Last Survivors Relive Revolutionary Days With Villa

Seventy years after bandit leader Pancho Villa joined the Mexican Revolution against the 35-year dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz, two of the three last-known survivors of Villa’s legendary guerrilla band were reunited--for the first time. Jesus M. Gonzalez and Leo Reynoso, both 87, never met during their revolutionary days but were brought together by Latin American history professor Manuel Urbina from the College of the Mainland in Texas City, Tex., who has been videotaping oral histories of the revolution. “When you finally realize that there are only three or four survivors, then you realize that is the time to bring them together,” Urbina said. It was a poignant moment for both men as they relived a tumultuous period in Mexican history. Gonzalez said he wasn’t even in his teens when he joined Villa’s army. Reynoso joined the Mexican army at age 14 to fight invaders at Veracruz, but entered Villa’s ranks after being captured by revolutionaries. Both eventually served as captains under Villa. The third known survivor, Rafael Lorenzana Reyna, 88, of Harlingen, Tex., was too ill to attend the gathering.

--Most world travelers wouldn’t think of leaving home without a camera and an armful of maps and guidebooks. When Magqubu Ntombela leaves his South African village near the Umfolozi Game Reserve north of Durban for a wildlife conference in the United States, he’ll be packing his black iron cooking pot and leopard-skin headdress. Ntombela, 87, who began tracking for professional game hunters 73 years ago, is making his first trip outside South Africa, and where he goes, his cooking pot goes. Ntombela, a Zulu, was invited to the fourth World Wilderness Congress in Denver by conservationist Ian Player, who owns the Wilderness Leadership School where Ntombela works, leading small groups on educational tours of Umfolozi. Ntombela lives in a world partly African, partly Western. Along with his traditional costume of skins and ostrich feathers, he sometimes wears running shoes instead of going barefoot. And his home contains one bedroom with mattresses and another with tribal sleeping mats made of rushes.

--British novelist Graham Greene has been crisscrossing Siberia on a tour he described as fulfilling an old romantic dream, according to the Soviet news agency Tass. Well-informed British sources said the 82-year-old writer, on his third visit to the Soviet Union in the last year, had arrived in Moscow on Aug. 25 and headed straight for Siberia.