Epistles from Pap: Letters from the man known as 'The Will Rogers of Indiana' Part 29

We are just now crossing the Equator northbound. One long blast announced our crossing. The temperature of the sea water is 78 degrees.

The 40-mile trip "up the river" to Guayaquil, princ.i.p.al port of Ecuador, was made in a Grace Line yacht, Santa Rosita, formerly a submarine chaser powered by a General Motors diesel capable of 27 knots. She is fast. She has to be. The Guayas River is not only fast but seems to cover about all outdoors hereabout. It takes power to buck the river's current. And when the tide is running out it takes still more power.

Guayaquil is a pretty rusty looking city to me. The population is about 250,000. The rain had stopped before our arrival. The day was cloudy, but it was very, very hot and humid nonetheless. The town was full of pushcart and sidewalk salesmen, all sorts of outdoor food sales and the ever-present Coca Cola. Our hats are off to the Coca Cola people. Perhaps in only one or two places in far south Chile were we without the jurisdiction of a "refreshing pause."

Here were bananas and pineapples galore. A vendor would take an 18 to 20-inch pineapple by the stalk, pare off the outer sh.e.l.l quite deftly, slice it crosswise, and sell it by the slice at the end of a long sharp butcher knife. I don't know the price, probably two slices for a cent. Foreigners are told to lay off food here on the streets.

Practically all shops and stores are open air affairs. You just walk in and there you are among the dry goods. All have more or less useless trinkets. The small rooms are crowded to suffocation, with no room to turn around in. Panama hats are a staple. . . On the other hand, all shopkeepers and salesmen were courteous, attentive and tried to help. No high pressure salesmanship anywhere as you and I know it.

In one shop, a woman was carefully watching me. I thought it was to keep me from filching one or more articles. But no. She finally had the audacity to touch me lightly where the old wallet should be, and the proprietor spoke up, "My wife wants to know if the senor will tell us where he got his suit of clothes, and how much he paid for it?" Seeing my chance to try to repay Haspel, the maker, who had gone to the trouble to send several different styles to the store across the street from the Roosevelt Hotel in New Orleans, I peeled off my coat and wrote down everything in the label except the number of the patent. And so, Messrs. Haspel up there in New Orleans, if a prepaid order comes from Guayaquil at the retail price of $22.50, please remember I am your "drummer" without portfolio and that I am not adverse to an unreasonable commission.

Coming back down the river to the ship, the pa.s.sengers got into a general discussion of what they had seen and what they enjoyed.

Some liked one thing and some another. But the consensus seemed to center on the beautiful, graceful and elaborate marble tombstones and mausoleums at the cemetery. So next time when in Guayaquil, go out and have a look at its No. 1 attraction.

Of the present pa.s.senger list, one of the most interesting to me is a piano playing timber buyer, or let us say, a timber buying piano player. I have seen a great many piano players and lots of timber buyers in my time, but this, I think, is the first combination of the two professions in any one man I have had the good fortune to encounter. The load he carries must be Herculean.

At one time I was a piano player. That was after father and I decided the life of a pool expert was not the life for me. At the zenith of my interpretation and rending of the masters I was also enrolled in college, but even my best friends on the faculty were unanimous in agreeing I was not both a student and a piano player.

My new friend buys balsa by the ship load and sends it to the U.S. and England. We talked about walnut, oak, mahogany and then some Brazil and South American heavy woods. He got red oak mixed up with California redwood. We got that straightened out. Some enterprising Californians had inveigled him into buying some big red oak (redwood) wine casks and selling them to Chilean vintners. He got run out of Chile for that. "Baad taazt. No goot."

I finally worked out his pedigree. He was a Czech. A real pianist, he had played in Prague, Zurich, Vienna and all around.

When World War II started, he started looking for a new home. He became a refugee and finally wound up in Guayaquil, where he expected to teach piano. That was optimism supreme.

COFFEE BY THE TON, NOT CUPFUL

Buenaventura, Colombia Jan. 14, 15, 16, 1950

We have gone into the coffee business in a rather big way. We are to take on 43,000 bags, about 150 pounds to the bag. That makes over 3,200 tons, or more than enough to run Margaret and Frances over Labor Day.

This town has perhaps 30,000 population. Some tell me it has 65,000, some as low as 10,000. You guess. I went around into town. It is about like Guayaquil on a smaller scale. A native who is employed by Grace Line told me he was half Indian--his mother a full-blooded Indian--I don't know what the other half is.

Colombia, according to him, is 60 percent Negro and 10 percent white. Spanish is the language.

It happened here in Buenaventura, of all places, and on shipboard. Something was said about Greencastle, Ind. A young Mrs. Burt and her husband were returning to the states after six years with the Kennicott Copper Co. in Chile. Mrs. Burt heard the remark and said her father and mother were both born in or near Greencastle. His name was Jack Reeves. He taught in the grade school in Greencastle. His mother was a Schafer. We knew her uncle, Frank Schafer.

We are tardy. We were to have sailed last evening (Sunday) at 6, then 9 p.m., then 6 a.m. today, then 9 a.m. The reason for the delay was too much coffee to load--and rain. I am told it rains here every day and that the annual rainfall is 360 odd inches.

We got away at 10 a.m. We are now on the high seas headed for where the Pacific discovered Balboa.

HOT TIMES IN THE Ca.n.a.l ZONE

Ca.n.a.l Zone Jan. 18-21, 1950 To The Graphic, Greencastle, Ind.

The ride to the Ca.n.a.l Zone was uneventful. Enroute, the question arose whether to stay with the ship and ride through the locks and ca.n.a.l to the east side to Cristobal, or to get off at Balboa and hunt our way to the Tivoli Hotel, as originally planned.

Two New Jersey doctors and their wives, the timber buying piano player and his wife and some of the ship's officers advised staying with the ship and then coming back here by train or bus, as suited best. Mr. and Mrs. Burt (nee Reeves) were also for sticking with the ship. All the women were going shopping on the Atlantic side for linens, ivory and oriental silks, etc. "at wonderful prices" (and they were--Tiffany prices). Then after dinner everybody was to go to a night club the two doctors' wives knew about. The ship's officers were ignored as to sailing time and matters of other unimportance to Grace Line stockholders.

We reversed ourselves and stayed with the ship.

TO THE ATLANTIC BY SHIP

I shall not try to describe the feats of engineering the building of the Panama Ca.n.a.l involved: Ridding the place of mosquitoes and malaria; damming the outlet of a river so the mean level of the new, partly man-made lake would be about 87 feet above the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans; making cuts of 100 feet or more in solid rock; dredging the channel so our ship drawing almost 30 feet could steam through.

Three giant locks on the Pacific side lifted us almost 30 feet per lock, so at the third lock we could sail out into first a winding ca.n.a.l and then into that tremendous lake whose new level left thousands of islands of its former jungle hill tops in size all the way from a few square feet to hundreds and probably thousands of acres. Studded all along were thousands of dead bare tree trunks and forks still sticking up out of the water, and some of those trees went by us not any too far off.

Entering an approach to the first lock, six electric "mules"

(three on each side) would take hold of us by heavy wire cables, get us midway from the sides of the giant cement walls. We would creep along into the lock proper. There we were, way down there below the surface of the lock, with a monster set of double steel doors ahead barring our further progress. Another pair of steel doors would close behind us. No way to get out. Then the water below started bubbling and we started rising.

The way that lock filled with water was a marvel. All the Baptists in the Southern jurisdiction pumping simultaneously wouldn't have raised us the first foot in an hour. A young fellow standing at the rail with me said it took eight or 10 minutes and, after a rapid mental calculation, three million cubic feet of water. I made it 20 minutes and three billion cubic feet of water. The young man said he worked at the locks. Let's give him the benefit. So when I get home don't come bringing me a lot of authentic figures.

We got out into the ca.n.a.l and on into the lake and to the Atlantic locks, where the process was reversed and we were lowered about 87 feet. We docked after 7 p.m. We had started in about 9:30 a.m.

Now, for my advice. Go through it once by all means. Then never repeat. It becomes very monotonous and very hot. At times we only crept. The high temperature yesterday was 89. The low last night 77.

We went down the gang plank alone and unattended and into the early night and the arms of customs. He slapped on five blobs of glue, five stickers at the few remaining places for stickers and added five banker's initials and p.r.o.nounced us pure and undefiled.

A Grace Line representative called and made a reservation for us at the Washington Hotel. An eager taxi cab driver loaded us and off we went.

All along I had been amazed at the size of the linen in South American hotel rooms. Some bath towels were as long as I was. At the Washington Hotel we got out of the 5x6 foot bath towel area.

The cotton manufacturers hereabouts must have lost control over the Legislature.

We hied ourselves to the shopping rendezvous, with Aura May in the lead. With true feminine instinct and bird dog accuracy she never faltered a step as we hotfooted it down to the "shopping district" of a strange town. She said, "They should be right along about here." And sure enough, there, three doors on down, they were--every one of them--the two doctors' wives buried under the two biggest tablecloths. . .

Trading slowed down. The ship's pa.s.sengers went back to stow packages and get ready to night club. They were to come to the Washington and pick up A.M. Nothing was said about me. They never came. The Santa Margarita, faithful to the winds of commerce, sailed at midnight.

The night before we had been put to sleep by the gentle roll of the Pacific. That night we went to sleep with the Atlantic beating at the foundations of our hotel--almost.

TO THE PACIFIC BY RAIL

I knew the general manager of the Panama Railway. Met him through a college friend. . . The railroad people gave us pa.s.ses. They would send the railroad "jitney" to our hotel to pick up the baggage and us to catch the 12 o'clock train for Balboa. They would have a van at Balboa to take us to the Tivoli hotel.

The train ride of 30 miles took about one and a quarter hours-- diesel power. We came first cla.s.s. The right-of-way was bound by wild banana, reed and semi-jungle. The road had a good many bridges, cuts, curves, considerable grade and evidently cost a good deal of money. No featherbedding, I was told, like our roads unfortunately have.

We stepped off the train at Balboa and into a car chauffeured by a cap with three letters on it; drove four or five blocks and when we got out at the Hotel Tivoli we were in Ancon. And right down there a block at the foot of the hill is Panama City--the relatively new Panama.

Where oh where have our two-letter corporation guardians gone?

Those alleged evaders of the anti-trust laws, who have so faithfully shepherded us these thousands of miles through the mazes of Portuguese and Spanish gyrations and possible malefactions?

We registered and A.M. asked for mail. There was none.

"Are you sure."

"Yes!"

"Haven't we had a reservation here for two months?"

"No."