Remembering Stirling Dickinson, San Miguel’s favorite expatriate
By John Virtue, Oct 20, 2006


Editor’s note: Stirling Dickinson was one of San Miguel’s great philanthropists; he co-founded and supported many of the city’s long-standing non-profits. On the eve of the anniversary of his death on October 27, 1998, academic and author John Virtue kindly offered Atención an exclusive excerpt from his forthcoming biography of Dickinson, The Model American Abroad.

Stirling Dickinson once accepted an invitation for Christmas Eve dinner at the home of American residents of San Miguel, only to advise them, hours before the event, that he had fallen ill and was being hospitalized. He was released the following day after doctors found nothing wrong with him. He happily spent Christmas Day with Mexican friends. “His illness was just an excuse to miss the dinner,” said Jesús Grimaldi, principal of the Gabriela Mistral primary school and son of Stirling’s longtime housekeeper.

The contrived illness was quintessential Stirling Dickinson, who died eight years ago this month (October 27, 1998) when his van plunged down an embankment of the Salida a Querétero. Rather than risk offending the hosts by telling them he had changed his mind about the dinner, he contrived an illness as an excuse to cancel. 

A painfully shy man, Stirling felt more at ease with Mexicans than he did with most of his fellow Americans or other foreigners. When speaking his accented Spanish to Mexicans, his shyness tended to disappear. He would give them abrazos, although he was known to step back when a newly arrived American student at the Instituto Allende offered his hand to shake. He would talk to someone in English for 15 minutes, always avoiding the person’s eyes. Yet he could talk his way into Mexican fiestas when he liked the music wafting into the street. 

Stirling inherited his shyness from his father and grandfather. Grandfather William was a poor farm boy from New England who moved to Chicago, where he became a millionaire futures trader. Stirling’s father, Frank, who owned an advertising agency, called his own shyness an “allergy.” 

Born in Chicago in 1909, Stirling was an only son, brother to two younger sisters. While studying at Princeton, he made a best friend, Heath Bowman, with whom he traveled to Mexico in 1934 to research the first of three books on which they collaborated: Mexican Odyssey. Bowman wrote and Stirling illustrated. Readers in the United States during the Depression enjoyed reading about the exploits of two carefree young men who traveled throughout Mexico for six months in a green 1929 Ford Model A convertible. The book went into multiple printings.

After writing a second book on South America, they decided to tackle a novel set in Mexico. Looking for a cheap place to live while researching and writing, they chose San Miguel. They arrived before daybreak on February 7, 1937. At the Jardín, Stirling looked up at the spires of the Parroquia poking through the mist. “My God, what a sight!” he said to himself. “I’m going to stay here.”

For $90 Stirling and Bowman bought part of the ruins of an old tannery on Santo Domingo street where they fashioned a house they christened Los Pocitos. After publishing their novel, Death Is Incidental, Bowman married and Stirling purchased his share in the house. 

A lifelong bachelor, Stirling believed that artists should live an ascetic life—and that’s what he did in Los Pocitos. He slept on a narrow bed in a room suitable for a monk. Although he had a housekeeper, he insisted on preparing his own Spartan meals. He never installed a telephone of his own, using that of the housekeeper. Some residents who knew Stirling from his earliest days and saw how he lived had no idea that he was a millionaire through inheritance.

Yet the town’s humble Mexicans sensed that he might help them, so they started to drop by. He never turned anyone away. Those who needed medical attention he’d send with a chit to Dr. Francisco (Paco) Olsina. If medicine was needed, Olsina would give out a chit for the Santa Teresita pharmacy. If the person died, another chit would be given for the López funeral home. At the end of the month, Stirling would honor the chits. He did this anonymously. 

Stirling paid for the education of many poor sanmiguelenses and contributed to the schools where they studied. “There’s not a school in San Miguel that doesn’t owe something to señor Dickinson,” said Esteban González, principal of the Leobino Zavala Camarena primary and high school. Stirling had funded his studies.

 

Although Stirling did postgraduate art studies at the Art Institute of Chicago and France’s L’Ecole d’Art Américaine du Palais de Fontainebleau, he realized that his artistic talents would never place him in the top tier of artists. So he was amenable to an offer made by Peruvian artist Felipe Cossio del Pomar to become director in 1938 of San Miguel’s first art school, the Escuela Universitaria de Bellas Artes, located in the former convent that houses the present Bellas Artes.

Probably the most important legislation to affect San Miguel was not passed by Mexico’s Congress but by that of the United States: the GI Bill. Under it, thousands of veterans of World War II received free education. The first handful of GIs arrived in 1946 to study at the art school. By the end of 1947, their presence in San Miguel was so notable that Life magazine assigned a reporter and photographer to do an article. A three-page spread appeared in the January 5, 1948, edition under the headline “GI Paradise: Veterans go to Mexico to study art, live cheaply and have a good time.” This was possible when apartments rented for US$10 a month, servants cost US$8 a month, rum was 65 cents a quart and cigarettes cost 10 cents a package.

As a result of the publicity, more than 6,000 American veterans immediately applied to study at the school. Stirling thought that San Miguel, which then had a population of fewer than 10,000, could only handle another 100 veterans, bringing the student body to around 140.

The ex-GIs were more demanding than previous students, so David Alfaro Siqueiros, an icon of the Mexican mural movement and a vocal member of the Communist Party, was hired as a guest lecturer. He agreed to work with the students on a mural of San Miguel’s most famous son, Ignacio Allende. When Siqueiros went over budget, he and the art school’s owner, Alfredo Campanella, had a falling out and the artist threw him down a flight of stairs. 

The faculty and the majority of the students then walked out in support of Siqueiros. When this forced the school to close in 1949, Stirling opened one of his own. But it did not receive accreditation from the American Embassy, so most of the veterans either went home or transferred to other Mexican schools.

Campanella subsequently launched a campaign against Stirling and his faculty—including the current dean of San Miguel artists, Leonard Brooks, who’ll be an active 95 next month—that resulted in their deportation as communists in 1950. Faced with the threat under Article 33 of the Constitution of never being allowed to return to Mexico, they contacted Mexican friends, including Siqueiros, and managed to get the deportation order lifted. 

The Instituto Allende was about to open, so Stirling closed his school and became art director of the new one. But he was unable to shake the accusation that he was a communist. Before the decade was out, Time magazine and the New York Herald Tribune published almost identical McCarthy-era articles saying that exiled American communists used Stirling’s home as a meeting place. Stirling sought the help of the prestigious Chicago law firm of Wilson & McIlvaine, which had a long connection with the Dickinson family. A threatened lawsuit brought apologies from both publications and a statement from Stirling in the minutes of the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee that he had never been a communist. The subcommittee’s counsel had been the source of the news stories.

Stirling had been worried that the publicity would adversely affect the Instituto Allende, where he taught as well as ran the art department. Like so many shy people, Stirling was an excellent teacher. He taught Spanish, botany and landscape painting.

But he was best known for his “Aspects of Mexico” course that combined lectures and field trips. He wanted the foreign students to see the Mexico and the Mexicans that he so loved.

Over the years, Stirling became famous for his outrageous masquerades, on display at two annual events: Los Locos parade and a charity costume ball. Stirling’s most controversial— if not most successful—appearance was at one of the balls. Six Mexicans arrived with a casket, placed it on a table and lifted the lid. Out poured the singing of Enrico Caruso and up popped Stirling, disguised as the Italian opera singer. On another occasion, he was a Viking, long hair and beard, gnawing on a bone and dragging a young child—a mannequin—by the hair. He was a towering Goth wearing skins and buffalo horns. He once went as a bearded sheik. He appeared as Abraham Lincoln and even in blackface as basketball star Michael Jordan. 

 

Stirling had two great loves: his baseball team, which he founded in 1938 and managed until 1987, and his orchids. The team once won 84 consecutive games. He was always vocal during the games, shouting encouragement in Spanish at his ballplayers: ¡Por favor! ¡Por el amor de Dios! ¡Chispas! ¿Porqué? ¡Dále duro! ¡Sigamos adelante! When the team was short a man, he inserted himself in the lineup. He played his last game when he was in his fifties.

On the 50th anniversary of his arrival in San Miguel, the local baseball field he helped to build was officially inaugurated. He didn’t want it named after him, but it inevitably became known as Campo Stirling Dickinson, Stirling Dickinson Field. 

Stirling helped the ballplayers in one way or another, usually financially. Most of their houses were purchased or built with Stirling’s help. He bought furniture and stoves. One player aspired to be a taxi driver, so Stirling bought him a car.

Stirling also used the ballplayers to help him find orchids. He’d drive into the countryside with three or four players in the back of his pickup truck.

As he got older, he had the players climb the trees to fetch the orchids.

Stirling had what was probably the largest private orchid collection in Mexico. 

He discovered a new orchid that bears his name—Encyclia dickinsoniana—and a second was named after him in recognition of his work: Cypripedium dickinsonianum.

When Stirling resigned in 1983 as president of the Instituto Allende, he thought he’d have more time to dedicate to his orchids. He was wrong. The library, which he had helped found, asked him to take over its “rural library program,” under which books were donated to outlying schools. At the time, the library had 85 schools on its list. Stirling got in his Dodge pickup truck and soon the program expanded to 300 schools. Until his death, he made three to five trips a week during the school year, determined to help those who lived in the interior as he had done for humble sanmiguelenses.

Working with the Patronato Pro Niños, which he financially helped, he identified children who needed medical and dental attention and brought them into town for treatment. He measured up to a thousand pair of feet per year and returned with shoes, sometimes the first footwear the children owned.

In 1942, after just five years in San Miguel, Stirling had been named a Favored Adopted Son, the only time the mayor’s office has so honored an American resident. Two years later, he was honored by the governor for his work with young Mexicans, a result of his founding the baseball team.

After his death, his baseball players launched a successful campaign to have a street named after him. Then they raised funds for the bust located on the corner of Stirling Dickinson street. 

One day when an American visitor was passing the corner in a taxi, he asked the driver if he had known Stirling. “I didn’t know him, but my father did,” he replied. “He told me that Esteerling Deekenson built San Miguel, not just the houses but the sky and earth itself.”



Dickinson biography due in 2007

John Virtue’s biography of Stirling Dickinson, The Model American Abroad, is scheduled to be published next year by Windstorm Creative of Port Orchard, Washington. It’s the final book in what Virtue calls his “San Miguel Trilogy.” The first biography was Reva and Leonard Brooks, which came out in 2001. The second is Brother in the Shadows, a biography of Canadian painter Fred Taylor, who lived in San Miguel from 1958 to 1987. McGill-Queen’s University Press plans to publish it next year. Taylor was a communist and his brother, E.P., was Canada’s leading businessman in the forties, fifties and sixties.

Virtue is the director of the International Media Center at Florida International University in Miami. A native of Canada, he spent 17 years in Latin America as a foreign correspondent and executive for United Press International, the last six based in Mexico City. He and his wife, Anna, started to weekend in San Miguel in 1977 in order to give their young son’s lungs a respite from the smog of Mexico City.

Prior to joining Florida International University, Virtue was executive editor from 1982 to 1987 of the daily newspaper El Mundo in San Juan, Puerto Rico. He resigned on a point of ethical principle without having a job lined up. This experience helped when he started to give ethics workshops on behalf of the university, eventually in 16 Latin American countries, including Mexico.

He is currently completing the manuscript of a book titled Finding Equality in Mexico. It deals with the role the Mexican Baseball League played in hastening the breaking of the color barrier in the major leagues in 1947. During the previous decade, over 100 players from the Negro Leagues in the United States played in the integrated Mexican League.

His e-mail is virtuej@fiu.edu