Bullets, Bottles, and Gardenias

By Timothy G. Turner

Timothy G. Turner

Book Description:

Bullets, Bottles, and Gardenias tells the adventures of an American newspaperman, for the most part in the Mexican revolutions. Turner was the only professional writer that went through the full revolutionary cycle, beginning with Madero’s rising. His is the story of perhaps the most colorful of modern struggles, done in terms of amusing personality and anecdote of revolutionists, filibusters, newspapermen, bull fighters, barflies, heroes and blowhards. He tells the story of that time with all the zest of those that lived.

A Word to the Reader from the Author:

This is the story of my life as it has been affected by what, for lack of a better term, I shall call the mood of romantic adventure. This mood, I believe, is now rare. The consequences of the World War, of the wide use of machinery and particularly in this country of a decade of prohibition, have given it the death blow.

Young men are now interested in machinery, where in my early days, I was interested in saddles and pistols. Now young men seek to debunk romance where I sought romance itself, but I do not think that I was ever blind to realities. Nowadays, even the word romance has been corrupted by Hollywood to mean sex experience. Sex experience is all very well, but it is not what I mean.

When I was a young man, it was the fashion to want to be a cowboy. Now it is the fashion to want to fly airplanes. Flying airplanes is not adventure in the sense I mean it. Lindbergh’s feat, magnificent as it was, was not romantic adventure. There you had a man flying across an ocean as he sat alone in an airplane and worked levers. His was sheer achievement.

Romantic adventure is more subtle than that; it is the interplay of human elements more than mechanical ones, the colors, the sounds, the smells, the hot rhythm of life itself.

Neither was the kind of fighting in the World War adventure in the sense I mean it, although those who followed Allenby must have felt it. The season or two that I was a cowboy, the many years that I followed Mexican revolutions as a newspaper correspondent, I would not trade for all the mud and gas of the World War.

This romantic, adventurous mood, I think, was distinctly a product of the Victorian period. I do not say that the old days are best. The new period has much good in it. But I do lament, and think many will lament with me, the passing of this old mood which made life a delight to those who gave way to it by living it or even stayed home and dreamed it.

About the Author:

Timothy G. Turner (1885-1961) was the son and grandson of newspapermen. His newspaper career covered a half-century, beginning in El Paso, Texas, and ending in Los Angeles. He also served as an Associated Press correspondent with Pancho Villa's army in the Mexican revolution.

He wrote Bullets, Bottles and Gardenias, on the Mexican revolution, and Turn Off the Sunshine, a collection of short stories originally published in 1942. The tales are sympathetic vignettes of individuals living in the poorer parts of pre-World War II Los Angeles.

My Opinion:

I highly recommend this book for information about life and customs near the United States-Mexico border at the turn of the twentieth century. Turner also managed to frequently be in the thick of things during the revolution. One thing I found annoying was the book has no chapters, only “scene breaks” between Turner’s various experiences.

Full citation:

Turner, Timothy G., Bullets, Bottles, and Gardenias, South-West Press, Dallas, Texas, 1935.