There's an excellent photography-related backstory involving an incident that took place during that long-ago trip to México.
My grandfather was an intrepid traveler. He made a living as a New York entrepreneur, trying various business ventures with varying degrees of success, but his principal interest was not in making money, per se, but in making enough of it to underwrite his extensive travels.
He had visited Germany earlier in 1939, and had witnessed the Nazi regime in power first-hand. During a brief interlude back in New York, he purchased a prewar Zeiss Contax II rangefinder from a German-Jewish refugee, reportedly offering an exorbitant price for it because he wanted to help the fellow out but didn't want to insult him by appearing to extend charity, and gave it to my then 25-year-old father. This was the camera my father used in Monterrey to shoot the picture above.
My father related the Méxican "incident" many years later in an unpublished family memoir:
The . . . incident occurred . . . when we went into a photo shop to buy some more film. It was a small, but fairly well-equipped place, decorated with travel posters in Spanish and other languages. I picked out several boxes of the film I wanted from a neat pile on one side of the counter. As Father paid for them he noticed that one of the posters was German and included a Nazi Swastika. Pointing to it, he asked the proprietor—a tall, handsome Nordic character who spoke excellent English with a European accent—if he realized what it was.
“Yes,” the man answered promptly, “the symbol of the new and greater Germany.”
To the best of my recollection, the rest of the dialogue went something like this:
“Do you really believe that propaganda crap?”
“It is true, as all skeptics, everywhere—including you in America—will soon see!”
“I’ve already seen it,” Father said, raising his voice, “I’ve just come back from Berlin and Munich! Heil Hitler!”
“Heil Hitler!” the man instantly responded.
“F*** Hitler!” Father shouted at the top of his voice, as he swept all the film displays and postcards on the counter to the floor of the shop in one dramatic gesture, before stamping out of the shop, with me trailing and the proprietor yelling anti-Semitic epithets at us and threatening to call the police.
As a teenager, I inherited the Contax. It replaced a Kodak
Brownie my grandfather had given me when I was eight or nine. It had a collapsible 50mm Sonnar lens to which I eventually added a 135mm Zeiss telephoto (with a clamp-on viewfinder) that I picked up used. The camera body was extremely rugged and the optical quality of the lenses was excellent. It triggered my enthusiasm for cameras as fine machinery—one of the aspects that has sustained my interest in photography to this day.