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Waiting For Hitler
As a young man yearning for adventure and bored by the routine, Alex Louis, who was not yet my father but a west Texas newspaper reporter, told his boss that he intended to quit his job and run off to Mexico so he could interview the exiled radical socialist, Leon Trotsky, and perhaps gain some inspiration that I imagine his life was lacking in Wichita Falls. Maybe his roommate at this time was Fred ( "Old Yeller") Gibson, or maybe that would come later--and so maybe or maybe not he talked it over with Fred beforehand, or this would be a thing Fred would hear about later. The caring or opportunistic boss suggested instead of throwing it all away that my father should make the trip as a paid correspondent. My father agreed to this because he was no damn fool but one secret thing I know about the man who was not yet my father is this--a part of him just wanted to disappear into Mexico, and perhaps run into Ambrose Bierce, or his ghost, who himself had disappeared in Mexico possibly looking for Pancho Villa, in 1913, the year of my father's birth.
This was 1939 or 40 and like a distant friend of mine who forty years later would be turned away by JD Salinger's housekeeper in New Hampshire, my father's request for an interview with Trotsky was met mostly by indifference and it was not long after that Trotsky was murdered when in Mexico City a hired killer named Ramon drove a pickax into the back of his head, in August of 1940. My father came back to America and waited for the next adventure which would be the Second World War.