Leila Gillette came to Álamos in 1989 and almost immediately became involved in Álamos history. She published “the Stately Homes of Alamos” a year later, and four editions of that book were published. She is a founding member of the. Álamos History Association.

DC: This is Diane Carpenter. I am here at the home of Leila Gillette, one of Alamos’ most prominent resident, nonresident residents, and we’re going to be talking with her today on her 95th birthday and hoping she will provide us with some of her wisdom. Leila.

LG: I am entirely faltered by what you say. My main prominence here is the fact that I have survived this long, I believe. Outside of that, I feel that I’m very much an ordinary citizen among the expatriates, the …

DC: Well,

LG: … new people here.

DC: I think the main thing, in addition to the contributions you’ve made to the community, I think the main thing people say when they mention you is that you are such a model for how we can live a full and well balanced life despite aging and aging gracefully. I think one of the things that people admire, you're taking, still taking Spanish lessons, taking music lessons, you're singing you have a lot of wonderful interests in your life. You get out and about. It’s just really an inspiration for many of us to see that. As we worry about ourselves getting older and wondering what life is going to bring us. But starting out, why don't you tell us a little bit about your life before you got here to Alamos.

LG: Well, I can do that. I think one of the most important influences in my life was the fact that my father was a mining engineer who was engaged by the Guggenheim Exploration Company to open a silver mine in Saltillo. He of course had to leave at the time that all of the foreign holders were taken away from anything that was involving the earth of Mexico. Anything under the ground in Mexico belongs to the Mexican people. But as a child I heard him talk about Mexico a great deal, and he was not a man who told a story more than once, so by the time that I had left home when I married, I had had a lot of information about this country that lay below us, and I was impressed in many ways by the fact that it was, to me, an exotic place to come. Then I was married to a man who had spent a great deal of time in the Central America and was fluent in Spanish. He had worked with the state Department and built dams and airports and other things that were wanted in the Spanish language parts of the world, so we used to come down to San Carlos. He liked to rent a boat and go out and go fishing for the day, so I was accustomed from 1976 on to spending quite a little time down .… We would come down from above, close to Phoenix, spend the night in Hermosillo, come down to San Carlos and usually spent a night there. After I was left a widow and had no one to tell me that I couldn't do it, I bought a camping equipment and took a great deal of pleasure coming to San Carlos and camping on the beach. My daughter, Ellen had told me, “Mother, she said, you really should go down and see Alamos,” because she had been here as early as 1960 and was interested in it, and so I did. I came down in 1989 planning to spend two days in looking at the place, and when I came up the little road that comes off the highway from Navojoa and came into the plaza, parked the car, and I looked around. I liked what I saw, and then two people from the balcony of the hotel called to me. One of them was Allen Pendergraff and then another one was Levant Alcorn. They said, “come up and have a cup of coffee.” So, from that point on I was given stories about Alamos, because I knew nothing about it. At that time there was nothing written about it excepting a small pamphlet that cost fifty cents and was worth every bit of it. I was enchanted by what I saw, and of course those two people would be the friendliest ones that you would find. That’s how I came here in the first place. I spent two weeks here, and then I came back the same year and spent a month, and at that time I rented an apartment over in one of the barrios for six months, and then I bought a house. There was no-one to tell me I couldn’t. (Leila laughs)

DC: That’s wonderful. What were the things that you remember from that time that have changed now that were what we might call as developed or ….

LG: I can tell you readily that mostly I remember that there were many streets that were not even with cobblestones in the barrio where I am living. The streets were made of earth which is quite fine excepting during the rainy season in which time they became quite rutted, and there was a little problem getting around. After having the streets paved with concrete, does not strike me as having been a very good idea, because the water that falls during the rainy season doesn't go down into the subsoil water where we want it to be, but that’s a change. I believe there have been some changes in some of the lights, but the streets have always been well lighted here, because I remember that. There are more North Americans now than there used to be. I think when I came twenty-two years ago there were probably two hundred, and now there certainly are more than three hundred people here. Because of Mr. Levant’s activities, now there are hardly any ruins left in the town. I can pass by one or two that I think of, but most of the houses that were falling apart have been purchased and rebuilt at this point. There was a lot more entertainment among the foreigners when I first came. Every Friday there was a little party, a “Thank God it’s Friday” party. Now that’s rather fallen off a bit. I don't quite know why, but as far as I can see, the attitude of the people has not changed. The Mexican people here are most kindly interested in the foreign people. I have always said that they make pets of us. They have a tendency to look at us and some of the people they see walking about being hit in the stomach with the camera and wearing shorts, and they find this amusing, but they are very kind to us. The people that live around me in my borough, I know my neighbors, and they know me, and they rather keep an eye out for me. I think many of the people that are here are people that never want to live in a large city again. Yes, that probably has something to do with it.

DC: One of the interests that you’ve maintained a lot over the years, is your art. I know you've had art exhibitions here, and you used to be a weaver, too.

LG: Yes, I still have my weaving equipment. The first exhibit I had here was with woven things that I made in my loom, and I usually spun my own wool, and I dyed my own wool, mainly because this is a very inexpensive way to get weaving equipment. At the time, twenty years ago even, commercially woven, commercially spun wool would cost nearly four dollars an ounce, and for five dollars I could buy a big brown paper bag full of raw wool that would make me a thousand yards easily of good wool. I liked using vegetable dyes. They're permanent, and if they fade, they fade true. If you put a piece of paper in the window under the sunlight it will turn, if it’s blue, it will turn an ugly sort of gray, but vegetable dyed objects, they will continue to be the same color although they may be a bit lighter. They are very permanent, so yes, I had one exhibition, and I still have some photographs of it of quite a few things that I have woven.

DC: That would be very nice for the History Club to have.

LG: I can find them.

DC: Then your paintings as well.

LG: Most of my life I have done some drawing and painting. I like doing it, and I had a few lessons in watercolor from a very good painter one time, and water color is a medium that’s very inexpensive to begin, and it’s rather difficult to finish in. But, I got started doing quite a little bit of painting when I went to Canada with my oldest daughter and found a beautiful bird lying in front of me in the street, because it had flown into an electric wire. So, I didn't have anything much to do, and I did have painting material with me, so I took it back to the house and painted a little sketch of it, and I got interested in painting some sketches of birds, particularly because I found out how many of them were threatened with extinction. Many of the birds that I was fondest of: the meadowlark, for example, the sandhill crane, because of the mechanized agriculture which has destroyed their habitat and of urban sprawl which has entered into their habitat. So that some of these birds that we are most fond of, almost eighty percent of them are now gone. There is supposed to be around this area, the MacKays who are very prominent among the preservation of birds and birdwatchers, they have a list of about four hundred and fourteen kinds of birds that can be seen here. One of the things that is interesting ….

DC: Now was that four hundred and fourteen types of birds?

LG: Four hundred and fourteen types of birds. One of the interesting things that brings a great many students to Alamos is that it lies astraddle of a line that divides to the north the thorn forest, and to the south, the dry tropical forest so that you have the dry fig trees and other things south. To the north you have the thorn forest, so people come down to see the difference in the creatures who live in the areas and their habitat and the plants and that in itself is an interesting thing about the city, aside from its incredible history.

DC: Going on to some more of your accomplishments. I know that you are Roy’s right hand woman in the History Club, and you've done so much research and writing in history of both Mexican history and the architectural history of Alamos. Can you tell us a little bit about this?

LG: Well, that’s because when I came, there was only one very small book, and there is a copy of it here on the table, it’s about that big (measures four inches with her fingers), and it’s practically useless. I couldn't find out why the city was here. I could see no reason why there should be a city that was thirty miles inland from the main north/south highway. I knew nothing about it, so when I went back to Tucson - I’ve told people that I suffer from what I call a samaritan complex. If I see something that ought to be done, I think I ought to do it. So I looked up the Arizona History Organization and found out what I could about Alamos from them, and I went to the University of Arizona, and in through their library, and I found out what I could about Alamos there, and then I was fortunate enough - I made a visit to my daughter who is a professor of history at the University of Norway in Oslo, Norway. She had an extensive library of books about the colonial policies of different countries, and one of them was on the colonial policies of Spain. I was able to look up and see, well now how did they govern the discovery of this new planet, the new part, that Columbus found, and I got a lot of information about what was done to govern this new territory there. So, I am not a professional writer at all. I have had to write a great deal because I went to college and finally spurred along and got myself a Masters degree, and but I felt that this city deserved to have some information written about it, and I was interested in the houses particularly, because they looked like the houses that were built by the Romans; built around an atrium in the center with portales that run around the garden on the inside. So I sat down and wrote what I could think of and also was fortunate enough to get a nice long interview with Levant Alcorn who told me about his experiences here in becoming excited about the city and then buying and selling and preserving the houses that were in ruin here. So, I wrote a book and paid to have it published. It cost very little, and it sold I wrote another one. By the time I, and one of them I had translated into Spanish, by the time I got through I had written five different copies of the book about Alamos and its fine homes. I really ought to write another one, because I find more about the city and the fact that it was tremendously influential every year. I had no idea of what caused it to be here.

DC: Tell us a little bit about your music - piano and guitar and singing. Some of the music you like.

LG: Well, now I come from a family of people who, all of them, were musicians on the side of my mother. My grandfather played the violin. My mother’s three sisters, all of them, were musicians. My mother was a very fine pianist. She was able to play beautiful different classical pieces for me as long as I could remember. She did not have the time or patience to teach me, however. I was exposed to learning the violin when I was ten years of age. My grandfather’s violin was given to me, and I never made a sound on that that wasn't painful to me, because a ten year of child doesn't have the strength to control the bow, and unless you control the bow your violin is just horrid, so for that reason, I never was taught anything about the bass clef, but I did fiddle around with trying to teach myself how to play popular pieces on the piano, because we always had a good piano, and then when I was about twenty-one, I somehow felt that it would be fun to buy a guitar, so I did. I taught myself to play that. Now the guitar, it’s said, is the easiest instrument to begin on and about the most difficult to finish, so I learned cords and cords, and I didn't realize that there was ….

LG: It’s something a little bit different about me than the rest of the family, and that is that I can hear music in my head. Because I loved to sing in church choirs. That was why I went to church and not that I’m a religious person, but I just loved singing in the choir. I always sung alto harmony. I can almost tell what should be harmonized, and I thought everyone could, but I guess they don’t. So when I had the knowledge that there was a teacher, a man here who was a brilliant guitarist and who had some pupils, I spent about five years trailing Mr. Alcantar and finally he was kind enough, or gave in, and gave me a guitar lesson, and I didn't realize until then that all my life I had known how to read music on the guitar and didn't know it. And so I’ve had fun learning to play that instrument, and it by the way doesn't need to a bass clef, but because I didn't know the bass clef I asked a friend of mine to teach me piano lessons so that I could learn it, and she was able to do that quite easily. So now I am having fun playing both the piano pieces and the guitar pieces.

DC: And then you have the knowledge, quite a knowledge of folk music, too.

LG: When I was a younger person I used to give concerts on folk music when it was popular. I like them very, I like folk music. Most of it has color of the people that it amused. See, when I was very young the only music you could get that wasn't being made by yourself was a radio that came off of little batteries. This was, there was a quartz crystal, and they called it crystal radios. So, we had phonograph records. The phonograph cranked up, and we could, you could buy records, very well made records, and we did have some fine classical records at home, but if we wanted to have much music, we had to make it ourselves.

DC: That’s right.

LG: And so we did.

DC: Can you share a little information about Allen Pendergraft. I don't think I ever met him, but my mother always spoke very highly of him, and she lived here for thirteen or fourteen years starting in 1979.

LG: Allen’s artistic agent, the one who was in charge selling his paintings, was Joanne Goldwater, the daughter of the senator Goldwater, and one of his paintings was hanging the White House when the elder Bush was president. His painting have been sold all over the east coast. This was one of the reasons why he didn't permit to have an exhibition of his paintings that were here in Alamos, because they were not a representation of all of his work. But we struck it off because he was able to give me some information about the use of colors and oils that I really cherished. We became close friends. He had lost a young sister, and I had never had a brother, so we decided quite young that we were going to be brother and sister, and we kept a close friendship of that time for about twenty years until finally Allen died. Now, unfortunately he had about as bad a thing happen to him as could happen to an artist. He had lost the ability to use his eyesight except just a very glaringly. Also he had a problem with the inner ear so that he couldn't walk without someone guiding him. So, it wasn't too long - it maybe there was as much as ten years when he was able to still paint and to get about, but the last ten years of his life he had to spend in bed. He really did. He could sit at the table in his apartment across the street or he could rest in bed, but he was not able to get about. He couldn't write letters. I wrote his letters for him, and answered them for him, and he was a patient man. He had PhD, a Doctor of Religion. He was an Episcopal priest, and I belonged to the same church so we had that that we could discuss. We talked quite a little bit about philosophy, and he had studied in France. He had spent quite a bit of time and energy because he had the ability to restore old paintings, and he had been engaged to restore paintings in cathedrals and in churches, so he was a wonderfully delightful person to visit with. He had married a nurse, a French nurse, when he was a younger man, and she and he were married for nine years, but she contracted a variety of tuberculosis that could not be cured by the medicine then available, and when she died, he was crushed. He said he tried to kill himself. He tried to drink himself to death, but he found it only made him extremely ill. He came, he used to come to Mexico because his family lived close to Phoenix, and his father ran a dairy farm there, so when the kids came down to Puerto Penasco at Easter vacations, and they had Mexican people working for them so his Spanish was more than that but quite early. (Street noise beginning) So when he decided that he wanted to die because his wife was gone he got, he really was retired from the ministry because he simply had an emotional breakdown, and so he had, he was on a pension from the Episcopal Church. Oh dear, we do have that noise out there. Isn’t that dreadful? At any rate, he was down in the church not far from - no he was down in a hotel and ran out of money so the hotel owner put him in charge of the bar, because the bartender that he had, he found out wasn't honorable, so he had Allen running the cash register. Tennessee Williams came in, and he was looking for a place. He wanted someplace to write. So Allen told him about this little place that is over on the coast and went over with him and showed it to him, and what he wanted to write was The Night of the Iguana. Not only did he write it about that place, but he put Allen in it as the drunken Episcopal priest which Allen never really appreciated although at the time it was perfectly true. (Diane Carpenter and Leila Gillette laugh) But Allen, he gave it up because he could see that it was only making him ill, and he decided that he could go on living, but he was completely devoted to the memory to this dear woman that he loved so dearly.

DC: I wish I had know him, because I had heard so much about him.

LG: He was a dear person. A gentleman in every way and nothing pompous about him, warmly friendly. You couldn't have found a more pleasant companion. So, we had a friendship that lasted for many years.

DC: That is wonderful.

LG: It was great.

DC: We are lucky when we have a close friendship that means that much to us.

LG: Well, it certainly is.

DC: We don't get many of them in our lives certainly.

LG: The kind of person he was, across the street where he lived was a woman, Urbilejo, Josepha Urbilejo (unsure of name), who was a trained nurse, and she took care of him in his last years after he was bedridden. Because she had no income except what he could pay for her for his renting his apartment and for her care, he decided that he would marry her so that she could inherit his income. It required that they make two ventures up to Hermosillo, because apparently the consulate up there is quite a chaperone for any North American down here. But they were married in the summer of 2004. They were married for a year, and he unfortunately, he died in the winter of 2005. He had a heart attack finally. I have had quite a time trying to get all of the money that she was entitled to from the Bank of America. He had his account there. Allen was one fourth Cherokee Indian. Quanah Parker, the Cherokee Indian who was one of the main heirs to the oil, Oklahoma fortune that they had, had a bank account and all of the descendants of his received a monthly income and about six hundred dollars a month came to Allen from that, but Josepha was never able to get it because his nephew was on his bank account there, and the Bank of America never accepted Josepha as an heir although we sent a copy of his will to her leaving her as an heir. I wrote them messages, we sent an attorney. Nothing happened.

Unidentified man: Batteries getting low.

DC: That is too bad.

LG: Well, she was able to correspond, and so she does get his social security check. That’s all.

DC: Well, that is good. Before we have to end up here, I would like to just ask you a couple more things. What, what do you see as, what is your vision of what Alamos could be in the future. Where do you want to see it go and where would not want to see it go?

LG: You see what it is. We had found out in the last year, mainly from new research material that Alamos was the center of what was the wild west in Mexico. Sonora was not really thought of in Mexico City as being any importance, but because they found the silver here, and the King of Spain wanted the silver revenue he got, finally he got ten percent of it ultimately. Twenty percent in the beginning and they reduced it to ten percent, and this was measured off here at the city. Now, there was never a mission where there was a silver camp, and Alamos was the camp part for the owners of the silver mines, and this was where they extracted the amount that was to go to the king from what was made here. Also because of the Apache Indians who raided and raided and killed and killed and drove off cattle and were great tormentors of this state of Mexico, while the government of Spain still had Mexico they maintained forts along the border to repel the Apache Indians, but they stopped doing that when they got their independence from Spain. So Alamos, the city, they sent money to maintain these forts, because this was the only place where there was any money in Sonora. You see, Spain didn't allow money to be circulated here, but Alamos had a mint for awhile, quite a long time. I believe it was established in 1850 and closed about 1898. There was money coined here. In fact, this money was so well coined that it was legal tender in China. A peso here was worth a dollar. It was worth that in silver. Alamos frequently sent thirty-five thousand dollars up to the government of Sonora to pay for the mines that were on the border. As long as the mines were producing. The richest man in Mexico lived here. He was one of the Almada family.

. LG: The one that came with the bishop, you know? Jose Maria Almada. He had 35 children.

DC: Oh, yes.

LG: He got about. That whole Armada family got sixty-five thousand dollars worth of money a month from the mines. That was every month. That’s a tasty bit.

DC: That’s right. Well our time is running out on this tape.

LG: Yes, and I’ll explain to you very shortly five minutes before you're all welcome to come up to the party that my daughter is giving to me at her house.

DC: Well, thank you very much for giving us so much of your time and many happy returns of this wonderful birthday.

LG: Thank you. I don't know, of course I have a good physical constitution. I think it helped because I lived so young, as a young person out in Sand Hills, Nebraska on a ranch. I was a ranch child except when I was sent away to go to boarding school because there was no school out there, and that produces quite a strong constitution.

DC: Oh yes, I think so.

LG: I didn't have any exposure to any kind of the mysterious bugs until I moved into civilization. I’m lucky that I don't have any problems. Just a few little aches and pains here and there.

DC: Well, you do look wonderful.

LG: Thank you. Thank you.

DC: Is someone going to pick you up or can we….?

LG: My daughter…

Transcribed by Ellen Ryan, Alamos History Association

October 21, 2018