Abroad With Wm. F. Rickenbacker

This year Ada and I finally were able to accept her parents’ longstanding invitation to visit them at their house in Spain, where they have spent half of each year for the last 15 years or so. Her father, Richard H. Hawkins Jr., held diplomatic posts in Spain and, earlier, Peru, and is a thorough master of the language (having served earlier in Jeddah, he has a grasp of the Arabic roots of much of the vocabulary). All of the family speak the language easily, along with French, German, and Italian, of course.

So we have been two months now in this most mountainous and lofty country of Europe, and the dream I had so long ago has come real and has not been disappointed. In the dark summer of 1942, scarce half a year after the Japanese assault on Pearl Harbor, when niceties were at an end and there were no vacations, my mother and brother and I stayed in the hot apartment in Manhattan in the days before air conditioning, and she asked me what I’d like to do for the summer and for some reason that I forget I said I’d like to learn Spanish. She always had good connections, and within a few days I was walking from 86th Street and the East River to a fifth-floor walk-up at 55 East 55th Street, whose basement was given over to a fashionable nightspot called El Borracho (The Drunkard).

WR

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William F. Rickenbacker

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This year Ada and I finally were able to accept her parents’ longstanding invitation to visit them at their house in Spain, where they have spent half of each year for the last 15 years or so. Her father, Richard H. Hawkins Jr., held diplomatic posts in Spain and, earlier, Peru, and is a thorough master of the language (having served earlier in Jeddah, he has a grasp of the Arabic roots of much of the vocabulary). All of the family speak the language easily, along with French, German, and Italian, of course.

So we have been two months now in this most mountainous and lofty country of Europe, and the dream I had so long ago has come real and has not been disappointed. In the dark summer of 1942, scarce half a year after the Japanese assault on Pearl Harbor, when niceties were at an end and there were no vacations, my mother and brother and I stayed in the hot apartment in Manhattan in the days before air conditioning, and she asked me what I’d like to do for the summer and for some reason that I forget I said I’d like to learn Spanish. She always had good connections, and within a few days I was walking from 86th Street and the East River to a fifth-floor walk-up at 55 East 55th Street, whose basement was given over to a fashionable nightspot called El Borracho (The Drunkard).