Stone of Kings

by Gerard Helferich

  In July 1954, Leslie left Guatemala to take a job with Eastman Kodak in Rochester, New York. The following year, Foshag prepared a letter announcing the discovery in the journal American Antiquity and listing Leslie as coauthor. The brief report was a watershed in American geology and archaeology. After nearly five hundred years, jade had been rediscovered in Mesoamerica—not carved into ornaments for kings, not as boulders stranded in riverbeds and fields, not as detritus abandoned in ancient workshops, but in the ground in the foothills of Guatemala.

  Leslie and Foshag’s find put to rest any residual speculation that pre-Columbian jades had been carved from Asian stone. And yet. . . . The thousands of pre-Hispanic jades, ranging from translucent blue to jet black, certainly hadn’t all come from this one outcrop above the town of Manzanal. Where were the rest of the mines? In Guatemala? Or as far away as Costa Rica and Guerrero, Mexico, as Michael Coe had suggested? Had the Olmecs and the Maya gotten their jade from the same sources or from different ones? How did they procure the stone, and how did they transport it without wheeled vehicles or draft animals? By resolving one central issue, Foshag and Leslie had opened the door to a host of others.

  The following May, William Foshag died of a heart attack at his Maryland home, aged just sixty-two. In 1957, the Smithsonian posthumously published his monograph Mineralogical Studies on Guatemalan Jade, and through the 1960s and 1970s, a handful of researchers continued the hunt for other sources of Mesoamerican jade. In 1967, a large boulder of jadeite similar to the stone in Foshag and Leslie’s outcrop was discovered along the Atlantic Highway just east of Manzanal. “In view of the size of the boulder [more than sixty pounds] and the abundance of similar material in the immediate vicinity,” wrote the discoverers, a team led by geologist Alexander McBirney, “the bedrock sources of jade must be nearby.” Yet those sources were proving devilishly difficult to pin down.

  Had Foshag lived, his stature in the field may have attracted the attention of a newspaper editor. But the popular press hadn’t reported on his and Leslie’s discovery or on the ensuing search by others. Focusing on his studies of Paricutín, Foshag’s obituary in the New York Times didn’t even mention jade or Guatemala. And so, in the coming years, the hunt for New World jade remained the province of a few specialists publishing papers in a handful of academic journals. The general public, and even researchers in related fields, were unaware not only of the discovery of jade deposits in Central America but also of the ongoing effort to find the sources where the pre-Columbian peoples had obtained the stone. To the world at large, it was as if jade still didn’t exist in Guatemala.

  PART II

  THE ENTREPRENEURS

  FOUR

  Serpentine

  In February 1973, a road-dusty Dodge Travco rolled into the Mexican hill town of San Miguel de Allende. Picking its way down the Ancha de San Antonio, the twenty-eight-foot motor home turned toward the Parque Juárez, a large, lush refuge with walking paths, fountains, bandstand, basketball court, and high trees where egrets raucously took their roosts at sunset. On the park’s south side, the Travco’s white, streamlined curves came to rest before the seventeenth-century façade of the Villa Santa Monica.

  It was the dry season in San Miguel. The days would break clear, and as the clock beside the Parroquia chimed each hour in its turn, scarcely a cloud passed to mar the cerulean perfection. Then in late afternoon, as the sun would arc toward the Sierra de Guanajuato, its rays illumined the rustic buildings, until the ocher and rose walls seemed to incandesce. The first, tentative rains were still months away.

  The town had been founded in 1542, as a mission to convert the Otomi and the less-compliant Chichimecas. When silver and gold were discovered to the north a few years later, San Miguel el Grande became a way station for caravans shuttling between the mines in Zacatecas and the mint in Mexico City. Then, in 1810, it played a seminal role in the War of Independence, when the region’s wealthy creoles plotted to overthrow their Spanish governors. After issuing his celebrated cry to arms in the neighboring town of Dolores, parish priest Miguel Hidalgo and his tattered army marched on San Miguel, which became the first city to fall to the rebels. Later, the town changed its name to San Miguel de Allende, lest anyone forget that its native son Ignacio Allende had been Hidalgo’s general and one of the architects of independence. But Allende never lived to see the honor; he was executed in 1811 and his head hung in a cage from a prominent building in nearby Guanajuato, along with those of Hidalgo and two other conspirators, until the Treaty of Córdova, giving Mexico its sovereignty, was finally signed in 1821.

  By 1900, the silver and gold had petered out and San Miguel had entered a decades-long decline. But in 1937, the town was transformed again, when Peruvian art lover and political exile Felipe Cossío del Pomar persuaded Mexican president Lázaro Cárdenas to let him convert an old convent into an art school, which he called Escuela Universitaria de Bellas Artes. An acquaintance of Cossío, American expatriate Stirling Dickinson, was named director.

  Then, after the Second World War, Bellas Artes was certified under the GI Bill, and in 1948 a three-page spread in Life magazine trumpeted San Miguel as a paradise where “veterans go to Mexico to study art, live cheaply and have a good time. . . . They find it very pleasant in the quiet little town of San Miguel de Allende, up in the mountains north of Mexico City.” San Miguel may have no restaurants and no indoor plumbing, the article continued, but “the air is crisp, the flowers are bright, the sun is warm, apartments are $10 a month, servants are $8 a month, good rum or brandy 65 cents a quart, cigarettes are 10 cents a package.” After the piece was published, Dickinson received six thousand applications for his 140 places. Among the new students were a few apparently attracted more by the cheap rum than by the curriculum; locals occasionally showed their displeasure by throwing stones at the rowdy interlopers.

  Despite the influx, San Miguel retained its small-town essence, as American art patron and author MacKinley Helm described in 1948. “San Miguel de Allende is not a place to be seen and enjoyed in a day,” he explained to the would-be visitor. “Yet I have known certain hard-working tourists who were unable to spend a whole day there and feel fully employed. I remember being addressed, when I lived there, by a woman who said, ‘What in God’s name do you people who live here do with your time? I’ve been here for four hours and I’ve walked from one end of town to the other, examining churches. What shall I do next?’ ”

  “This is a place,” Helm explained, “where, if it hits you just right, you want to buy a house right away and stay a long time. If it doesn’t so hit you, you may find it dull. It has so few ‘sights.’ Its charm really consists in its hillside setting and views, its well-watered gardens, in the dependable sun, and the slow seeping of time in its plazas.”

  Cossío and Dickinson went on to found a second art school in San Miguel, the Instituto Allende, and by the late 1960s, the town was still attracting North Americans looking for clear light, cheap living, and a frisson of escape they couldn’t get in Boise or Newark. But burros and horse-drawn carriages were still plentiful in the cobblestone streets, and electrical service was intermittent; in the unlikely event that you received a call, the telephone company would dispatch a boy to your house to let you know. If you wanted to invite someone to dinner, you sent a note.

  Just down the hill from the city center was the park named for nineteenth-century Mexican president Benito Juárez. In 1967, an American named Betty Kempe had bought a Colonial house on the park, once the home of Mexican opera singer and movie star José Mojica, and converted it into one of the city’s few hotels.

  Tall and athletic with wavy blonde hair, Betty Kempe (then Betty Johnson) had arrived in San Miguel in the late 1950s, from Fort Worth, Texas. A widow with three daughters, aged eight, twelve, and fourteen, she rented a house on Calle Barranca, with a fountain on the corner and a view of the valley, and like so many before and since, she was enchant
ed. For the daughters, the first six months in primitive San Miguel were torture, devoid of everything they considered necessary to sustain life. But by the end of the first year, the girls had also come to relish the high adventure, the feeling that every day was unpredictable and tinged with magic.

  Just eighteen months after their arrival, the family moved again, to Europe, where Betty’s third husband, an American expatriate named Gordon Kempe, was hoping to find work as a travel writer. Betty and the girls embraced the change, which seemed just the next step on the audacious trajectory they’d taken since leaving Fort Worth. Then in 1967, eight years after leaving, Betty Kempe returned to San Miguel, without the husband or the now-grown daughters, and bought José Mojica’s house on the Parque Juárez.

  The next year was spent restoring the four-century-old building, from the tile-roofed patio to the stone-walled reception area, to the generous guest rooms and extensive gardens, realizing her vision of a tasteful, tranquil oasis decorated in earth tones and pastels. Mojica was an amateur artist, and he’d left behind one of his own paintings, a Virgin and Child painted directly on the wall above a fireplace. Not wanting to obliterate the picture but finding that its vivid hues clashed with the softer palette she was planning, one afternoon Betty decided to mute it with an antique finish. As she was balanced on a ladder dabbing the painting, one of her workers announced a visitor—Mojica himself, who had come to see how the renovation was getting on.

  Caught with her hand in the paint pot, Betty gave her most winning smile. “Sr. Mojica, I’m so glad you’ve come. I was thinking of toning down your painting a bit, and perhaps you can advise me on the best way to proceed.”

  Mojica considered the half-stained picture. “It is a bit bright, isn’t it?” he finally said, then took the rest of the afternoon helping in the desecration of his own art.

  By December 1968, the hotel was ready, and Betty opened it as the Villa Santa Monica, the name Mojica had given his house in honor of the patron saint of mothers.

  It was early afternoon on this February day in 1973 when the Dodge Travco came to rest in front of the Villa Santa Monica. Inside the motor home was an American family—mother, father, and three girls ranging in age from ten to sixteen. They had been nearly two months on the road from Chicago, partly because they’d done some sightseeing en route and partly because Jay Ridinger refused to drive more than four hours a day. Friends in Chicago owned a home in San Miguel, and the Ridingers had arranged to rent it, but even with their dawdling they’d arrived too early: The house wasn’t ready. The friends had told them to look up Betty Kempe, and though the Ridingers arrived at lunchtime, interrupting the principal meal of the day, she received them cordially.

  “Tell me, pretty lady,” Jay Ridinger asked, “where can a family go to amuse themselves while their house is being readied?” Betty was charmed by the six-foot visitor, bearded and sandy-haired, ten years her junior. Over time, as she learned more about him, she would be impressed.

  At the age of thirty-nine, Jay Ridinger (the g is hard, as in gold) had already reinvented himself several times. He’d been born in East Chicago, Indiana, on Lake Michigan, twenty miles southeast of the other Chicago. His early years had been nomadic. Beginning when he was four, he ran away from home so many times to stay with his grandparents that his mother and father finally gave in and let him live there. At the age of seven, he returned to his parents’ house, but the family moved so often in the coming years, as his mother strove to trade up to better and better neighborhoods, that he never formed close friendships. Though he played clarinet in the high school band, he wasn’t particularly adept at either music or sports. But he loved the outdoors and found his niche in Scouting, where he went on to earn the rank of Eagle. When he was a child, his mother had sent him to a therapist to correct a speech impediment, and he’d developed a sonorous voice that helped him to win the presidency of his class in high school (his slogan: “Ride with Ridinger”) and to earn debate scholarships in college. At Indiana University, he majored in business, though he liked to say he lettered in poker. Sociable, competitive, psychologically savvy, cool under pressure, Jay Ridinger was a very good poker player.

  He stayed on at Indiana to earn an M.B.A., but as graduation approached, he felt a sense of dread, because he feared that all his education hadn’t taught him to do anything. Both his father and grandfather were managers at Inland Steel Company, headquartered in downtown Chicago, and young Ridinger accepted a job with the corporation. Inland sent him to some engineering courses at Purdue, but his focus at the company was on the business of steelmaking, not on the technical side. His first turning point came when he was just twenty-five, after another junior executive commented off-handedly that neither of them would be allowed to make any significant decisions before the age of forty. Ridinger realized his companion was right; he resigned the following day.

  By then he had a wife, Marilyn, and two young daughters, Robin and Renée. To support them, he and a couple of friends founded their own real estate development company. Every morning, Ridinger would get up at four o’clock to be at the local coffee shop by five, when the Tribune arrived. Then he’d scour the classifieds for marginal buildings that the partners could renovate and resell. The concept of condominiums was new in those days; Ridinger claimed that the first time he used the word with his lawyer he had to spell it. Before he’d reached thirty, Ridinger had taken his profits and retired to the affluent North Shore suburb of Lake Forest, buying a grand Victorian house once owned by Abraham Lincoln’s brother-in-law. Ridinger dedicated a guest room to Lincoln, decorating it with flocked red wallpaper and pictures of the president; in the attic was his collection of John Wilkes Booth “wanted” posters.

  Ridinger had always loved old and beautiful things, and to occupy himself he opened an antiques store. But he was restless in Lake Forest, a place, his daughter Renée says, “without sufficient oxygen for his spirit.” So he moved the family, now including a third daughter, Angela, back into the city, to an apartment building he owned on Barry Avenue, an area in the process of gentrification. Though he continued to invest in property, he also turned his real estate acumen toward nonprofit ventures, working with organizations such as the Chicago Missionary Society and Jane Addams Hull House to mount demonstrations against slumlords, press the city to expand low-income housing, and help people of modest means to get mortgages.

  Then Marilyn contracted breast cancer, the disease that had taken her mother at forty-one and her grandmother at forty-three. After Marilyn’s surgery and radiation in November 1972, the Ridingers made plans to leave the city. Though he knew it was irrational, Jay blamed Chicago’s pollution and harsh climate for her illness, and he resolved to make a new start somewhere warm and untainted. The former Eagle Scout had always been fascinated with Central America, which he imagined as a wild, exhilarating place, and he’d long thumbed through catalogs of expedition gear, picturing himself wearing the rugged clothing, hacking a trail through virgin jungle. And so, at the age of thirty-nine, as he planned his third retirement, Jay Ridinger began to look southward. In January 1973, he and Marilyn took the girls out of school, climbed into the swivel seats of their Dodge Travco, and steered for Mexico.

  In San Miguel, Ridinger was eager to meet Betty Kempe not just because she was one of the few names he knew, but because she had also resettled in Latin America with three young girls. The middle daughter, Mary Lou, was now in her early twenties, blonde, nearly six feet tall, with blue-green eyes. She had majored in Latin American Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Married at nineteen, she’d quickly divorced. Then, after working for a year as a social worker in Colorado, she’d come back to Mexico and enrolled in the graduate program at La Universidad de las Américas, at that time located outside Mexico City on the highway to Toluca.

  Her two interests were anthropology and archaeology. One of her professors, William Swezey, liked to call archaeology “the bo
okkeeping of the earth,” and Mary Lou Johnson liked the sound of that. When she considered the fantastic richness of Mexico’s ancient cultures, the choice became clear. The year after she enrolled in the archaeology program, the university moved to Cholula, near Puebla. But the new location wasn’t to her liking, and Johnson began spending weekends with her mother in San Miguel. She also volunteered for archaeological digs in Mexico City, where excavations for the new Metro were turning up Aztec sites, and at Cañada de Alfaro, in Silao, Guanajuato, since paved over to build Del Bajío International Airport. By February 1973, she’d completed the coursework for her master’s degree and was working on her thesis, on ceramics from the Cañada.

  Mary Lou Johnson wasn’t in San Miguel when the Ridingers arrived. The previous October she’d gone to Stanford University in California, to analyze the ceramics from her dig. But in March, her research completed, she returned to San Miguel while the Chicagoans were still in town. Archaeology was another of Jay Ridinger’s interests, and he persuaded Mary Lou to escort him to every site in that part of Mexico, including private pre-Hispanic collections and a local pyramid at La Cañada de la Virgen. There were also family picnics in the campo and frequent lunches at the Ridingers’ rented house on Calle Santo Domingo, where one of their neighbors was Stirling Dickinson.

  Apparently in denial about the state of his wife’s health, one day Ridinger announced to Mary Lou Johnson that the family would resettle in Central America. He asked her opinion on various locations, and she immediately recommended the Colonial town of Antigua, Guatemala, which when she’d visited the year before, had struck her as “the most beautiful city in the most beautiful country in the world.” Antigua, she told him, was the only place she really wanted to live.

  But the Ridingers never made it to Central America that year. After just a couple of months, they cut short their stay in Mexico and flew back to Chicago, when Marilyn became too weak to continue. Her cancer had metastasized to her lungs. Two weeks after their return to the States, on July 9, Marilyn Ridinger died. Neither Jay nor the girls wanted to stay in Chicago after that. By August 15, they’d rented a house in Antigua.