Autobiography - The Galindo Group

Ram Galindo THE MAKING OF AN AMERICAN Page 166
the authors extolled the virtues of truthfulness, hard work, dedication, loyalty, honor and
love of family and friends, in one word, integrity. My parents knew that and made sure I
always had money to buy more of those books.
As I continued to grow, every time I had a little money to spend I would go to the only
bookstore in town that imported U.S. magazines, and I would buy any that had the
picture of an airplane on the cover. This awareness coincided with the escalation of
fighting in the Korean War, which made planes very famous. I had more temptations
than money. That is how I became acquainted with Popular Mechanics, Newsweek and
Time magazines. I made a scrapbook of my own paintings of the planes that I saw in
the magazines and added some of my own design. I wanted to increase my
understanding of airplanes and pictures alone were not enough. I badgered everyone I
could find who knew a bit more English than I to help me understand the text. Since my
father had a working knowledge of the English language, eventually my mother decided
that all the children and she should catch up and learn it, for she realized that French,
her second language, was in decline. She hired a tutor and we all took some classes,
but as my first trip to New York demonstrated I had not been very successful.
Given the isolation of life and the political turmoil in Cochabamba in the mid-1950s,
interscholastic competitive sports were little known, but I still managed to learn a few
skills. My high school phys-ed instructor, Napoleon Araujo, a gifted and handsome
athlete, taught us the essentials of physical exercise and introduced us to modern
gymnastics. Destiny would have it that he would in later years marry my sister Toqui
and become my brother-in-law. It is thanks to his enthusiastic coaching that I acquired a
love for that sport, which later also extended to diving. Both gymnastics and diving are
individual sports, in which one fails or excels without a teammate’s influence. Thus, they
are very useful in revealing one’s limits and the extent to which practice and willpower
can push them. I think sports in this category are extremely important in honing the
inner virtues that shape character.
During my last year of high school, as a self-taught diver using a wooden plank, I
qualified for the Bolivian national diving championship and then won it. Ten years later,
after collegiate coaching at Texas A&M on competitive aluminum diving boards, I
entered the Bolivian championship again, and won it once more, still on the same
wooden plank of earlier years.
Napo (Napoleon’s nickname) also introduced me to the game of basketball, which is
purely a team sport. Here I learned the value of group effort and the power of the virtues
needed to accept other players and subordinate individual choice to the best interest of
the team. In my senior year Napo chose me as a fill-in member of my high school’s
team. Upon my return to Cochabamba eight years later, I joined his team in the city
league and enjoyed playing competitive basketball for another decade. The lessons in
character building learned from Napo took the form of perseverance in the presence of
Autobiography.doc 166 of 239