If I were king of the world, I would make all Americans experience life in a third world country for at least a year. Secular humanist Randy is advocating mission work? One reason is that as I consider economics, social change, or politics, -not to mention expectations--I often cite the experience of living in Brazil as a child—only to get a subliminal if not an overtly clear message from the American with whom I am speaking, that whatever I learned there was not relevant to the United States. Our problems are different…….
The differences between Brazilian culture and that in which we live are significant, but the experience of Brazil was grounding, relevant, and served me well learning about myself, the world, and the United States.
Brazil is a sensual country. My first steps on land presented smells, sounds, and scenes that were exotic and powerful. Every return visit I have had to Brazil reinforces this impression. Stepping off the SS Argentina onto the dock in Rio de Janeiro harbor, I smelled humid hot air with a mix of rotting vegetation and diesel fumes. I saw powerfully built black men, dressed only in ratty shorts and shoes hauling immense weights of cargos out of the ship’s holds on their backs. The sun was intense. In my imagination, (because I don’t think it possible in 1961) a samba band was playing uniquely Brazilian music as we headed to the customs officials. We were greeted by Herb Behner once we got through customs and were driven to the Oro Verde hotel in Copacabana. This is now a concierge hotel under a different name, but was just one block down from the famous Capacabana Palace Hotel overlooking the famous beach. Herb took us to dinner at a Churrascaria where one dined on French fries, tomatoes, any cut of meat you could imagine (all served on little hibachi’s next the table), and for the first time, Guaraná, a soft drink that looked like beer but had twice the sugar content of a coca cola. Going to bed in our hotel room that looked out on Copacabana Beach, I was lulled to sleep by the sound of waves, traffic, and the smell of the sea which helped soothed my sunburned skin more than once.
The passage of time made this sensual quality more obvious and explicit: a great example was Carnival. The Americans spoke softly about it when we kids were around—there was mystery in the air but the streets were full of excitement. Scantily dressed men and women both muscular and flabby letting go for days on end. While Chip was allowed out to observe, we elementary school kids were locked indoors, sunset to sunrise. There is no event in the United States that I know of that comes close to this.
In a different light, there was soccer. Pelé reigned supreme. Brazil won the World Cup in 1962; the experience leading up to this victory hit at random days and times when quarterfinal and semifinal games were played. One could be reading in the apartment and a vibration would slowly build and a roar proclaim from every window, “Goal, Brazil!” Riding home on the bus one day, the same experience—the bus vibrated, the driver slowed down, fire crackers went off, and as the shouting from the surrounding apartments proclaimed the goal, the passengers themselves on the bus shouted along, “Goal Brazil!”
We would live in that Copacabana hotel for months before settling into an apartment in Ipanema, the next beach over. By then, routines were set. The beach life was for the taking, just a walk across the street in Copacabana, a two block walk in Ipanema. My brother and I were enrolled in a private school, the Escola Americana. I would later learn that this was quite expensive and I have no clue how the expense was managed on a Naval Captain’s salary. What undoubtedly helped was the state of the Brazilian economy where hyperinflation would be the rule for the two years we lived there. At an early age, I learned that my one dollar allowance could be traded in for at first, 16.5 cruzeiros but by the end of two years, five-hundred cruzeiros. I could buy many things with advantage trading dollars in an environment of hyperinflation.
Our first days in Ipanema found us moving furniture and stocking the kitchen. My father gave Chip some money and requested we buy a few items at the corner store along with a six-pack of beer. I had some rudimentary Portuguese already saved up for this and pointed at a head of lettuce, asking for “um cabeza.” I got a laugh as the expression in Portuguese was to ask for a foot of lettuce (My Portuguese translator 2022 says I have that wrong…….). The smell in the food store was predominant with that of unscented soap and of bacalao—heavily salted fish dried and stacked in great heaps. Yes, they sold beer to a 13 year old boy though they would have sold it to me at age 9 had I been alone. My father had a mischievous smile on his face regarding us with our goods upon arrival home and opened a beer. Walking the fifty yards around to the store over the next year brought many images not repeated in the US before or since: Vendors hawked wares. In Ireland, they are called Tinkers; on our block, knives could be sharpened, pots banged out and repaired, tools fixed, and shoes shined by poor black men sitting on small wooden benches that held their tools. Every Tuesday there was a local market, on the street that led to the beach. Again, the smells of fresh produce were strong. The Rio of my youth had no large grocery stores. If you wanted meat, you went to a butcher’s. Some meat was sold in the street market as well and the memory is of having too swat the meat to visually inspect it without it being covered with flies. If one wanted chicken, one bought a live chicken…a scrawny live chicken. My mother had had experience with this in the South where she grew up in the thirties. She would have none of it and it was only when the Kitty Hawk (an air craft carrier) came into port that my father was able to use his captain’s stripes to score us a crate of packaged chickens that we finally were able to have home cooked chicken. Milk was not pasteurized in the Brazil of the early 1960’s so after a trial of dried milk (from a diplomatic mission commissary) and cereal, I had to forgo milk for two solid years.
We had a freezer which allowed us to parse the chicken out over time. This was virtually unheard of among our Brazilian apartment dwellers. We had a maid who thought it crazy that one would eat chicken that was a month old. Our maid cleaned, shopped, and helped serve food but my mother, Lethe remained the cook. The apartment in Ipanema was on the eighth floor and configured in the shape of a ‘C.’ The middle portion was an open area communicating to the sky. A small room was next to the kitchen at one end of the ‘C,’ and this is where the maid slept five nights a week. We went through three maids in our 15 months in Ipanema and this was in part was because of the ambiguity of having one in the first place—it was expected but not needed. There was shame in not hiring the poor when you had the money to have this service provided whether it was really needed or not. There were cultural problems which were expected—the look on a face when an error was discovered and the unexpected-- one proved to be a priestess of the Macumba cult which blended African and Christian religious traditions. The beach was commonly found in the morning with mounds of sand, ornaments, and bird fathers with a sprinkling of blood. Chip teased me that my pet cat, Sam, was all black and therefore subject to possible sacrifice.
Travel in Rio was largely done by bus. A nearby park was a stopping place for ancient cable cars (bondis). Our apartment faced a busy bus line. With the school year, Chip would hop on the bus and go to school; I waited for an elementary school bus. Coming home from school was an hour long experience as we traversed multiple parts of the city and I was often at the tail end of the route. It became a norm that I could get off and stay with friends after school and then bus home. I learned with Chip how to navigate both the bus routes (and the painted destination points on the windshields) as well as etiquette once in the bus. I enjoyed the challenge of standing and keeping my balance while the bus swayed, stopped, and started. My first bus ride found a seat open with an enormous black woman next to it. I chose to stand. My brother Chip reprimanded me knowing that I was afraid. “Take the seat,” was the message.
Years later, I would learn that the color divide was as real in Brazil as it was in the United States. It was not so sharply found in the middle classes because they were by and large, a relative minority of the population at the time. The wealthy mostly looked European or “American,” and the poor mostly black or coffee colored. I passed poor black people each and every day. I was polite and deferential and for the most part, that was reciprocated. Skinny black boys playing soccer in the local park was a common scene but they commonly scattered when an adult in uniform walked by. They just looked through me. One evening, I saw excitement and a gathering of boys. I came over to see what they had and there was a kitten in a park pond struggling to swim to shore. They used sticks to deny it access to the shore. I freaked out. To their credit, they did not tease or challenge me. The leader of these boys waded into the gross scummy green pond and fetched the kitten out and handed it to me. I thanked him (muito abrigado!) and took the kitten home. Lethe (my mother), was in a dilemma, recognizing my kindness but not willing to make a home for cat number three. I don’t recall the disposition of my find….which is a metaphor for many of us Americans living in a foreign culture.
My formal education at Escola Americana was associated with a stair-step in my interest and ability to learn. I was quizzed by the principle the summer we arrived in a small office. Handwriting: awful. Reading, average at best. He quizzed me with some math problems that I could not solve; when he showed me how they were done, I remembered, “Oh yeah, we did learn that last year.” I was assigned to 4B which was the class for average students. Miss Vera was my teacher, a Brazilian woman—a hot Brazilian woman. She liked me and inspired me. I was all in—I wrote extra credit assignments based on my Landmark Book reading—-all done in cursive and with a fountain pen. She left us at the semester to teach in the high school, and we then had Miss Schullman who was a Mimi Eisenhower doppelgänger. I re-submitted some of my extra credit reports to her. The library was full of ancient books with an odor I would not smell again until in 1973 when I took a bus to UC Berkeley and its science library to read up on Schistosomiasis from texts written in the 1920’s. I fell in love with Greek and Roman history. I read about the Civil War, the conquest of Mexico, and the French and Indian War. I studied hard. I graduated to 5A which was for above average students and it was here I was introduced to “new math.” I met some incredibly bright students, many, Brazilian, who undoubtedly went on to have impressive lives. I left school with a confidence and fund of knowledge that worked well for me when I returned to Coronado for sixth grade. My Brazilian school experience found me thinking I was capable of athletics. However, living fourth and fifth grade without football or baseball would find me way behind my American peers. My attempts to learn soccer were sad short-lived affairs because any kid on the street had mastered foot work that I could not begin to understand. One does not win soccer matches on the streets of Brazil kicking that ball like a kickball in the states, going for the home run. I did credible work with dodge ball which was very popular at recess and I was the fastest sprinter in my grade level. That legacy lasted in Coronado for my sixth grade class but delayed puberty would forever find me in the middle of the pack as sprinting went after that.
The elementary school experience of those years that most my peers in the USA had that I did not, related to the events in 1962. We lived in Chevy Chase, Maryland when JFK was inaugurated president. To this young kid, he was magnetic. It was apparent in Brazil that he was someone different, to both my parents as well as Brazilians who occasionally could be heard speaking of him in the context of the Cold War. Around the corner from the Oro Verde Hotel was an office with large windows and a prominently displayed portrait of President Kennedy. The Cuban Missile Crisis had my peers ducking for cover in class drills but for us in Brazil, it was springtime and without TV, the drama was diluted a bit by the limited news I could absorb through the Brazil Herald the daily English newspaper. As I aged, the intellectual concern about nuclear war was a problem to be sorted and solved, but the fear, the emotional connection to the very real possibility— I never faced it the same way as I would have living in the United States. Lethe was incensed by an overheard comment uttered by a Brazilian, contemplating that a war between Russia and the United States would propel Brazil into the ranks of a world power. She was disdainful of that prospect as the society we could view from our eighth floor apartment while colorful, did not look organized or dynamic as in having a plan to go to the moon or launch air craft carriers with modern jet fighters or crates of frozen chicken.
Rio was a city subject to shortages. In the summer there were brown-outs of electricity when to protect our record player or the TV in my parent’s room, they were turned off. We lived by candle light for some nights because of power failures. Water shortages were known and at least once, we had warning of no running water for several days. I learned that stored water in a bathtub could be scooped with a small bucket and used to flush a toilet. For the whole two years, we drank only filtered water that was then boiled and stored in the refrigerator in old whiskey bottles. Food shortages were not uncommon. Being impressed by the Spartans, their discipline, and the ethos of, “no whining” I was tasked to wait in a line to get butter. I waited patiently with maids and other children for four hours in hot sun only to be asked an unintelligible question by an impatient worker to which I nodded my head and then purchased a kilogram of butter. As Lethe looked at the label, she was incredulous that I would purchase butter without salt. Who knew they put salt in butter? There was no discussion about waiting in the line for four hours, without complaint.
Ignorance of unsalted butter was just the tip of the iceberg. One day, heading to the home from school with a friend on the school bus there was a tension in the air. Armed soldiers with machine guns were manning every intersection. Traffic was intense. There were crowds on the street. We got to his house, played cards, had a snack, and gossiped. I got on a bus to go home and coming through the door of the apartment, Lethe was beside herself. “Where were you?”
“I was with Frederico, why?”
“Honey, there was a revolution today! The president of Brazil stepped down! Didn’t you see the soldiers?”
Why, yes I did. They were pretty cool but the slowed the traffic down quite a bit…….I let that be my internal response playing dumb to her question as the significance truly was not something I understood. The next day at the beach, and aircraft carrier was steaming off shore, and I was told the Navy, “was leaving.”
Perhaps the most remarkable legacy or memory I have of my time in Rio was the freedom I was granted—-the freedom I took. It was not unusual to come home from school and find the apartment empty. I was free to go home with friends if I mentioned it before-hand or called when I arrived at the friend’s house. So long as I was home by five o’clock or so, no problem. I went to my friend Stuart’s house three blocks away unattended, and passed a beachside bar, typically full of drinking young men, often singing as I walked by. I went to the beach alone to gather sand for the cat’s sandbox. I would be sent to buy cat food (beef liver or kidneys purchased at a butcher’s around the corner).
Chip and I would explore Rio as we pursued our hobby, stamp collecting. There was a stamp dealer Chip found in old town Rio. This was an adventure and by bus, took us way out of our normal known environment. The dealer’s story fascinated me; he had fled Nazi Germany and had been a man of means. He marketed stamps as they were easy to transport and started a new life. We bought and collected stamps from him with money obtained through unclear means—my brother Chip being something of a juvenile delinquent. One hot day, standing for hours looking at blocks of stamps, I had tinnitus and noted my vision funneling down and I greyed out. I fell to the floor with some control. Chip was freaked out; explain that to the parents! The stamp dealer had seen it all before. “Don’t lock your knees when you are here!” He sat me up when I felt better and gave me a cold Coke. We got home, no one the wiser.
My friend Stuart and I learned that for just pennies, one could purchase firecrackers, fifty to a box. Brazilian firecrackers were essentially a match with cigarette paper rolled around the stick with gunpowder. One struck the match and threw the thing and it popped. I became addicted to these. Stuart and I progressed to building our own larger firecrackers by incising and re wrapping larger and larger bombs. I have a brass cannon from a model of an old sailing ship and actually primed it with gunpowder and lit it as it faced the closed gates of Fort Apache, my toy soldier set. I nearly set fire to the plastic fort on the eighth floor of an apartment. At one point, I burned my palm and successfully managed to keep it hidden in that I was never asked how it had occurred. Freedom to mess up! My ultimate measure of freedom, having read a history of famous doctors, was to find and purchase a can of ether which I took to Gail McCann’s birthday party. I had no plan with respect to what I would do with it. I had told the seller I used it for my (imaginary) butterfly collection. Gail’s mother frowned and took it from me and I never heard a word about it again.
My friends and I went out to see movies,. This sometimes involved taking busses. We saw Hatari and The 300 Spartans over and over; the pre movie features were typically Abbot and Costello or the Three Stooges. We bought records. My favorite? A Brazilian edition of Chubby Checker’s Twisting Around the World. Rei do Twist! I still have it—a collector’s item, I am sure. This freedom of travel with money in my pocket translated further when Lethe and my father traveled on a diplomatic mission around the continent, leaving us with the maid for ten or so days. We ate well, went to school, and continued our usual projects. For Chip, the experience was transcendent being in the first two years of high school. I recently recounted his memories with him of this time. He drank beer and out for the first time at Carnival, had friends contribute money for his first sexual experience. He and I were fans of West Side Story and this modeled his getting into street fights with local kids sometimes. He knew me to not be very street smart (that remains a problem) and so, he would practice knife fights with me using combs. My forearms were a mess of scrapes. His friends offered up a first cigarette. When I puffed at it without inhaling they all got loud and I had instructions using words I did not know. “Come on Randy, inhale the smoke!” I swallowed a mouthful of smoke and turned green, nearly vomiting. That was apparently hilarious but on recovery, I indeed learned to inhale. I was a party trick now when they came over. The issue of smoking is quite interesting in that both my parents were at least a pack a day smokers, and the PX provided cartons of cigarettes for a nominal price. Chip would help himself and did not hide the fact that he smoked in our room or in his study area near the central ventilated part of the apartment. I recall the parents not being happy about it but he was not explicitly forbidden from doing it. I wish they had. To this day, cigarette smoke finds and annoys me when it is present.
My sister, Kathy lived in Brazil as well. I have very few memories of her there. She went to a catholic school as there was no grade level for her at my school which started at fourth grade. She did not have the freedom I had being in second and third grades. She was pretty much an apartment dweller and when you ask her about the experience, the details are sparse but my impression is of a negative one with respect to her life there. It was undoubtedly lonely and her social activities limited to when the parents would take her somewhere with them.
Of the three kids, only Chip had Brazilian friends; some were a blend, American kids who had lived in Brazil all their lives. On the first floor of our apartment building, there was a family that spoke fluent English—they were Brazilians in name, but their legacy was that of Southerners who immigrated after the Civil War so as to keep their slaves. Brazil did not outlaw slavery until 1888. My attempt to have a Brazilian friend in the apartment building failed in that we could not communicate well. My toys and his were not very compatible. Re-playing Fort Apache or the Civil War with my toy soldiers was just weird for him and his love of soccer did not resonate for me. We belonged to a country club and I would occasionally play pool games with Brazilian boys my age. I actually thought there were physical differences separating Brazilian and American kids as in the locker room at the club, they were all uncircumcised and not knowing how circumcision came about, assumed it was, as with skin color, an anatomical difference that reflected the country of origin.
My American friends from school mingled with some Brazilians whose parents saw the advantage of a private English speaking school. While it may have been the times, the culture of Brazil in 1962 found a mix of fifth graders at a birthday party playing kissing games with the blessings of the hosting parents. I would not encounter that until Junior High upon return to the States. I would learn in college that Brazil is an example of a “sex positive” culture where there is an openness and acceptance that is not found in other parts of the world. I certainly saw and at some subliminal level understood that even as a nine year old. I have as we all do, wondered how different my world would have been if we had settled there for adolescence. It would have been pretty crazy, I think. As it was, the translocation from Brazil to Coronado with a very different culture and set of expectations found me a bit lost and it would take a few years to regain my balance and sense of self. Adolescence would be in the setting of the Viet Nam war in the United States where I saw a consensus in favor of the war dramatically shift in just a few years with all sorts of chaos associated. As difficult as that could be, to have been an adolescent in Rio in the same years would have seen even more polarizing and dramatic as a right wing military dictatorship took over the country in 1964, seemingly with US support, and “foreign elements” like hippies and their culture were reviled and suppressed. The slums would get organized and react to formal military controls whose presence was to prevent a communist take-over. The middle class and poor would continue to struggle with hyperinflation. It would be the 1980’s before the military would withdraw from overt control of the Federal Government of Brazil.
My life and understanding of Brazil led me to think in relative terms about possibility and fate, not to mention well thought out plans and their outcomes. Were I a middle class Brazilian in 1964, where would life have taken me? As bad as politics and civil unrest seemed in the United States, it is the clear winner of any contest for
alternative realities. I finish as I started: I wish all Americans could have a comparable experience in a foreign country to sand down our rough edges as Americans with a very exceptional view of the world.
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