Living in Argentina in 1951 in a German boarding house that was full of Gestapo/Nazi officers on the run after the end of World War II is the setting for a book produced by a mother-daughter collaboration with Clarksdale ties.
Throw in the added detail that notorious Nazi officer Adolf Eichmann lived in the room next door and you’ve got all the makings of a spy novel worthy of Ian Fleming’s Bond character.
Instead, one could say the book, “Culture Shock: Life Under a Dictator,” is a love story, says Lois McMurchy. She took the letters and journals written by her mother, Caroline Buntz, during the years of 1951-53 when Caroline and her husband, Lynn, lived in Argentina and compiled them into the memoir.
“She loved my daddy and she’d follow him across the world. But my daddy loved her just as deeply. Their adventures were together,” McMurchy said of her parents.
“My momma followed my daddy’s lead. If he said, ‘We’re going to cross over this waterfall and go into these jungles where there’s anacondas that’s going to kill us, she’d be like, ‘Okay.’”
Speaking before an overflow crowd of 60-plus people at the Cutrer Mansion on Thursday night, McMurchy said she had no idea the book would grow into what it’s become.
“I figured it would just be for family,” she said. “It’s not a literary classic, but it does capture true moments of an American living in Buenes Aires with all of the Nazis.”
During the years of 1951-53, Argentina was a boiling pot under the leadership of president Juan Person, and his actress wife, Eva Duarte, who was better known as Evita. She would die of cancer in 1952. During his presidency, Peron welcomed former Nazi officers such as Eichmann and Josef Mengele and they were set up with money and jobs.
The information in “Culture Shock” was compiled from a series of letters that Buntz would write to her relatives back in the United States and also included excerpts from a journal she wrote during her solo sailing trip from New York City to Buenes Aires and another journal that detailed the couple’s journey by car from Buenes Aires to Lima, Peru, in 1953.
“It’s none of my words. It’s all hers,” said McMurchy, who said it took some six months to go through some 500 pages of material and compile it into something readable. “I just tried to stick with the history of my mother’s experience, as well as the experience of what was going on in Argentina. It was a long process.”
McMurchy’s daughter, Erin Gapen of Hernando, who she calls the “empress of grammar,” edited the book.
“Erin called and she said, ‘Oh my gosh, momma, I saw my grandmother in a whole new light,’” McMurchy said. “She said, ‘It was just an amazing thing to me.’”
McMurchy’s mother, who is now 98 and still living in Oklahoma City, Okla., also read over the finished manuscript and gave her own input. Her biggest objection came when she saw the proposed cover, which included pictures of Buntz interspersed with photos of Peron, Evita and Eichmann.
She pointed to Eichmann and said, “I do not want that man’s picture on the face of my book,” McMurchy recalls.
With her father stationed in a number of exotic locales as she was growing up, McMurchy had a childhood quite unlike any other.
She said it was her father’s stance that the family get the full experience of the life they were living, whether it was in Paris, France, or in Mexico City.
“We always lived in the culture, not in the American enclave. That was extremely important to him. Be part of the people,” McMurchy said of her father, who passed away in 1986.
After the stint in Mexico City, the family would move to Oklahoma City, where McMurchy would spend her teenage years. After graduating early from high school, she would go to the University of Mississippi.
McMurchy moved to the Delta in 1978. She was the first elementary principal at Lee Academy in Clarksdale and then took on the position as the administrator of the Coahoma Community College’s Workforce Development Center.
She would then work for the Higher Education Center and eventually Southern Bancorp as the senior community development officer for the Delta bridge project.
Celebrating an early retirement, McMurchy continues to stay plenty busy.
The Clarksdale resident has completed a book about her childhood that she has titled “I Thought My Childhood Was Normal.” It is currently being edited by her daughter, Erin.
She has also written a novel, “The Intern,” but it is not published.
McMurchy’s other daughter, Caroline, was killed in 1998 in an automobile wreck when she was 20 years old.
She said she’s blessed to have her mother and daughter, as well as two “brilliant” grandsons and a “brilliant” son-in-law.
“I’m very thankful,” McMurchy said. “God has blessed me abundantly.”
Want a copy?
To get your own copy of “Culture Shock: Life Under a Dictator,” go to the websites for Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
