The 40-mile trip "up the river" to Guayaquil, principal port of Ecuador, was made in a Grace Line yacht, Santa Rosita, formerly a submarine chaser powered by a General Motors diesel capable of 27 knots. She is fast. She has to be. The Guayas River is not only fast but seems to cover about all outdoors hereabout. It takes power to buck the river's current. And when the tide is running out it takes still more power.
Guayaquil is a pretty rusty looking city to me. The population is about 250,000. The rain had stopped before our arrival. The day was cloudy, but it was very, very hot and humid nonetheless. The town was full of pushcart and sidewalk salesmen, all sorts of outdoor food sales and the ever-present Coca Cola. Our hats are off to the Coca Cola people. Perhaps in only one or two places in far south Chile were we without the jurisdiction of a "refreshing pause."
Here were bananas and pineapples galore. A vendor would take an 18 to 20-inch pineapple by the stalk, pare off the outer shell quite deftly, slice it crosswise, and sell it by the slice at the end of a long sharp butcher knife. I don't know the price, probably two slices for a cent. Foreigners are told to lay off food here on the streets.
Practically all shops and stores are open air affairs. You just walk in and there you are among the dry goods. All have more or less useless trinkets. The small rooms are crowded to suffocation, with no room to turn around in. Panama hats are a staple. . . On the other hand, all shopkeepers and salesmen were courteous, attentive and tried to help. No high pressure salesmanship anywhere as you and I know it.
In one shop, a woman was carefully watching me. I thought it was to keep me from filching one or more articles. But no. She finally had the audacity to touch me lightly where the old wallet should be, and the proprietor spoke up, "My wife wants to know if the senor will tell us where he got his suit of clothes, and how much he paid for it?" Seeing my chance to try to repay Haspel, the maker, who had gone to the trouble to send several different styles to the store across the street from the Roosevelt Hotel in New Orleans, I peeled off my coat and wrote down everything in the label except the number of the patent. And so, Messrs. Haspel up there in New Orleans, if a prepaid order comes from Guayaquil at the retail price of $22.50, please remember I am your "drummer" without portfolio and that I am not adverse to an unreasonable commission.
Coming back down the river to the ship, the passengers got into a general discussion of what they had seen and what they enjoyed. Some liked one thing and some another. But the consensus seemed to center on the beautiful, graceful and elaborate marble tombstones and mausoleums at the cemetery. So next time when in Guayaquil, go out and have a look at its No. 1 attraction.
Of the present passenger list, one of the most interesting to me is a piano playing timber buyer, or let us say, a timber buying piano player. I have seen a great many piano players and lots of timber buyers in my time, but this, I think, is the first combination of the two professions in any one man I have had the good fortune to encounter. The load he carries must be Herculean. At one time I was a piano player. That was after father and I decided the life of a pool expert was not the life for me. At the zenith of my interpretation and rending of the masters I was also enrolled in college, but even my best friends on the faculty were unanimous in agreeing I was not both a student and a piano player.
My new friend buys balsa by the ship load and sends it to the U.S. and England. We talked about walnut, oak, mahogany and then some Brazil and South American heavy woods. He got red oak mixed up with California redwood. We got that straightened out. Some enterprising Californians had inveigled him into buying some big red oak (redwood) wine casks and selling them to Chilean vintners. He got run out of Chile for that. "Baad taazt. No goot."
I finally worked out his pedigree. He was a Czech. A real pianist, he had played in Prague, Zurich, Vienna and all around. When World War II started, he started looking for a new home. He became a refugee and finally wound up in Guayaquil, where he expected to teach piano. That was optimism supreme.