My father was a close friend of Stanley Boggs (1914-1991), who was born on a
farm in Franklin Twp. which is probably still owned by the family. His father,
Stanley S. Boggs, was a civil engineer who also held a number of local
political offices. He had a younger brother, Joseph, who (I see from the SSDI) was
b. in 1926 and died in November 2003.
I would like to be in touch with this family, as I have many photos, some
home movies from the early 1950s, and letters to share.
"Stan" Boggs was a college roommate of my father's, and their friendship
lasted over 50 years. In the late 1930s, Boggs, who was doing his doctoral work in
anthropology, visited El Salvador. He worked on many Maya sites and made
several very important discoveries---even some entire cities! He was a
"household name" in Central American archaeology, and is to this day a national
figure
in El Salvador.
A wry and humorous character, looking like a dead-ringer of 1940s comic
bandleader Spike Jones, but with wire-framed glasses and a pipe, Boggs was also
the inventor of "El Atomico", a frozen double vodka martini with pickled
onions.
By the early 1940s, Stan Boggs met and married his first wife, who died in
the 1960s. She was from one of the wealthy ruling families in the republic,
owning many large coffee "fincas". They had a daughter who used to baby-sit my
brother and me in South Bend in the early 1950s. I believe she and her husband
now live in Miami; but I can't think of the husband's surname.
Stanley Boggs spent most of his life and career in El Salvador, becoming the
dean of the Anthropology department at the University of San Salvador.
However, there were periods when the family lived in the United States, including a
few sojourns on the family farm near Mentone. In the mid-1960s, Boggs took a
teaching post at Harvard, and became a director of their Peabody Museum.
He later returned to El Salvador, commuting to Harvard and international
conferences, until the last months of his life. He died in Miami. During the
1980s, he sent us frequent reports on the Salvadorean revolution (which occurred
about the same time as the Sandinista coup in Nicaragua). His letters were
always laced with his dry, Hoosier wit, and some empathy for the poor and the
dispossesed.
Jose Napoleon Duarte, who became president of El Salvador in 1984, was of
Stan's wife's social circle (my father met the young Duarte in 1943). Duarte was
one of the most remarkable Latin-American politicians of his time, who tried
to de-fuse the Communist rebels with an invitation for them to participate in
the democratic process. He died of cancer at the moment of triumph.
Stanley Boggs died in 1991. Nobody told my dad about his death, but my
father knew it, because the Christmas cards, which we were always delighted to
receive, stopped coming.
My father died in 2003, and I am just now trying to pick up the pieces of
this remarkable, life-long friendship. I am now doing a genealogy of Stanley
Boggs, which I intend to post to Ancestry World Trees, in honor of my father's
friend.
Stan claimed to be the grandson of an illegitimate liaison between Warren
Harding and a secret lover---does anyone here know about this? I'm thinking it
was another of his Hoosier tall tales.
Thanks for listening!
---Bob Robertson
Napa Valley, California