From his description, journalists the world over would instantly recognize Rafael Delgado Lozano, man-of-all-work in TIME'S Mexico City bureau. Almost without exception, his kind is present wherever there is a newspaper city room, or an editorial office, or a foreign bureau worthy of the name. He is--in many ways--journalism's indispensable man.

He is especially that to U.S. bureau-men working in foreign countries like Mexico, where it can take three weeks of notarizing & counter-notarizing, witnessing & counter-witnessing just to rent a safe deposit box--but not with Rafael Delgado Lozano around. Rafael, known colloquially as Ralph, on 24 hours notice once arranged to have three divisions of the Mexican Army turned out to parade before the cameras of a MARCH OF TIME unit. That was a major miracle. He performs minor ones almost daily, disappearing into the jungles of official red tape to emerge with just the document a harried correspondent needs, knowing the right cafes in which to find the politician who must be interviewed at once, etc.

Ralph, according to his bureau chief, John Stanton, is a warm, round, emotional, faintly picaresque Mexican who somehow "manages to remind you vaguely of Queen Victoria." His seemingly inexhaustible, elastic and highly valuable know-how is the result of all that Ralph has been and is. His familiarity with Mexican ways is perhaps best exemplified by his faith in the power of documents. Unimpressed by the ordinary correspondent's press card, he designed his own. It has space for his photograph, for numerous stamps --also of his own design--and for signatures and counter-signatures. The TIME bureau chief who first signed it was highly amused--until Ralph, on the strength of it, was ushered into a forbidden Mexican sanctuary one day while the bureau chief, lacking such elaborate identification, was thrown out.

Ralph got his know-how the hard way. His Spanish-born parents died a few years after their arrival in Mexico City (where Ralph was born in 1908), and, at the age of ten, Ralph turned up in Shreveport, La., having gone along with a Mexican family just for the ride. He did odd jobs, went to public school, drove a taxi, saw the country, became an auto body finisher in Detroit -- until his employers found where all the nicks were coming from -- and topped off the U.S. phase of his career one night by leading Detroit's Fox Theater orchestra through a performance of Ravel's Bolero before a full house. He was the theater parking lot attendant, and the men in the orchestra pit had noticed him leading them from the stage door night after night. On this occasion they marched him to the podium and played his favorite composition under his baton.

The Cafe Tupinamba, favorite hangout of Mexico City's journalists, politicians, actors, bookies, bullfighters, etc., completed Ralph's education. There he picked up odd jobs reporting for local newspapers, editing the leaflet given tourists at the bullring. There his "I just heard what you said and I want to set you straight on that" has been the start of many a warm (and newsworthy) friendship, many a warmer argument.

Of him, Bureau Chief Stanton says: "No matter how early the resident correspondent gets to work, Ralph is there first. He sits at his desk sternly reading the newspapers. As he reads he comments on the news with his hands. He forms a circle with thumb and first finger : someone has done just the right thing. He touches his eye with his forefinger: Ralph has just read a great truth. He forms a cross with his thumb and first finger and kisses the cross: Ralph is adding his testimony to the great truth. He stands and faces the bureau chief : 'Now, if I were President Truman. . . .'

"Make no mistake about it, this bureau could hardly get along without Rafael Delgado Lozano."

Cordially, James A. Linen

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