The Hunt

As most of you already know, Jose is a historian in his free time and he writes books. He's written 4 books and hundreds of articles for magazines and newspapers. He could spend hours in an old archive searching through old documents and be having the time of his life. Something that sounds dreadful to me, but Jose loves it. It's his passion. He'll come home after a long afternoon in the archive and tell me that he discovered something that only he knows. That's what he loves the most...researching and discovering something that no one else knows. He doesn't really like actually writing books, he loves what's behind the books. He loves the smell of an old archive, the dust on the boxes, the occassional insect that been hiding in the stack, the mystery behind the puzzle pieces, putting the pieces together and above all...the hunt.

I've learned from Jose that investigating is much more than just looking for and finding documents. It's all about being able to interpret what you encounter, finding the missing links, and continuing to research those links until all the pieces of the puzzle come together.

It's an adventure. With his last book, Lobos Acosados, about German U-boats sunken off the coast of Galicia, he had to go to Germany and investigate. Oh, and what an adventure it was! He didn't speak a lick of German and their English was shaky. He went to a small town outside of Hamburg, Germany and spent a week in World War II archives photocopying. The janitor who worked there turned out to be Gallego! She helped him out a lot. She even went to the store for him and bought him food so that he could continue researching.

Needless to say, he does this for the passion...not the money. They don't pay non-fiction very well, so he can't dedicate all his time to writing and investigating.



Today he came home, after his traditional morning coffee in the café below reading the newspaper, with newspaper in hand and a big grin on his face like a kid Christmas morning. Someone had written an article about Lobos Acosados. "The historian, Jose Antonio Tojo Ramallo, assures us in his book, Lobos Acosados, the best work ever written on naval battles during the Second World War on the Galicia coast, that if Spain were to participate in the conflict, Ferrol would have a submarine base much greater than that of France."

So even if his books don't get paid well, his work never goes unnoticed. And the satisfaction he gets from the hunt is more than money could buy.