I called on Margo Findlay unannounced one April morning in 2009. She had invited me to come a few months earlier, and she had told me to drop by after 10 a.m. any morning. Unfortunately, winter had turned to spring, and then to a hotter-than-normal April, and still I had not found the time to drop by.

When I did call, I went to the house and used the “knocker” by the door. No one stirred. I knocked a second time, then a third time—no response. I walked across the street to the Hacienda de los Santos and called from there, and Margo answered. She then met me at the door, and invited me in.

I told her this would be the first of several interviews—at least three, but possibly more. “Oh, I’m not that important,” she told me, but said that after the death of Levant Alcorn she was now the oldest foreigner in town. “I was born May 6, 1906, in Lewistown, Montana,” Margo told me. “Next month I’ll be 103 years old.”

Lewistown was a small town in Montana when she grew up, and she assumes that it’s still pretty small. (“I haven’t been there for so long, I don’t really know how big it is now!). She left at age 17 to study at the Chicago Art Institute, and for four years she studied art, music, and dancing. While still attending the institute she acted in a traveling company that performed three different dramatic plays, starting at Chicago and going north into Canada before ending the tour (and reorganizing) in New York City.

“The play I remember best was “White Cargo,” Margo said. “It was really melodramatic—a sailor gets shipwrecked and falls in love with a native girl. I was the native girl, and my first line was ‘I am Tindeleo.’ I was too white, so for each preformance I had to use a brown body paint. In the story I had a child and kept waiting for the sailer to return, then I killed myself and the child. He comes back and finds us dead, then he kills himself. What a story!”

Margo said that she traveled for two years, but her parents didn’t approve of the lifestyle and were happy when it ended. But shortly after her career in drama ended, she joined with Martha Graham and danced (on and off) for several years. “Martha was a wonderful person, and she had a great influence on me,” Margo said. “She had such a tragic death—I was in California when she died.

(Editor’s note: Martha Graham was hospitalized and near death after she retired from dancing in 1970, but she rallied, reorganized her company, and choreographed 10 new ballets and staged many revivals from 1972 – 1990. She died in 1991 at age 96.)

At age 23 Margo married Hal Findlay, who was working with Warner Brothers at the time and who had two daughters from a previous marriage. “Hal was 12 years older, and I raised his two girls—Janet and Jane. Jane worked as a secretary for a large corporation and did very well. Janet ran away from home and got married—two different times. I’ve lost track of her.”

Hal met Margo as he was teaching her to sing a “blues” number, which she was trying to sing in an operatic style. “I don’t think I could ever make you into a ‘blues’ singer,” Hal told her, but that didn’t stop him from marrying her in 1929 and enjoying a life together centered on Hollywood, music, and travel. Hal died in 1987, and Margo has been alone in Álamos for the past 21-plus years.

In her early years of marriage she often danced with Fred Astair. Fred had come from England to California and was under contract with Warner Brothers. At first his sister was his dancing partner, but she later married and left show business.

“I would get a call that Fred was working on a routine and needed a dance partner,” Margo said,” so I would be dancing with Fred Astaire and learning the routines before Ginger Rogers ever danced them!” Fred told her that she should be in movies, but Margo didn’t want to appear on the silver screen. “I enjoyed the stage, but I wanted nothing to do with the movies,” she said.

One of her memories was of Fred Astair perfecting a routine, getting frustrated, and throwing off the wig he was wearing. “A lot of people didn’t know this, but Fred always wore a wig. It was a very good wig—in fact he had several. More than once I saw him grab at the wig and throw it in a corner when things weren’t going right.”

Hal’s work with Warner Brothers led to a two-year stay in Rome in 1958 – 1959. An actor’s strike had prevented the studio from its normal U.S. production, but Warner Brothers owned an Italian film company and Hal and Margo went to Rome.

“We lived on the 6th floor of a hotel at the top of the Spanish steps, and we could see the steps from our balcony. We had a great time! A driver picked up Hal at 7 a.m. each morning, and the driver then came back and took me places in Rome and to the wine country around the city. Hal worked with Paul Ketchoff, and his wife, Landa, and she and I did many things together.

“On the weekends our driver would take Hal and I to places that he had taken me to see on the weekdays, so we had a great time.”

Hal and Margo first visited Álamos in 1956. They were not strangers to Mexico—in fact, they were married in Mexicali in 1929. Margo promptly called her mother and said that she and Hal had eloped to Mexico and were married, which caused her mother to say that people don’t go to Mexico to get married—only to get divorced!

“My mother never did believe that our marriage was valid, so we later had a ceremony in San Diego. Hal was doing a show, so the wedding was held at 11:30 p.m.—but it was in the U.S, which made it official to my parents.

“Anyway, we used to vacation in Mexico City, but every day Warner Brothers would be calling and our vacations were always interrupted. I had an artist friend, Fletcher Martin, who came to Álamos in the 1950s, and he told us to go to Álamos rather than Mexico City. ‘There are only three telephones in the town,’ he told us, ‘so they’ll never be able to find you in Álamos!’”

“In 1956 we came and rented the house I have now. I loved Álamos when I first saw it—it reminded me of a small town in Italy. It was much smaller then than it is now. Later that year we bought the house.”

When asked if she preferred Álamos as it was in 1956 when compared to the larger, busier Álamos of today, Margo said that it was hard for her to make comparisons. “I loved it then, and I love it now,” she said. “If I’m in a place, I always look for the good things. Right now I don’t think I could adjust to living in the states again—I’m so happy here with my house, my paintings, and my cats.”

When Hal and Margo bought their Álamos house, much of it was in poor condition. “When we moved in, we lived only in the rooms to the right (east) of the courtyard—the rooms on the left were pretty much in ruins. Where my studio is now was a small neighborhood grocery store. Years later, after Darly Gordon opened the Tesoros as a hotel, she told Hal she needed to buy part of our property, that she needed more space. Hal wouldn’t hear of it, but later, during a time Hal was called back to Warner Brothers and away from Álamos, I sold a portion of the property to Darly.

“When Hal came back he was so mad at me that we didn’t speak for two weeks. Later, though, he told me that we really didn’t need that part of our property.

“It was a big house—a big property when we bought it. Hal only knew about music, but he had the dream of being a ranch owner. He could imagine himself on a white horse, giving out directions to areas of his ranch. That’s why he wanted a big piece of property, and why he didn’t want to sell any of it.”

In the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. La Casa de los Tesoros hotel was the center spot for social activity among the foreign community in Álamos. When Hal and Margo Findlay came to Álamos, there was no Tesoros.

“Al and Darly Gordon bought the property, but later they split up and he went to northern California where he opened a restaurant called ‘The Álamos.’ Darly lived with me for a while, and a friend of hers who manufactured shoes suggested that she open the property (now the Tesoros) as an inn. That was how it got started.”

Hal retired in 1964, so they moved permanently to Álamos. Hal had a Steinway grand piano in the house, and some days he would play the piano from morning to night. “At 5 p.m. I put a cocktail on the piano, and Hal would say ‘I’m just getting started.’ I would paint, draw, and write, and also run the house.”

Their life in Álamos revolved around the small foreign community, of which Bill and Dolly Walsh were two important members.

“They came after we were here. They bought the house across the street, which is now part of the Hacienda de los Santos—but then it was just a house. Dolly had been married before, and for a time she had lived in France. She was very, very elegant, and she saw herself as the social hostess of Álamos.

“Bill had this great voice—when he spoke at his home, you could hear him in the plaza! He was a lawyer, and he never let you forget that he was one of the lawyers in the Nuremburg trials. Hal and Bill were good friends, and Dolly and I were good friends as well.

“I don’t know how they discovered Álamos, but I think it was because of Bill and not Dolly.”

After Bill died, Dolly remarried, but Margo didn’t think her new husband enjoyed living in “Bill’s shadow” and never appreciated Álamos the way Bill had. Dolly died in the mid-1980s.

John and Ruby Lawler were also good friends at that time, and Ruby, like Dolly Walsh, was “very formal.”

“She wore long, white gloves to the vegetable market so that she wouldn’t touch anything,” Margo said. After John died, she went back to San Francisco and Margo lost touch with her.

Margo has painted all her life. When she was a little girl her mother couldn’t stand the cold Montana winters, so she and her mother stayed the winters in California. She was too young to write letters to her father, but she was never too young to draw pictures. She sent her father pictures every day, and she has been painting every day since then.

“I don’t paint portraits,” Margo said. “I only did one portrait—it was of me, and I looked in a mirror and drew what I thought was a great self-portrait. I showed it to my mother, and she asked, ‘Who is that old woman?’ I told her it was me, and her advice to me was not to be a portrait painter.”

Margo’s philosophy is that no two people see the same thing in the same way, and she therefore finds it hard to be a “critic.”

“I taught art classes here in Álamos several years ago,” Margo said. “People came and asked me to teach, and suddenly I had 30 people in a class! It took so much of my time that I didn’t have any time to paint, so eventually I stopped teaching.

“I always wanted to be positive, though, and I only wanted to say good things about any art project a student brought to my class. I think that goes back to the classes I took at the Art Institute in Chicago. I believed that what I produced was the result of what I saw and felt, yet I had teachers criticizing my paintings. I never did like that.”

Margo told the story of when she first enrolled in the Art Institute she signed up for a life drawing class, but being a 17-year-old girl the instructor wouldn’t let her attend--because the class sketched nude models. “I had been drawing nudes since I was a little girl,” Margo said. “I was really upset.”

From March 21 – April 21, 2009, in the museum in Álamos, a retrospective exhibition was held of nearly 30 of Margo’s paintings. The featured artwork in the show was an acrylic piece titled “Enigmatica,” a depiction of a masked woman surrounded by owls. “I always wanted to be an owl when I was a little girl,” Margo said about the painting. But the inspiration for that work happened many years ago when an owl perched in a tree in her courtyard for over two days. “I watched it and talked to it, and that’s when I got the inspiration for the painting.”

Margo draws and paints from memory. She doesn’t work with models or from photographs—but only from her imagination.

Her painting “First Communion” was another popular piece in the retrospective, and Margo painted that from her many memories of first communion ceremonies. “My first communion was when I was 12,” Margo said. “The girls in the painting are all about that age, but now I think kids are having their first communion at even seven or eight.” To Margo’s way of thinking, the first communion is a more meaningful experience at 12 than it would be at eight.

In talking about her life, Margo talks often of her mother. “I guess we were alike in many ways. After Hal and I moved to Álamos full-time in 1964, my mother came for a visit. She loved the place, and she played bridge every day.

“She and Hal loved bridge, and they were good players. They would talk about plays they made in the bridge club, and they would bore me to death. Susie (I always called her that) and Hal had a lot in common, and once I asked Hal why he married me and not my mother. ‘Because I met you first,’ he told me.

“Anyway, my mother loved Álamos so much that she later sold her house in Montana and moved in with us. We had many wonderful years here together.”