George F. Weeks and the Calm Before the Storm

Ivor Thord-Gray wrote of American Journalist George.Weeks , along with Timothy Turner, as the men who helped him secure his commission under General Obregon. Thord-Gray said of them: “we became lifelong friends”

For George.Weeks, Mexico was a second chance at life after profound personal tragedy that left him a shattered man: the murder of his son and his son's fiancé in California.  After selling his newspaper, he suffered a nearly fatal battle with tuberculosis and retired to Mexico in his mid 50's. It was in Carranza’s hometown of Cuatro Cienegras that George Weeks was reborn.   Like Tim Turner, George Weeks loved Mexico.   From his reflective 1906 book “Seen in a Mexican Plaza” :

“Away out on the edge of things in the state of “Coahuila and Zaragosa”, far south of the Rio Grande, is a picturesque, thoroughly typical little town of Cuatro Cienegas – “Four Meadows”. … The name is a pretty one, pretty to a degree, as well as appropriate; rolls smoothly from the tongue of the native, as also from that of the foreigner – after he knows it. It is a pretty place, too – if you like places that are “different”; that are dusty as becomes a locality where no rain falls on occasion for over two years at a stretch – where it may be said of a truth that “there falls not either rain or hail or snow”; but which nevertheless has vineyards and orchards and gardens and flowers regardless of such trifling natural vagaries as absence of rain…” —Seen in a Mexican Plaza: A Summer's Idyll of an Idle Summer"

Weeks was deeply immersed in the pleasant and tranquil hours of Mexican village life, with its courtesies and kindnesses, when news of Victoriano Huerta's murder of Francisco Madero came with the whirlwind of revolution.  Weeks fled his idyllic Coahuila to seek the safety of the United States, but before reaching the border, he changed his mind, deciding to stay and raise his pen against the usurper Huerta.    With an assignment to cover Carranza entouage for an American newspaper, he rode with the Carranza  entourage a thousand miles on horseback over the sierra, where, incidentally, he met Ivor Thord-Gray in a bar in Hermosillo.

George Weeks went on to become the official publicist for the Carranza administration, an episode documented by Historian Michael M. Smith in a fascinating, well researched paper “Gringo Propagandist: George.F.Weeks and the Mexican Revolution”.