The Joys and Perils of Serving Abroad: Memoirs of a U.S Foreign Service Family

By Diego Asencio

Diego Asencio met Nancy Rodriguez in 1951, and the young couple married in 1953. Diego entered the U.S Foreign Service in 1957, and thus began his, Nancy's and their children's life as a U.S. Foreign Service family.

Diego's first overseas assignment was to Mexico, where he assisted jailed or troubled Americans and shipped dead Americans home, tasks that were "an effective introduction to the Foreign Service," he opines. After his initial service as vice consul in Mexico City, Diego was assigned increasingly responsible diplomatic positions in Panama, Portugal, Brazil, and Venezuela. He also served as Assistant Secretary of State for Consular Affairs and retired as ambassador to Brazil in 1986.

Diego was named ambassador to Colombia in 1977. It was during this assignment that Diego and several other ambassadors and diplomats were kidnapped at a party at the Dominican Republic embassy by the M-19, a paramilitary terrorist group. Diplomats & Terrorists Or: How I Survived a 61-day Cocktail Party, written by Diego and Nancy, is an account of how Diego and the Mexican and Brazilian ambassadors talked themselves out of their predicament.

This book, The Joys and Perils of Serving Abroad, is the full account of the Asencio family's experiences over the course of Diego's career as a Foreign Service officer.

• Language: English
• Publisher: MAP
• Release date: Jan 15, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310974212

Diego Asencio

Ambassador Diego Asencio and his wife Nancy are a retired US Foreign Service couple. Most of their thirty year diplomatic career was spent stationed at Embassies throughout Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula. They met in Washington, D.C., while he attended Georgetown University School of Foreign Service, and she a freshman at Dumbarton College of the Holy Cross. Nancy later attended the National University of Brazil and graduated from George Washington University. Diego was born in Spain but derived his American citizenship from his naturalized father, who had returned to his homeland to marry. He was raised on the hard-scrabbled streets of the Ironbound section of Newark, New Jersey, one of the last melting pot enclaves in the United States. Nancy was born in Havana, Cuba, immigrated to the United States with her mother in 1945, and was naturalized at age twenty. In 1980, while attending a cocktail party at the Dominican Embassy in Bogota, Diego, who was serving as American Ambassador to Colombia, was captured together with a group of other foreign ambassadors. The terrorists belonged to a politically radical paramilitary organization known as M-19. In a departure from the usual turn of events, the hostages directly participated in the negotiations that eventually set them free. Ambassador Asencio was ultimately awarded the State Department’s Medal for Valor, and became Assistant Secretary of State for Consular Affairs. Diego began his diplomatic career as a Vice-Consul in Mexico assisting Americans in jails and shipping dead bodies home, followed by a stint as Political Officer in Panama where he participated in the Panama Canal negotiations and survived the riots of 1964. His subsequent duties included Special Assistant to the Assistant Secretary for Inter-American Affairs/ Coordinator of the Alliance for Progress, Deputy Chief of Mission in Portugal just before the Revolution of the Carnations, Political Counselor in Brazil during a military government, Deputy Chief of Mission in Venezuelan during the nationalization of the petroleum industry, and Ambassador to Colombia, where he became intimately familiar with the ways of terror. After his tenure as Assistant Secretary of State for Consular Affairs, he was named Ambassador to Brazil at a most poignant moment, when civilian rule returned to that society. The Asencio’s upcoming memoirs, "The Joys and Perils of Serving Abroad," will also recount Diego’s tenure as a member of the US-Moscow Investigating Commission, and as Chairman of the Commission for the Study of International Migration and Cooperative Economic Development. Having decided that there were too many retired ambassadors in Washington looking for interesting things to do, Diego and Nancy moved to Florida, where they have resident children and grandchildren. Governor Lawton Chiles promptly appointed him Executive Director of the Florida International Affairs Commission with a charge to coordinate the State's foreign trade policy. After a couple of arduous years he returned to private life, concentrating on consulting with American firms, including McDonald's and Coca-Cola, on their Latin American operations. Nancy spends a great deal of her time reading, writing and painting, her passions in life. They live a few steps from the Intercoastal, across from the town of Palm Beach, with their Portuguese water dog Filomena, cat Tinkerbell and cockatiel Blanquita, all three refugees abandoned into their care.

Book preview

The tropical scenery that spread before us rekindled memories that had lain dormant. We leaned over the balcony of our terrace on the Infinity. The overcast sky and the unusually cool (for Panama) seventy-five-degree temperature permitted us to spend hours observing the view and remembering. We had time. Crossing from Panama City on the Pacific Ocean to Colón on the Caribbean Sea took eight hours. The scenery had not changed since our posting in the early 1960s: verdant tropical foliage, shrubbery, and palms. Various shades of green were mirrored in the dirty, gray waters the ship cut through. In contrast with the leaden sky and green expanse of the water, the horizon was dotted with the violet color of flowering jacaranda trees. Our ship was so wide that we came dangerously close to the muddy shores of Culebra Cut. It reminded us that the construction of a new sea-level canal, or the widening of the present canal, was under active discussion.

We pictured ourselves young once more, chatting with our friends and diplomatic colleagues, wanting to make a difference in the world. We saw our five children at a tender age, enjoying the barefoot freedom of a tropical paradise. We recalled the friends we had made during our tour of duty at the American embassy, the Panamanians we had befriended, our colleagues, our neighbors, and other diplomats. We also remembered the dangers we lived through during the flag riots of 1964, the march on the embassy, the evacuation to the Canal Zone. These were the joys and perils of living abroad. In the years that followed, we faced even greater, more dangerous ordeals.

We began writing this book during our cruise through the Panama Canal. We were reminiscing about our years living abroad, when Diego was a Foreign Service officer. We had the privilege of spending the children’s formative years abroad. They were exposed to other cultures and had opportunities to interact with friends of sundry nationalities, religions, and ethnic backgrounds, all of which broadened their minds. Their experiences were a mixed bag, both good and bad. They were also able to get to know their own country better, having a yardstick by which to judge America and to appreciate being Americans. This memoir was originally meant to be a legacy for our children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, a recounting of the many stories on which we have dined out for decades. It was not intended to be a foreign policy treatise. As a professional practitioner, Diego has read his share of such volumes and has always been struck by how dry, dated, and stilted they seem, even when written by major foreign policy stars. It is the human aspects of these events that we wish to convey. In our business, you had to be fascinated by the new and different and be able to adjust to the way things are done where you happen to be standing. The sense of history generated by participating in our profession is one of the great benefits of the Foreign Service. Also, we marveled at the nineteenth-century engineering of the canal. We were enthralled with the topographical beauty of Rio de Janeiro and the newness of Brasilia, which became the capital of Brazil in 1960 but was still a pioneer society when we arrived in 1972. We loved the sophistication of Mexico City, the majesty of the pyramids of Teotihuacan, the pleasure of standing in the Chiado in Lisbon, and the sites and experiences of the Plaza Mayor in Madrid and the Barrio Gotico in Barcelona.

The reverse side of the coin was also notable among Foreign Service families: the loneliness, depression, and alcoholism; the cross-cultural conflicts, the crime rate, and the natural disasters; the diseases and the primitive medical care; and the riots and revolutions. Most of all, consider the marital conflicts. As we read these stories, they were clearly divisible into the funny/peculiar and the funny/ha-ha. It was the occasional guffaw as we read them that led us to seek a wider audience. This is a reasonably complete and accurate rendering of our existence. Some of the names have been omitted to protect not only the innocent but also the guilty. Some of the blows have been softened, and some of the stories will remain untold.

The most difficult challenge that we had to face, upon deciding to write this book, was how to harmoniously and interestingly bring together our two very distinct voices into one manuscript. Advised by our daughter, Maria Dolores, we attempted to do a he says, she says account of the life of our Foreign Service family abroad over a stretch of three decades. But Diego found that format much too cumbersome. Therefore, we worked assiduously to blend our two completely different sets of recollections and points of view. However, we did concur that the chapters on our family backgrounds should be written in the first person.

Read our history, and meet our family.

Photo 1: The Asencio family - Diego Cortes, Nancy, Manuel, Diego Carlos, Anne, Maria and Frank - at the June 1984 wedding of Frank Asencio, Fort Campbell, Kentucky.

1

DIEGO’S EARLY YEARS

My earliest childhood memory is a visit to a roadside attraction with my parents, Manuel Asencio Camacho and Dolores Cortes Hernandez. We were accompanied by two of my father’s best friends, Antonio Garcia Uroz, who was a boarder at our house, and Julio Castillo, who, although I did not know it at the time, was secretly in love with my mother. It was a Sunday morning. The sun was warm, but tall trees provided shade. I must have been three or four years old, which would have made it about 1935. On a small oval track, children were being led around on horses, and the smell of horse manure intrigued me. I was excited by the pony rides and clamored to be allowed to ride. Julio attempted to feed a peanut to a small caged monkey, which promptly bit him.

My father was born in 1899 in the town of Nijar, a town in the province of Almería in the Andalusian area of Spain on the Mediterranean coast. Both Julio and Antonio also came from Almería, and in 1931, I was born in the same province. Almería was the last province the Catholic monarchs Isabella and Ferdinand wrested from the Moors in 1492; the church in which I was baptized had been converted from a mosque. In recent years, my daughter Maria Dolores was able to photograph the baptismal fountain of that church in Nijar.

With the expulsion of the Moors, and later the Jews, military men had been rewarded for their conquests with large swaths of land. The workers they recruited from the Basque region of the Pyrenees Mountains created an anomaly. Most Andalusians are short, svelte, dark mixtures of their Christian and Moorish ancestry. Musical, highly sociable, and voluble, they resemble the Spanish stereotype in the English-speaking media: the bull-fighting, guitar-playing, wine-drinking, amorous Latin lover. By contrast, the Andalusians of Almería, with the exception of those from the town of Mojácar (supposedly a throwback to Moorish times), are rather large-framed, big-headed, stolid, hard-working, and puritanical. The village structure in Almería is quintessentially right from the Basque heartland in the Pyrenees Mountains.

This leads me to the conclusion that I have Basque ancestry. I have a theory that Basques are the last remnants of Cro-Magnon man, an early type of Homo sapiens. This might explain the attitude of ETA (Basque National Liberation Movement) separatists toward Spaniards in general. Consider La Chanson de Roland, or the Song of Roland, which describes the attack on the rear guard of Charlemagne’s Army of Franks in the Battle of Roncevaux in the eighth century. One version of the story is that the attack was by Saracens, another name for the Moorish invaders. But the attackers were actually Basques objecting to the passage of a foreign army through their territory. After Roland gives his dying trumpet call and the main body of the army returns, they find that the Basques have melted into the countryside. I am not prepared to say that my Basqueness, real or imagined, is the source of my sense of alienation or of my passive-aggressive resistance to authority. I may be wrong. Consider Roncevaux as an allegory.

The end result of the Christian conquest, however, was the destruction of such things as the Moorish irrigation system. A number of crises also affected the province. One of the early disasters was a sharp drop in the price of wool, which had a severe impact on what had become a sheep-centered economy. Concerns on the part of the United States about the Mediterranean fruit fly also destroyed the exportation of Almería grapes. The arid climate could not support the population growth of the area, and Almería became notorious as an exporter of people.

My father’s parents were dirt farmers. My mother’s parents were station managers for a railroad that serviced the region’s local gold mines. In an area between Nijar and the municipality of Carboneras, my maternal grandfather Juan Cortes also ran a combination country store and inn; in recent times, it has been expanded into a hotel, bar, and restaurant, still run by a cousin. Grandfather also possessed extensive landholdings farmed by tenants. Eventually the railroad stopped running as the mines played out. During and after the Spanish Civil War, he was forced to work the land himself. Fortunately, he had ten children to help him.

One of my father’s anecdotes centered around being sent as a young boy by his father, Diego Asencio, to the Venta del Pobre (Poor Man’s Inn), as it was and still is called, to purchase a bottle of anisette. On his way back to the farm on muleback, my father could not resist taking a good swig of the liquor. He decided to replace the missing portion with water to hide his indiscretion. To his horror, the addition of water discolored the anisette. Thinking quickly, he dropped the bottle on the rocks of the road and explained to his parents that there had been an accident.

Finding it difficult to make ends meet economically, my paternal grandparents immigrated to Oran in Algiers, then a French colony. However, my grandfather did not find conditions to his liking and eventually returned to Spain. One of the relics I once had and lost was a letter from my paternal grandfather to his wife’s father, stating that he and his wife would be leaving Algiers and were thinking of emigrating to São Paulo, Brazil. They never made the trip, and they both died quite young, leaving my father orphaned at a tender age. He was raised by the Canadas family, friends of his parents, who decided to send him in his teens to Argentina, where his older brother Antonio was earning his living as a gaucho.

My father, a great raconteur, often regaled me with stories of his adventures in Argentina. He became an accomplished horseman and cowboy. He and his brother even did a stint as laborers in the construction of a railway through the Gran Chaco, a still forbidding swamp and wilderness area between Argentina and Paraguay. My favorite was his account of coming to Buenos Aires with his brother for some vacation time. Dressed in his gaucho garb of wide pants, broad belt, boots, and hat with the back brim pulled down over his nape, he must have cut quite a figure. After refreshing themselves at a local cantina, they went out to look at the big buildings and other attractions of the city.

They came to a large square with an equestrian statue in front of a large pink building. Father stopped an elegantly dressed Porteño, as a denizen of Buenos Aires is called, and asked, Hey buddy, who is that on the horse?

The city slicker looked at them and decided that they were not only country bumpkins, judging by their dress, but also Spaniards, judging by their accent. Using a pejorative term for Spaniards, he said, Ese es el que le hizo cagar a los Gallegos (He’s the guy who made the Gallegos shit their pants). He was referring to San Martin, the great liberator of Argentina from Spain. Stung by the implication of cowardice, and offended by being referred to as a Gallego, my father whipped out a pistol and shot the statue.

The story gets murkier thereafter. I would imagine that it took the Spanish consul a few days to get him out of jail. He was put on a ship going north, which eventually arrived in New York harbor after a brief sojourn in Havana. This is the reason that I am an American instead of a Spaniard or an Argentinean.

Many years later, I encountered my uncle Antonio in France. After Argentina he settled in Oran and became a pied noir, as the European settlers of Algiers were known because they were said to get their feet dirty by working the soil barefoot. When France relinquished her control of the colony, he settled in a small village near Lyons. When I asked him whether he could confirm the family legend, he responded, That stupid son of a bitch almost got us lynched.

Many years later when we were stationed in Brazil and visiting Argentina on vacation, I took my sons Charlie and Frank to the site of the statue in front of the Casa Rosada, the presidential palace in Buenos Aires, and proclaimed, This is the statue your grandfather shot up. They wanted to know where the bullet holes were.

In the United States, my father decided that he had to go back to his hometown in Spain to find an appropriate bride. Unfortunately, his return coincided with the third Spanish Rif War in northern Morocco in 1927. He was inducted into the Spanish Army and wound up as a noncommissioned officer in the artillery branch. He saw action in several skirmishes and battles. When his enlistment concluded, he returned to Almería. In a scene reminiscent of the zarzuela Los gavilanes, the Indiano (an epithet describing a Spaniard who goes to Latin America and returns home, presumably wealthy) courted my mother and stole her from her intended. Even though she would be living across the ocean from her family after her marriage, they were happy to give consent.

Leaving her pregnant in Nijar, he returned to the United States, where he linked up with Julio Castillo and went to work in Julio’s bakery in Lodi, New Jersey. It was the heyday of the Prohibition era, and the bakery was in direct competition with a Sicilian bakery with Mafia ties. My father rode shotgun—literally—when delivering the bread. On one occasion, when both he and Julio were absent from the bakery, mobsters lined up the employees at gunpoint and poured kerosene into the dough. After a hiatus, and lulled into a false sense of security, my father was cornered in his truck out in the street and, unarmed, escaped serious harm only by vaulting a rather tall fence. He carried a scar at his hairline as a memento of the incident.

According to what I heard, he was a good shot. During an outing and on a dare, Julio tossed his pocket watch into the air. My father shattered it with a single pistol shot.

My mother and I arrived from Spain aboard the liner Marques de Comillas in January 1932. Though the voyage was uneventful, it had been preceded by a near disaster while we waited for the ship in Malaga. My mother told me that I had a pacifier with a whistle on the end that sounded when I sucked on it. Somehow, I managed to swallow the whistle, and it was touch and go as to whether we would be able to sail. Fortunately, everything came out all right (small pun intended). Many years later, I stood on the pier in Malaga trying to imagine that averted calamity and wondering how my mother had coped.

I have tucked into my memory several pictures from my early childhood. I remember that we moved a lot. From our time in New Jersey, I recall an apartment in Lodi, a boarding house in Kearny, and a strange apartment in Hoboken, where we washed in a tub in the kitchen and shared the toilet with the tenants in the apartment next door. I worried at the time because we had no chimney through which Santa could gain access to the apartment, but I was assured that a window would suffice. I recall accompanying my mother when she walked my father to his job at the textile mills in Passaic Valley. We eventually moved to the part of Newark called the Ironbound, named either for the rail tracks or the industrial plants that surrounded the area. Historically, the area was also known as Down Neck because the Passaic River curved there to form what looked like a neck. After a short stay in an apartment on Green Street, we moved to 166 Elm Street, where I lived until I left to be married. My father had obtained work as a painter at the Kearny shipyards, which had revved up production in anticipation of World War II. Stability and permanence at last.

My father was an avid soccer fan. The New York area had a soccer league composed of multiethnic immigrants living in the vicinity. Every Sunday, my father took me to watch the soccer game. The Brooklyn Hispano, composed mostly of Spaniards, is the team we rooted for. It has often been noted that Spain is not a homogenous society, but rather a collection of republics and kingdoms that differ racially and linguistically. Thus, there was also a Galician team made up of former inhabitants of northwestern Spain, the source of the characterization that my father had objected to in Buenos Aires. Similarly, there was an Irish team and, of course, a Northern Irish team. The Scots also had their own team, as did the Germans and others.

Some of the games became arenas for resolving ethnic quarrels. My father said that he enjoyed going to the games because one saw not only a football game but also occasional boxing matches, lots of running, bits of drama, and great theater. Engraved in my memory is a game between the Brooklyn Hispano and the Irish, played on a muddy field on a blustery rainy day. Fabri Salcedo, the center-forward on the Spanish team, was a giant of a man, my idol, and a friend of my father’s. By halftime, Salcedo had single-handedly incapacitated three Irishmen. When the whistle blew, he came over to the stands to greet my father. An old Irish lady suddenly appeared and proceeded to whack him with her umbrella. The poor man tried to evade her without laying his hands on her. I found the scene to be very amusing.

My parents’ closest friends were Manuel and Aurora Guerra and Modesto and Dulce Vasquez. Manuel worked at the same shipyard as my father. They were nearby neighbors and as close as family. We vacationed together, usually on the Jersey Shore or on a Staten Island beach called La Toja. Sometimes we went to one of the Spanish resorts in the Catskills. I spent a great deal of time with their daughters Aurorita and Alegria, who were near my own age, and, on a different level, with Juanita and Remedios, who were a little older. Those friendships persist even now. I remember Aurorita getting the best of me in an argument once by bopping me on the nose.

We frequently visited with Julio Castillo and his wife Mariana in Waldwick, New Jersey. Waldwick was an old mill town and railroad stop that slowly morphed into a bedroom community for New York City because of its proximity to the George Washington Bridge. Hunting within city limits was permitted until the early 1950s, when somebody accidentally hit the mayor while shooting at a rabbit. I spent some of my holidays and summer vacations there and bonded with Julio’s son and daughter, Alvaro and Dolores. I learned to fish and ride horses. Alvaro and I chased girls. In comparison with our life in blue-collar Newark, this was a taste of relatively affluent middle-class living. Julio started with a grocery store, which he turned into a liquor store when supermarkets began to offer competition. Waldwick was surrounded by the even more prosperous towns of Ho-Ho-Kus, Ridgewood, and Saddle River.

One of my and Alvaro’s friends in Waldwick was Jesse Mann. He was what was known as a Jackson White, a member of the Ramapo Mountain People, as they now prefer to be known. One legend has it that in the eighteenth century, a contractor for the British Colonial Army, a man named Jackson, supplied the whorehouses of New York City with women. He loaded several sailing vessels with human cargo recruited from London, and when one of the ships foundered on the way, he sent another vessel to Havana and Port-au-Prince to fill his quota. After the Americans were successful in their revolution, the burghers of New York City kicked the women out of town. They crossed the river into New Jersey and met a band of Tuscarora Indians migrating up from the Carolinas, eventually settling into a remote area of the Ramapo Mountains in New Jersey. Later, the settlement became one of the stops for runaway slaves on the Underground Railroad. It was not until the administration of Franklin Roosevelt, when a road was built into the Ramapo area, that the Jackson Whites emerged from their seclusion. I loved to hear Jesse’s accounts of his forbearers and traditions. I could see traces of all his ancestors in his features.

At Christmas time in Newark, the housewives would prepare special seasonal delicacies. My mother was famous for her polvorones (similar to Italian wedding cookies), and Dulce Vasquez for her pestinos (pastries dipped in honey). These would be laid out on a table, and we would visit each other’s houses to offer season’s greetings and to partake of the offerings. My mother was a wonderful chef. I remember her migas, a shepherd’s dish of old bread, olive oil, and garlic (lots of garlic), with side dishes of sausage and other meats. She also made gachas in a clay pot with cornmeal covering the sides and bouillabaisse in the middle. Her stuffed calamari in tomato sauce was to die for. Her pastas and sauces (learned from Italian neighbors) were exceptional. She was a fountain of unconditional love. She spoiled me shamelessly. I tried to reciprocate.

Many years later, I was sitting at an elegant Madrid restaurant and complaining that the dishes I remembered from my childhood were never offered at Spanish restaurants. The maître d’ brought the chef to my table to ask me what I had in mind. The chef and I spoke at length and with great nostalgia regarding the dishes our mothers used to prepare. He asked me to come back the next day, when he set up a special menu with all of my—and his—childhood dishes. My wife Nancy and I ate for what seemed hours. It was a most enjoyable moment.

My father was strongly anticlerical and anti-Catholic. As a supporter of the Spanish Republic, he believed, like many other Spaniards, that the Church had sided with Franco and the Fascists. This was reinforced by the fact that, as a young soldier in the Spanish Army, a chaplain had slapped him for not remembering the words to a prayer. This offended his egalitarian soul and almost made him desert. My father’s point of view meant that I could sleep late on Sunday mornings, but it also meant no Christmas tree and no manger. It was not until I went to university that I became a practicing Catholic.

I entered first grade at the Lafayette Street Public School. I recall my teacher Mrs. Villani vividly. Her husband became mayor of Newark and gave the principal address at my high school graduation. Mrs. Villani was charming and invited the class to her home for a Halloween party. At this point, I was still unicultural, and the idea of bobbing for apples struck me as strange but enticing. The children in their witch, ghost, and monster costumes were also fascinating. The neighborhood was a blue-collar immigrant enclave, the last of the U.S. melting pots, with people from Italy, Germany, Ireland, Poland, Portugal, and Spain, among others. My classmates reflected that diversity but, interestingly, the teachers were mostly WASPs with names like Marshall, Driscoll, Nelson, Kingsley, and Keller—Mrs. Villani was an exception.

In grammar school, I was in love with Beatriz, who was of Mexican ancestry, and Fanny, who was Portuguese and Polish, but I was too shy to say anything to either. My closest personal friends were Bobby Ballester and Joey Espasa, both sons of Valencianos. Bobby lived across the street and often joined me to walk to school. However, he was habitually late, requiring many shouts at his window, to the chagrin of neighbors sleeping after a late shift. Joe lived some distance away, but visited with us after school. Joey’s father owned a nightclub in downtown Newark; Bob’s father worked as a waiter there.

Early on, I fell in love with books. The academic standards of my school were not high. Complicating matters was the fact that local law required schooling for children only until age sixteen, thus a substantial number of students with no particular interest in education simply waited for their sixteenth birthdays to quit attending. The older children, of course, bullied the younger ones. I still remember the confrontations. Fortunately, as I progressed in years, I grew in size. By the time I was thirteen, I was fully grown and quite capable of responding in kind. My mother, of course, was overprotective of me, her only child. I often found her waiting for me to cross the highly trafficked streets. When I was made a member of the school safety patrol and stationed at a major street crossing, I had to explain to my mother that it did not look good to have her peering over my shoulder as I helped young children cross the street.

Although bullying ceased to be a problem when I went on to East Side High School, what did not change was my attitude toward learning. The fact that I read, studied, and did my homework marked me as peculiar and, in some quarters, risible. Moreover, I was an assiduous patron of the local public library. The first novel I read was Alexandre Dumas’s Count of Monte Cristo. As a child of eleven, I had seen the movie For Whom the Bell Tolls, which made a great impression on me. I took due note that the movie had been based on a novel by a writer named Ernest Hemingway. I promptly went to the adult section of the library and asked for the book. The librarian was a little dubious about my reading the book at such a tender age, but relented. That was my introduction to American literature.

The movie Beau Geste led me to the works of British writer P. C. Wren. Drums Along the Mohawk, one of my favorites, led me to Walter Edmonds. A few competent librarians guided my reading and encouraged my pursuits. They enlisted my services as a magician, complete with turban, for a show for young children. They placed me at a table in the middle of the library, with an airplane model kit as an attraction. During World War II, one of them devised a notepad for the readers to record book reports. Each report received an ascending military rank. Reading suddenly became competitive. God love them, I do not remember their names, but they were wonderful and deserve the lion’s share of credit for my education.

My other source of education arose from my dad’s cultural chauvinism: He decided that I should have instruction in Spanish. He found a refugee from the Spanish Civil War working in the shipyard. Avelino Arranz, who had been an officer in the Republican militia of the province of Asturias, had the equivalent of a community college education. He introduced me to Spanish literature and to stamp collecting, and he took me to the main Newark Public Library, which had a section on foreign literature. I still remember the excitement I felt when I read the epic poem El Cid Campeador. I read the Argentine epic poem Martin Fierro. I also remember a gaucho novel called Don Segundo Sombra. I discovered Lope de Vega, Goya, Velasquez, and numerous other cultural luminaries. Avelino regaled me with stories of the Spanish Civil War. He had been severely tortured and still carried the scars on his back. He had been released from jail through the intervention of the American embassy in Madrid because he had been born in Tampa, Florida. He made me pay attention to Spanish grammar and insisted that I learn to type.

An interesting side story is that, while Avelino was holding forth on astronomy, it suddenly became clear to me that he was outlining a Ptolemaic vision of the universe. I hastened to correct him with a Copernican rebuttal on the heliocentric universe and an exposition on Galileo. My father was shocked that I would contradict an educated adult. Fortunately, Avelino did his own checking and came back to inform my father and me that I was correct. It was only years later, in one of Salvador de Madariaga’s books, that I learned that the church-dominated school system at that time in Spain had been