Autumn Years Summer 2023

One of the Sisters of St. Joseph let this striving senior know that a “lady attorney” was looking for office help. Bonnie got the job and spent every afternoon at the office until 7pm. Describing the lawyer’s hard driving attitude, Bonnie says “I respected her. Looking back, it helped contribute to my constant search for climbing up that ladder.” The next rung was with a large cor poration. After graduation, she became an executive assistant then progressed to office manager, still striving to do more, which takes a toll. When vacation time came she went for a week to Acapulco with a girlfriend and liked the city. “The vacation was amazing, I loved every sec ond of it—the warmth, the nightlife, the beaches,” she says. Upon returning home she found out that her company was moving to St. Louis, and her reaction was “Are you kidding me? So, I kicked off and moved to Acapulco, but after a month, was bored out of my mind,” Bonnie says. “Although I learned basic Spanish in high school, in Acapulco I lived with a family who spoke almost no English in order to fast-track the learning experience.” What did the bored high-achiever do? She got a job with a local magazine. Sitting on the beach one day, she was reading it and noted the spelling and grammar errors obviously written by someone who was struggling with their English. She boldly wrote to the publisher, offering her skills, and soon she was a featured columnist. At that time in the late 1970’s, Acapulco was the jet-set capital of the world, and Bonnie met and wrote about celebrities like George Hamilton, Harold Robbins, Tom Jones, Farrah Fawcett and Grace Jones, among others.

Bonnie with a client pointing to one of the many positive messages throughout the building.

The editor helped Bonnie get her working papers, and she was soon cover ing parties and the lives of the rich and famous. “This was my life. The nightlife was amazing, and these places didn’t close until sunrise,” Bonnie says. “I’d walk into a restaurant or club and was ushered to the best tables and never got a bill, because I wrote about them.” There was a publishing tie-in with Star maga zine in Las Vegas, and her stories about Acapulco appeared in it every month. T he next rung up in Acapulco came as a pleasant surprise. Her editor, the well-off wife of an architect, decided to move on to other ventures and turned over the magazine to Bonnie. In addition to the Star , she was also work ing as a stringer for the Associated Press based out of Mexico City and a German magazine called Bunta . She became the editor at Adventure magazine, which was ironic, because her real first name is Bonaventura. When El Sol daily newspaper asked her to write a column in English, she was excited to appeal to the locals. Publish ing stories began to take a more serious turn when she looked into the story of a missing Indiana couple, upon the request

of the Associated Press. She found out that the military patrols were manned by uneducated people from the mountains who had been given guns and, unfortu nately, caused the couple to “disappear.” “Corruption was rampant in Mexico and my immigration officer told me I couldn’t write about this incident or write about the poor in the streets, because it would scare off tourism,” she said. After five years in Mexico and being homesick, Bonnie decided to return, but soon discovered that “in the U.S., journalism pays nothing.” A wealthy New York City couple who spent their winters in Acapulco led her to an opportunity in real estate. “My friend tried to connect me with Donald Trump in 1980, but I didn’t want to work in New York City. My problem is that I climb the ladder, then throw myself down and start all over again,” she says. Her subsequent peripatetic professional life included working for a doctor; then a company that sold hardware and software to the artistic world. She traveled the States as a national sales manager with a firm that did parking-ticket processing. When she hit the glass ceiling after selling a multi-million-dollar contract to

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AUTUMN YEARS I SUMMER 2023