Timothy Turner, gypsy love and "dynamite" Oscar Creighton

Journalist Timothy G. Turner was nursed in a newsroom and when he grew up, found that the only smell he liked better than printer’s ink was the sawdust and spit of a barroom. His father, Willis Hall Turner, “my pal” as Tim called him, died in March 1906 when Tim was a teen, after which he “was obliged to go to work in earnest” as a reporter, for the Grand Rapids Herald. His role as a cub reporter on the prowl for stories landed him in a gypsy camp where he was smitten by a young gypsy queen who taught him some of her Canaries Island Spanish.

It ended badly, but when he was trying to wrangle a reporting job in West Texas, his love-language won him an unpopular posting to Juarez, with the advice: “Mexico? .. Keep you mouth shut and your bowels open”.

So Timothy Turner became “the Juarez man”, where he felt more at home than he had back in Grand Rapids. As his reputation as "the Mexico man" grew, he was posted to El Paso for the Herald, and filed for the Associated Press as well. By 1910, his friendly contacts with the Porfiriano authorities were an obstacle to getting in with the growing insurrecto circles, despite his sympathies. However, he broke the ice when he was picked up by “El Diario” of Mexico which gave him standing in the revolutionary circles.

“My delight was keen when finally I was allowed to enter the revolutionary junta and share to an extent its plans. It was in a cheap rooming house top floors, where the plotters sat around on the edges of beds or sometimes on floors. There was always a litter of saddles and ammunition bandoliers and a bustle of filibusters and Mexican plotters coming and going, whispering in knots in the halls, with that unmistakable but intangible suppressed excitement, promising, amid these sordid surroundings, of great things to come.”

--Bullets, Bottles and Gardenias

He became great friends with Oscar Creighton, who later earned the nickname of “dynamite” for his prowess in blowing up bridges and stealing whole trains. There Turner also made the acquaintance of the dashing, tall, blond, Oxford-English speaking Italian, Guiseppi Garibaldi, grandson of the great liberator.

His friendship with Creighton and Garibaldi led to one of the greatest scoops a newsman could hope for, an exclusive interview with Francisco Madero while fleeing Federal bullets over the mountains.

This was a couple of years years before Timothy Turner and Ivor Thord-Gray met in a bar in Hermosillo, which you really ought to read about here.