Autobiography - The Galindo Group

Ram Galindo THE MAKING OF AN AMERICAN Page 193
Mastering skills such as scuba diving can also make it possible to do a few less
conforming things. After being single for five years to the date, on October 5, 1983, I
married Margo Hess. She was an athletic and beautiful young lady with whom I had
been sharing a physically very fit life and participating in marathon and triathlon races
for about a year. She learned to water ski and made a good member of my family’s
water skiing group, which was led by Cid and Lis. I introduced her to diving and she
readily took to the sport. We decided that getting married under water would be a real
adventure. We sent our minister to scuba dive school, selected other diver friends,
including my children and sister Vivian, as wedding attendants. Cid was my best man.
We held several practice ceremonies in a deep swimming pool and devised the
necessary waterproof tablets to conduct communications.
My marathon running friend Lane Stephenson was at the time head of the public
information office at Texas A&M. He thought the idea was newsworthy and put out a
press release. The news agencies picked it up and our wedding became an
internationally publicized event, since Mexico also used it to promote tourism. We flew a
party of more than 30 to Cozumel and held one of the first underwater weddings in
history. The event took place in the famous Palancar reef, at the formation called
Horseshoe, which was shaped a bit like a large altar. Big media newspapers and
specialized tourism TV made it famous. We all had an unforgettable time. As some
things in life go, unfortunately my marriage to Margo lasted only four months. But thanks
to her exceptional understanding, we will remain good friends for the rest of our lives.
Another urge for adventure with perhaps parallel attraction as swimming in the ocean is
flying through the skies. As I recounted earlier in this chapter, flying held a fascination
for me ever since I was a young boy. In 1983, when my son Cid was in college, he and I
decided that it would be fun and useful to learn how to fly small planes. I had the ulterior
objective of flying myself to small towns in Texas where I might do some development
work. We took ground school together and went to flight school at the same time. After I
completed my required flying courses and accumulated the necessary hours to get a
license, I realized that it would take me too long to learn the art of flying well enough to
be my own pilot. At that point in my life this effort was really incompatible with the
concentration I needed to apply to my business priorities. Therefore, I decided to
continue chartering a plane with pilot rather than one without a pilot. I did, however,
enjoy the thrill of flying in a small plane very much. Years later I repeated the
experience in gliders, riding thermal currents in the Colorado Rocky Mountains, one
time accompanied by my wife Susan.
One day in early May 1992, Cid called me from Austin where he was attending graduate
school at the University of Texas, to inform me that the following Saturday, May 9, we
were going to go jump out of an airplane. Needless to say he took me by surprise, but I
rose to the occasion. He had made arrangements for us to take a short course at the
Bryan jump school where we were given a choice of how to start. We could do a
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