When I was 6 years old, my father got transferred to El Centro, Columbia South America, a tiny little town on the edge of the jungle. El Centro was a subsidiary of Carter Oil Company (now Exxon). All of the residents in El Centro were employees of Carter Oil Company. We flew to South America on July 4, 1947. I remember that because that July 4th was my 7th birthday and all the flight attendants sang Happy Birthday to me.
I loved South America. We lived in a beautiful house. The entire yard was hedged with gardenia bushes. When they bloomed the smell was so poignant, it penetrated the entire house. When I smell a gardenia today, I am immediately thrown back in time to when I was seven. We had a tin roof to protect us from the tropical storms. Iguanas ran everywhere getting on the tin roof and making the worst ‘screeching sound’, like fingernails on a black board’. They would crawl on our screens and hang there. We learned to put a pan of water on to boil and, when ready, throw it on the iguana. He’d drop off right away.
Ants were everywhere including in the house. We had tile floors which were swabbed daily with kerosene to discourage the ants from making our house their house. When we baked a cake, we had to put the cake on top of a drinking glass, then put the glass in a bowl, then put water in the bowl making a moat, which protected the cake from the ants. The yards were full of stinging red ant hills. We never went outside barefoot because getting hookworm was a risk as well as stepping in one of the red ant hills. Invariably from time to time we would step in one and we would run for the shower and try to get there before they got to our leg and started stinging. We would turn on the shower and get in with our clothes on.
Our school house had 2 rooms. One for grades 1 thru 6, and the other for grades 7 through 12th. The rows were arranged so that 1st grade sat in the 1st row, 2nd grade in the 2nd row, and so on. We had two teachers, one for each room. They were English speaking Americans. They would talk to the grades one at a time, while the other grades had a written assignment. The advantage is you always learned something new because everyone could hear the lectures for the other grades.
The school yard was asphalt, had a mango tree, and a play contraption like a carousel (except it didn’t have horses but stools; it didn’t go up and down as it went around; and it only went around if someone would push it.} At every recess we sat on that thing and helped ourselves to a mango.
One weekend, my sister and I were playing on that contraption while watching 3 men working in the vacant lot beside us. They were chopping weeds with their machetes when all of a sudden, they started yelling and pointing and moving away from where they were working. My sister and I decided to go over there and check it out. When we got there, in place of the three men, we saw the most beautiful and colorful 4-5 feet long snake we have ever seen. We decided to take it home and show it to mother. This beautiful snake turned out to be a coral snake, a friend to none.
We found a long stick with a ‘Y’ at the end, perfect for dragging it to the road. Every once in a while, he would pick his head up and put on a mean look. In response to this, we would take our stick and whack him in the head until his behavior improved. All the way home it was drag, whack, drag, whack. Etc. We drug it up the porch step and then called for mother. Naturally, she came when we yelled for her; naturally, she screamed when she saw the snake; naturally, we laughed at her screaming. We didn’t think much of her over-the-top screaming because my mother was a scaredy cat; she screamed at mice, bees, ants, etc. Her screaming caught the attention of the neighbors who were running over to investigate her screaming. One of the neighbors explained the situation to us in a way and tone that we could understand. We quit playing with the snake and let him have it for disposal.
We lived in El Centro for one year. What got us back to the U.S. earlier than anticipated was the Colombian Revolution of 1948. We were in the middle of action. School closed, the oil company closed, everybody was instructed to stay inside. The rebels had seized our communication lines and we could not call the U.S. We had no idea if the U.S knew about our situation or not. We lived right outside the jungle. At night the jungle natives would come into our village swinging their machetes and yelling “death to America” (they yelled this in Spanish and not English). Every night my mother packed food in case we had to flee into the jungle. Dad loaded his .22 rifle and sat up holding it in his lap. They sent my sister and I to bed assuring us that everything would be fine. This was the nightly ritual. One night. I suddenly woke up. There was a native looking in the window beside my bed. I screamed and Dad came running in with his .22. The native stared at him holding his machete in fight position. My Dad stared right back at him thru the gun sights aiming his rifle with the hammer cocked. It seems like this standoff lasted hours. Then the native lowered his knife and walked back to the crowd. This was probably the most critical moment in that whole nightmare. The natives had been threatening to lock us all up in the school house and massacre us. If Dad had shot him that would probably have triggered that massacre.
A few nights later the revolution ended as suddenly and quietly as it had begun. We got our communication lines back and found out that America did know that we were hostages and had planes ready to evacuate us.
We immediately got transferred back to the GOOD ‘OLE U.S.A.