![]() ![]() My brother Ron once came home with this comment on his third grade report card: “Ron doesn’t let his schooling interfere with his education.” It must run in the family. I’d like to think he finished his last definition there. Then he spent ten days in Chihuahua City, sending his last telegram on December 26, 1913, and heading out the next morning for the Battle of Ojinaga, rode into his historic disappearance.īierce surely would have made the cantina his last office those ten days. This could very well have been the place Ambrose Bierce spent the ten days he was in Chihuahua City in December 1913.Īt the tender age of 71, Bierce had ridden the 250 miles from El Paso alone on horseback. In Ciudad Chihuahua there is a patio café near the Cathedral and main hotel, called the Café de los Milagros (The Café of Miracles), which is in a restored building from the 1890s. They have the bullet-riddled 1922 Dodge that Villa was riding in when he was assassinated.Ī few blocks from the museum is a park that contains a grand mausoleum for Villa that remains empty – his body is buried in a national cemetery in Mexico City, and his head is missing. When she died, the Mexican Army took over running the museum. People brought her other items and gave her a gratuity for touring the place. Over the years people came from all over the world to see the memorabilia of Villa that his wife had collected. Villa’s widow inherited this property from him upon his assassination in 1923, and lived there until her death in 1981. It is now a parking lot.Īt the other extreme is the Pancho Villa Museum, also known as the Museum of the Revolution. It was at this humble adobe casa that Villa was contacted by representatives of the Revolution and recruited. He was running a butcher shop, and having to suffer assertions from enemies and competitors that perhaps some of the meat he was selling might have come from “lost” cows. ![]() In 1910, 32-year-old Pancho Villa was living in a small adobe house at 500 Calle Decima in central Chihuahua City near the Cathedral, trying to put behind him his days of cattle rustling and banditry up in the surrounding hills. The house we stayed in was within walking distance from three sites that are related to Pancho Villa, and one site that could be related to Ambrose Bierce. We stayed with a family who lived a few block’s walk from the old part of the city where there were narrow residential streets that were laid out in the 1720s.īuildings are built right up to the sidewalk in that area, and houses have walled back yards, or are built around interior patio courtyards. I aided her, and also walked about the city, tracing the legendary footsteps of Pancho Villa and of Ambrose Bierce, author of The Devil’s Dictionary of Ambrose Bierce, model for the Old Gringo in the novel by Carlos Fuentes.Ĭiudad Chihuahua is fortunate in not being a big city, a border city, nor a tourist destination/trap. My wife, Karin Wiburg, was using part of her sabbatical to work with students on computers in Spanish in a technological preparatory school there. I had the good fortune to spend two weeks in Ciudad Chihuahua this past September. Printed hereunder is an account of a two week sojourn in Ciudad Chihuahua that first appeared in the New Mexico State University Library publication, Citations, January 2000. Prior to that, my wife Karin and I had made innumerable trips to vast parts of Mexico. Sadly, I haven’t been to Mexico since May 2005. What got to me was that it was on a sound stage. Oh, I could look past the fact that it was in black and white. One night my brother and I were invited over by one of the neighbors to watch Sergeant Preston on one of those flickering boxes of light. Eventually, we seemed to be the only family on the block who could afford to own a color radio, everyone else making do with a black and white television. I only got in on the last of color radio in the early 1950s, shortly before it was done in by black and white television. I remember, in particular, on cold winter nights, my brother and I listening to Sergeant Preston of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, with the lights out, lying on the floor staring at the action on the radio that was unfolding on the ceiling. You supplied the images in your mind therefore, they were in color. ![]() Radio was like somebody talking to you in a normal conversation, describing things. You wonder what color radio was? It was drama, soap opera, comedy, sports, religion, news, and yes, even music, all of this without images superimposed on a screen. I doubt it will ever hold a candle to the last great innovation in radio – color radio! Right now a lot of people are getting excited about the latest thing in radio – web radio. The following appeared in Citations, April 2000. The blog post appearing hereunder, and the two following it, first appeared in the New Mexico State University Library publication, Citations, in 1999-2000 while I inhabited a cube there. ![]()
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