Autobiography - The Galindo Group

Ram Galindo THE MAKING OF AN AMERICAN Page 180
practice, ballet class, gymnastics workouts and weekend out-of-town trips to competitive
events. When he was in Texas, Dad’s help as a driver was invaluable. My parents’
home was an after-school holding place for my kids until I could pick them up. I must
admit that I was never a cook and that my children probably had their main meal of the
day at school. I missed the family tradition of learning around the dining table, but it was
an inescapable price of the times I was living through.
By this time my sister Vivian had finished law school in Bolivia and wanted to get a taste
of U.S. universities. Being my parent’s youngest child, and given the fact that my
brother Chris and I were established here, they decided to move temporarily to Bryan-
College Station. They bought a house in Westwood Estates one block away from mine,
and during the long periods when they lived there, despite the fact that he was already
past 80 years old, my Dad would do a lot of my driving. This allowed me to concentrate
more on my work. He literally helped me until he could no longer do so. When I was
late, Mom would feed my children after school and make sure they were all right.
It was a rare day when the kids had no friends dropping by at my house. I much
preferred to have them around me than away. I made my house available for meetings
of organizations such as Young Life (a high school Christian organization) and
occasional parties. I was very familiar with all their friends and in many cases became
acquainted with their parents also. During the first year of my divorce I also had the
invaluable support of Joe Elliott, who was once again in Texas helping me establish my
engineering company.
Cid had a knack for always choosing as friends kids that I could trust and admire. He
surrounded himself with young men and women who were truly at the top of the human
pyramid scholastically, athletically and morally. They were always competing with each
other to be the best, but never debased their standards in their quest for excellence. In
time his group produced the best of America’s new generation – engineering PhDs,
economists, MBAs, MDs, entrepreneurs and corporate executives; a monument to my
theory that the seeding grounds profoundly affect the harvest.
Kim was touched by a lust for traveling early on. She spent a semester of her junior high
school year in Cochabamba living with my parents and learning Spanish. My mother
was in charge of helping her choose friends but Kim had her own contacts. Kim’s
approach to selecting friends there set a pattern for the rest of her life. After graduation
she went to find the other half of her roots in Copenhagen, as I have described in
Dreams Planted, Dreams Harvested (Chapter 1). Again, she continued to enlarge the
ethnic pool from which she selects her friends, proving my thesis that the goodness in
people, as we consider goodness, is uniformly distributed everywhere.
All my children had been very close to me growing up, but Lisie was especially so. She
was barely 10 when I became her single parent and she lived with me, except for a few
college semesters and an extended visit with my parents in Bolivia. After her graduation
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