Autobiography - The Galindo Group

Ram Galindo THE MAKING OF AN AMERICAN Page 167
more gifted competitors, discipline, dependability and the yearning to be the best I could
be, always playing by the rules and abhorring cheating and laziness.
My focus on sports and my model airplane-building hobby, coupled with the selection of
friends, steered me through my teenage years refusing to try smoking or drinking
intoxicating beverages. My father, who had already provided us with a tennis court,
basketball backboards and a small swimming pool, realizing the benefits of my interest
in physical activities had a set of parallel bars built for me. I was indeed a very lucky
youngster. The habits I learned through sports proved most useful during my college
years and in later life. As a matter of fact, I never took up either smoking or drinking
liquor.
As I have described in earlier parts of this book, my father was an entrepreneur of the
first magnitude by Bolivian standards. I am amazed at how he was involved in so many
activities at the same time and still found time to be our guiding star. Both my parents
volunteered their time to worthy community causes such as the orphanage and service
clubs like the Lions and Rotarians. He was founder and first president of the former. At
one point or another of his busy life he led the politically important Committee for the
Improvement of Cochabamba, was president of the Engineering Society, the
Geographical and Historical Society, the Hispano-American Society and several other
similar organizations, all on a volunteer basis. Additionally, he was the author of several
pamphlets and a couple of books, including his own autobiography, Memorias de un
Ingeniero.
My mother was also involved in civic activities, particularly in relation to the protection of
abandoned children. Most of her attention, however, went to us. She was relentless in
her pursuit of constant improvement, for us and for herself. Since school left us three
months a year of free time, Mom saw that we were engaged in learning activities during
this period. One time she talked me into taking typing lessons on the suspicion that it
might be a skill I may need in the future. Indeed, I am very thankful for that foresight
now. It is sure helping me type this manuscript!
During school periods we lived in an apartment my father bought and remodeled on the
old colonial part of Cochabamba, while in the summer we lived in a villa he had built in
the outskirts of town. The latter’s location was on about 15 acres of the alluvial fans at
the foot of the mountain where the valley begins. When he bought it, the land was
covered with nothing but rocks and thorn bushes. My parents bought it in 1940 from
other descendents of Ubaldo Anze, my mother’s paternal grandfather. Close to the turn
of the 19 th Century, Mr. Anze had purchased more than 240 acres around it from his
widowed mother in law. He called his estate Aranjuez, after the beautiful village in Spain
where kings went to get away from Madrid. He developed a water source at the mouth
of a cascading mountain creek on the high end of his land. Through a hand-made rock
and lime lined open channel, he carried these waters down to his productive land to
irrigate orchards and vineyards and to supply his canning operations.
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