In January 1958, my mother & I boarded the freighter, Bergitte Torm, bound for Rio De Janeiro, Brazil. It was tied up at a pier in Hoboken, New Jersey. We hadn’t been there before, even though it was near Jersey City where we lived for over a year prior to this. It was the home of Frank Sinatra. It was not a place that you would want to visit as a tourist. It was pretty cold as I remember, being the middle of winter. The ship had several staterooms for passengers, so we had people to keep us company on the voyage, some of which were Catholic priests. You couldn’t tell by the way they were dressed that they were priests though, since they didn’t wear priestly garb. I don’t remember who the other passengers were. We all ate in a large dining room with the ship’s captain & other crew members. the following are some pictures we took on the trip.
When we arrived in the port of Rio De Janeiro, the first thing that happened was the Brazilian customs agents coming on board to inspect the ship & check all the passenger’s papers. Just before we arrived, on of the ship’s officers, asked us if they could put some cases of cigarettes in our stateroom, to hide them from the customs agents. I guess they weren’t allowed in passenger’s rooms. I think we said yes but am not sure. That was a long time ago. After that we got off the ship & had to go to the customs building on the pier, where they inspected our baggage & determined if we had to pay any Duty on any of our things we were bringing in the country. I don’t know if we had to pay anything but for instance, if we had a car, we would have had to pay roughly the value of the car in Duty. I believe Maxine Stoleson & her 2 sons, Dan & Juan met us & drove us to Sao Paulo, where we were going to stay in their house for the time being. This is their house at the right. It was a typical Brazilian house, brick & stucco with a tile roof. The streets in the residential neighborhoods were made of stones with concrete sidewalks if you had a sidewalk. The windows had flowerpots on the outside & wooden shutters. The 1st floor windows had iron grates over them to prevent anyone from breaking into the home.
During my visit to São Paulo, I engaged in extensive sightseeing. The city is reminiscent of New York City, Chicago, or Los Angeles. While each metropolis has its distinct characteristics, they all boast towering skyscrapers in their downtown districts. Below is an illustration of the São Paulo skyline. I would walk around & take pictures with my Yashica Flex 35mm camera. It became a lifelong hobby of mine.
On nice days I would often go with friends to the beach. We usually went to Santos which isn’t too far from Sao Paulo. I also went to Rio de Janeiro with the school. We would compete with kids from the American School there. Anywhere there were a lot of American families living they had a school for the kids.
These are some photos I took with my 35mm camera, both black & white & color film. The current photos I got off the internet, showing what downtown looks like today.
It seemed like we were in Sao Paulo longer, but we were only there for 6 months. In July 1958 we moved to the town of Avare, after talking to a missionary couple, Ernest & Jen Warkantin, who had been living there. My mother, being a schoolteacher, found out she could make a good living giving private English lessons. There were many Doctors, lawyers, engineers & other professional people who wanted to learn English because they did business with Americans & wanted to be able to communicate in their language.
Avare is a small town in the interior of Brazil, a few hours from Sao Paulo. Being a small town, most residents knew each other. I became a novelty. I was the first American teenager to actually live in the town. Many had visited, but I was the first to live there. Because of that, everyone wanted to meet me & talk to me, especially in English. I also got to learn more Portuguese this way. After a while I learned it so well, people who didn’t know me thought I was another Brazilian teenager. They said I didn’t have an accent at all but sounded like I was born there. Later, people who I met could actually tell me where I was from in Brazil, because of the way I spoke & phrases I used. Here are some Pictures I took while living there.
This first church is the Baptist church that we attended regularly. We worked with the pastor & other leaders in the church & helped some of the families any way we could. Most of the people attending the church were very poor.
The other church is the town’s Catholic church. We aren’t Catholic but we found out we could help them some too. While attending an outdoor mass one day, we listened to the priest & his message wasn’t much different than that of our Baptist pastor. As is most of South America, the majority of the town’s people were Catholic so that gave us a very large group of people to minister to.
When we moved to Avare, I didn’t have a school to attend, so I took out a high school course by correspondence, from Drexel, in Chicago, Illinois. I set my own schedule, so I could go to the park & get a shoeshine & enjoy the fresh air & sunshine. Needless to say, I fell behind in my schoolwork because of things like this.
The weather was nice most of the time, so I liked to spend a lot of time outside. The only time you had to be careful was in the middle of the summer. You could set your watch by when it rained then. Every day at 3 o’clock a tropical downpour would come through, then after a half hour or so it would stop & the sun would come back out. The warm weather & daily rain were the reason this part of the world was perfect for growing things like bananas. I witnessed banana plants grow a foot a day in this climate. That might sound a little exaggerated for some of you, but it’s the truth.
My mother loved the outdoors also. She enjoyed walking around & admiring the flowers & trees. She could name most of them. I was not like that. I admired them but didn’t know them by name. For her it was important to know them by name. I think I got my adventurous spirit from her. In this picture, she is in one of the many parks Avare had. It was truly a very beautiful little town.
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The best thing that happened to us in Brazil was meeting & being adopted by this family. We simply called them the Nogueirs’a. They had a small farm a few miles from Avare. The kids went to school in Avare, so we saw them a lot there. The 2 oldest brothers lived with us for a while. In the picture from left to tight is Coaraci, Beatriz (mother), Inaie, Alfredo (father), 3 unknown men in back, Iani, Iara & Iaci. There are 2 boys missing from the picture, Ubiratun & Alfredo (Alfredino). I’ll never forget all the delicious meals I ate there. In the morning, we would take a cup of strong coffee, go to the barn & squirt some milk right from a cow into our coffee cup. Talk about fresh. We also rode horses there. That was the life.
Cows at the Nogueira farm in Barra Grande near Avare.
Another American family that we met while living in Avare Darwin & Joyce Goss & at the time 4 kids, were hired by the Fagundes family to build & run a modern pig farm. They constructed a building for the pigs to live in, instead of just letting them roam out in the open. Inside it were troughs for feed & a trench for their waste, which could be washed easily to keep things sanitary. Their food consisted of ground corn, Sugar cane juice & some kind of vitamins, I’m not sure what. There was sugar cane growing on the property & they had a device that squeezed the juice out of the cane. The pigs loved that. I started helping Darwin in the day by day caring for the pigs. I got into the medical part of it like holding the pigs still while Darwin castrated them & then I actually gave a lot of them penicillin shots. It was definitely different than what I was used to.
Other things that I did was drive the tractor they had, plowing, raking & hauling stuff around the farm property. The tractor was unique. It was a one-cylinder Landini, made in Italy. To get it started you had to put a torch under the cylinder head to heat it up. Then you had to spin a large flywheel back & forth until the diesel fuel ignited. The flywheel had to spin counterclockwise as you were looking at it. If it wasn’t, you had to shut the throttle off & when it slowed down it would rock back & forth. When it started to turn in the right direction you had to open the throttle to get it to keep going in that direction.
Some friends of ours, the Palmers, bought some land in the State of Parana, which is a neighbor of Sao Paulo, to plant coffee trees. It was an experience to get where they were. I had to take a train the 1st part of the trip, then I got on a bus for most of the rest of the way. Everything was OK until the rains came, turning the roads, which weren’t paved but just dirt, into mud making them impassable for vehicles. We had to spend a night or 2 in Cruzeiro do Oeste (Cross of the West) until the roads dried up enough to drive on. The picture below is what the main street looked like. I stayed in a small, what we call Bed & Breakfast, which was one of the buildings across the street.
I had one room which had a small bed & a chair. We ate in a dining room & ate whatever was on the menu for that day. I’ll never forget one evening meal. 2 men sat down at my table (you had to share), ordered a couple of glasses of Pinga, a Brazilian liquor made from sugar cane. They offered me some, saying in Portuguese, “It’s good, try it”. I politely declined. As we were eating our dinner, the local police came in, dragged another man out of the dining area. I later found out he was wanted for murder. This town reminded of the wild west back in America. All the men carried either a gun or a knife, for protection. That night I went to the town’s movie theater, where there was an old American Western movie showing that night. It cost the equivalent of 25 cents to get in. We finally got back on the bus & completed the journey. I don’t remember the name of the town we went to, but to get to our friend’s farm, they came & picked me up in a truck to take me the rest of the way.
This is a picture of 2 of the Palmers, mother & son, who bought land in the state of Parana which was next to the state of Sao Paulo. The land was pretty much jungle. I went there to visit & help them clear the land & then plant coffee trees. We used mostly machetes to clear the brush & the trees were cut down with saws. One of the highlights of the visit was when their son (I can’t remember his name) & I went for a jaunt into the jungle. We both had a machete & pocketknife. When we started out, we followed a dirt road leading into the jungle, then it became just a path & then it ended. Before the path ended a wild cat, (see photo below) maybe an Onca, which is like a leopard or jaguar, crossed the path in front of us. From that point on it was just jungle which is where our machetes came in. We cleared brush as we went along. We saw some hunters going back the way we came & when they saw us, they asked us where our guns were. We told them we didn’t have any, just machetes & a knife. They shook their heads in disbelief & continued on their way. I think they thought we were crazy. Maybe we were, out there in the jungle like that without guns. That’s American boys for you. We were both about 17 or 18.
About halfway through our stay in Brazil we moved from Avare to Botucatu. they were maybe 75 miles from each other. Mother had been taking the train here from Avare, because most of her private students lived here, so by moving here she didn’t have to go for their private lessons. The town was a little larger than Avare & laid out differently. They were both on the Railroad line but Botucatu was more industrial than Avare, which was mostly a farming community. When we first arrived there one of mother’s students, Dr. Alimar De Barros, a mechanical engineer, asked her if she could translate some technical manuals from English to Portuguese. She told him that since I was picking up the language faster than she was, that I would be more suited to translate them than she was. I took on the task & did such a good job, he offered me a job at his factory, Petrac Engeniaria, as a Quality Inspector. I accepted & started to work there. They made parts for large Earth moving machinery, such as LaTourneau & Caterpillar. Some of the parts were made of metal powders which they made right in the factory. My job was to inspect the finished parts, measure them, check for defects, before they were sent to the customer. I was only 17 at the time. I had to quit after a while because I came down with Asthma due to inhaling too much metal dust. It was quite educational for me though. The pay wasn’t good ($15 a month) but the experience was.
Another job I had was teaching beginning English to local teenagers, some of which are shown in the picture to the right. Everyone wanted to learn English, which was also a required language in the schools in Brazil. The way I got the job was strange. One of the teachers at a Brazil/United States Cultural Institute, where my mother also taught, came down sick & couldn’t teach. The people in charge asked me if I could fill in for her until she recuperated. I said Yes. I had a class twice a week & guess what? The job paid $15 a month, just like the factory job. I actually did both at the same time for awhile until I had to quit the factory job.
While living in Avare, I became acquainted with 2 brothers who owned a small store in the town. They were part of a Japanese family who had emigrated to Brazil. Their last name was Watanabe. Like many others, they wanted to learn English so I became friends by teaching them some English from time to time. They were amateur photographers & had their own darkroom where they developed film & printed & enlarged pictures from the negatives from the film. They taught me how to develop film & print pictures, which I thought was very interesting. Then they showed me how to make my own print box out of wood & using a light bulb & switch for making prints from negatives. At the time I had 2 cameras. One was a 35mm Argus C3 & the other was a Yashika Flex, whose negatives were full size. I was able to print pictures with my home-made box from the Yashika Flex negatives. The Watanabes let me use their enlarger to print pictures from my 35mm camera. I will be eternally grateful to them for what they taught me.
One thing we had to get used to in Brazil was insects & snakes. There were tarantulas, fleas, flies & many other critters in our house. We hired a maid to come in & clean our house regularly. It wasn’t very expensive to hire someone to do this & they knew how to get rid of the bugs. The floors in the houses there were made of hardwood & were waxed. When our maid cleaned the house, she would wax the floors with a special red wax mixed with a little gasoline. It wasn’t dangerous but killed any insects in the floor. We would never have thought of that. Obviously, we went somewhere when she did this & then the house got aired out good before we came back. I also remember sitting on our couch & having a tarantula start crawling on me. Yuck!! On the other hand there were some beautiful insects such as butterflies by the thousands everywhere.
I thought this snake was pretty, so I took a picture of it, not knowing it was very poisonous.
There were a lot of things that were different in Brazil that we had to get used to. There were no supermarkets like Safeway (for those of you that are old enough to remember). Instead, there were individual shops like, bakeries, butcher shops, small grocery stores, etc. If you needed milk, they dipped a used vegetable oil can in a milk can that had just been delivered by a farmer & poured it in a container you brought. If you wanted some meat, you told the butcher what cut you wanted & he would cut it off a slab of beef he had hanging in a walk-in refrigerator. If you wanted some hamburger, he would grind it for you right then & wrap your order in paper. Vegetables were all fresh, so you bought enough for a day or 2. If you wanted bread, you went to the local bakery & got fresh baked bread. It was always fresh that day. Italian bread was everyone’s favorite & you had to slice it yourself.
Brazilians knew from watching American movies that we liked to drink milk, so the 1st time I ate dinner in the Fagundes’ home, they gave me a glass of milk. I didn’t say anything, but it didn’t taste good. Later I found out that they boiled it to kill any germs in it . That’s when we studied up on pasteurization & bought the pan’s necessary to pasteurize milk. Basically, it’s just putting a pan of milk inside a pan of boiling water for a certain amount of time.
Another thing was the coffee. Most stores just sold raw coffee beans. This led us to buy a coffee roaster & then a coffee grinder. We learned how to roast the beans to our liking & then ground the rosted beans as we needed more coffee. We had to adjust to a lot when we moved to Avare & then Botucatu.
