Autobiography - The Galindo Group

Ram Galindo THE MAKING OF AN AMERICAN Page 97
friends with many of their neighbors as well. Over the years, Scott and his neighbor,
Kay Dobelman, became my investors and partners in various businesses I put together,
including numerous real estate investments, a bank and a municipal district.
Several years after graduation from college and following Scott’s attraction for the
Texas Hill Country where he had a ranch, I decided to make the first real estate
purchase of my life. In one of my yearly trips to Texas I took with my family in the
summer of 1967, Scott helped me find something I could afford. On July 25, 1967, I
bought a small run-down cabin on the banks of the beautiful Guadalupe River near
Ingram, Texas. We used it as our home during our yearly trips from Bolivia. In fact, my
youngest daughter Lis was born there. There I re-established my acquaintance with
West Texas critters such as scorpions, daddy-long-legs, rattlesnakes, wild turkeys,
coyotes, friendly deer, skunks, armadillos and other creatures that shared my land. Less
than four years later I sold this beautiful tract for a small profit, thus beginning to learn
the real estate business. At the time of this writing Scott is no longer with us but Kay
continues to shine a light on my path and set standards that I strive to uphold.
The lessons I learned through these relationships go to the heart of my understanding
of our economic system. Scott became significant in my life in my senior year. This was
the time I was buying into the unrealistic idealism of the promises of unlimited
government and the supremacy of society over individuals. He became sort of a
surrogate father and patiently educated me in the realities of the world. Not ever
antagonizing me, he took me to evening “investment” classes where the education was
90% about free-enterprise economics and 10 % about stock markets. Slowly I began to
absorb it all and, subconsciously I believe, started to build up the intellectual
foundations of my professional future.
The essential lessons were that government does not create values; it only redistributes
the money that represents them. And those who get to be the judges of how this
redistribution is made become very powerful. Therefore, once in that position they
seldom want to give it up. It is the mission of each producing citizen to be vigilant
against the gobbling voracity of this redistribution machine operated by power hungry
politicians. My life experiences confirmed these early lessons.
Although intellectually I was beginning to understand these points of view, I didn’t really
feel the impact of their meaning until after I went to work for the construction firm of
Brown & Root, Inc., in Houston, Texas. I took this job in August of 1962, upon my
graduation from Texas A&M with a master of engineering degree. I had the good
fortune to be hired by an elite group within the engineering team that was usually
assigned to the most difficult civil engineering problems the company encountered. I
was heavily challenged with some of the studies we tackled, but that was the part of the
job that I liked and kept me interested enough to go back to the office on weekends and
sometimes on holidays.
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