Since writing “Dos Gringos,” the stories and characters from the Mexican Revolution keep creeping out of the cracks. I got a call from El Paso from a man about my age, who told me about his great- grandfather who was a building contractor in Ciudad Chihuahua in the 1890s. A young man he had hired fell off a ladder and
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Some years ago, at a summer camp in Maine, I heard a story I have never forgotten. A lady, hearing about my father’s story in the Mexican Revolution, now the published book “Dos Gringos,” told me about her Jewish grandmother and Pancho Villa. It seems the woman was a recognized horse-breaker during those hectic years, living in central Texas, maybe San
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It is amazing who you meet at the beach. Learning I had written “Dos Gringos,” a book set in The Mexican Revolution, a nice woman introduced me to her friend saying the friend’s father was involved with building an air force for Pancho Villa. The father was Frank Wallace, one of those adventurous aviation pioneers during the wild days
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The interest in “Dos Gringos” amongst the Latino community is growing. As Dena Burroughs writes in the “LatinoLA” and earlier in “LA Arts Examiner,“ the story in Dos Gringos is of particular interest this year as November 2010 will mark the centennial of the onset of the Mexican Revolution.” She points out, “While World War I created havoc on the other
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Readers of “Dos Gringos” know that the infamous Pancho Villa is not a major character in the story. But surely his side of The Mexican Revolution is very much there, and represented by “The Hawk” who personifies the spirit of the revolution and is the savior of the common man for young Tomás. Villa killed his first man at 16,
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One of my favorite books is Barbara Tuchman’s “The Zimmermann Telegram,” about Kaiser Germany’s wild attempt to keep America out of World War I. The Americans were quite happy with their isolation from all that death and destruction in Europe. But, we were shipping guns and supplies to England and the Kaiser didn’t want to pull America into the war
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Taking the "road less traveled" has been a stand-out theme in the life and career of Frederick R. Andresen. Born and raised on the West Texas desert near El Paso, Andresen has spent a great deal of his professional life working and living abroad. Although his time in the military and his earlier career took him all over Europe and Asia, the nearly twenty years he has invested in building telecom companies in Russia have most inspired him as a writer and as a man.