The Rough Road to Rio: An MG Adventure for the Ages

By June 19, 1954, the day Frank Baker and Gérard Fabry arrived in their MG TD at the northwest border of Guatemala, the wet-season rains of the Southern Hemisphere were in full swing. All the first-year Harvard Business students wanted was to get to Brazil, but their timing could not have been worse. Already 16 days and 5000 miles into their trip, as they idled in the downpour at the guard station, the real adventure was just beginning—one that would press their and the car’s limits. What happened next is a story that has outlived them both.

The particulars of the conversation are lost to time. But we know that as Baker and Fabry walked together across campus one crisp autumn day in 1953, they discussed the idea of legacy, of challenging themselves to do something important before their adult lives took over.

Baker, an American, and Fabry, a Frenchman, were 24 years old, each naval veterans of their respective countries, so they had already done plenty that mattered. They were both car guys, too, and in the early 1950s, before the construction of vast, interconnected highways, driving anywhere far still carried the promise of the unknown and a whiff of danger.

We know that their conversation concluded with an agreement to forgo the usual B-school summer internships at J.P. Morgan or Procter & Gamble and instead do what felt important: In the spring, they would drive to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Both were interested in learning something about Latin America, and they believed they might help to educate others upon their return. A story published at the time of their journey in the Boston Globe noted they hoped to “compile information for a book, lectures, and articles.” “But mostly,” the story concluded, “they just want to be the first ever to succeed in driving from the United States to South America.”

The publicity wasn’t incidental: Some 50 years before anyone had thought of becoming a social media influencer, they set out on a full-blown campaign of letter writing, phone calls, and handshakes to get the whole enterprise off the ground. They enlisted Baker’s undergrad roommate, Bruin Hall, to help promote them to the press, and a Boston speakers bureau, Lordly & Dame, to book speaking engagements upon their return. Baker, an editor of the Harvard Lampoon, got himself an International News Service (INS) press pass, with plans to post stories along the way. They applied for all the entry and exit visas they’d need. And they secured sponsorships from the American Automobile Association, from Dunlop Tires, and from MG, from which they purchased a 1953 TD.

The little sports car appealed to the duo for all that it lacked.

By the early 1950s, MG had cemented its reputation in America for building spartan, diminutive sports cars that did everything well (barring, perhaps, weather protection). The right-hand-drive TCs that had followed American GIs home across the Atlantic after World War II soon evolved into the left-hand-drive TD for 1950. Power came from MG’s tough-to-kill 54-hp 1250-cc XPAG four-cylinder; rack-and-pinion steering, a rarity on contemporary American cars, helped to make it nimble—just the thing for the racetracks and jungle tracks of the Western Hemisphere.

Yet the little sports car also appealed to the duo for all that it lacked. “Going down with any comforts is like climbing Mount Everest in a helicopter, or fishing for brook trout with deep-sea tackle. It just isn’t sport,” Baker told the Boston Traveler, in a piece published 10 days before the trip commenced.

Throughout the winter of ’54 and into the early spring, the Harvard men mapped out a route that included 10,000 miles of unpaved roads and 400 miles of roadless jungle, through a total of 16 countries. Baker would serve as mechanic and Fabry as interpreter. They reckoned the trek would take 100 days, at a cost of roughly $3000 apiece (about $35,000 in today’s dollars).

On June 3, 1954, sporting pith helmets and smoking pipes, before a small gathering of friends and classmates, Baker and Fabry departed from Harvard’s Morgan Hall in their British sports car, which was cloaked in the crisp, bright flags of the Americas and loaded to within an inch of its life with a two-person Army tent, a gas stove, four 15-gallon jerrycans of fuel, four spare Dunlops, 5 gallons of water, essential spare parts, a shotgun, and a machete. If ever there was an ideal “Before” photo, this was it.

The Boston Traveler warned, “This journey probably sounds like a lead-pipe cinch, a real joy ride. Don’t be fooled. First of all, this is a special jaunt no one has yet attempted. The boys have only a few maps and AAA descriptions to rely on…”

“Among hazards they will face,” added a piece in the Brazil Daily Times (that’s Brazil, Indiana, of course), “are stretches of scorching deserts, tropical storms, poisonous insects and the heavy snows of the Chilean Andes at an altitude of more than 15,000 feet.” Pre-trip prep included inoculations for tetanus, typhoid, epidemic typhus, smallpox, yellow fever. “They are continually popping anti-malaria pills down their throats,” said the Traveler. Failure was not an option: “This is one course we expect to pass,” Baker stated.

The initial part of the journey, in the United States, seemed to have been largely uneventful. Though America was still two years from the passage of the Federal-Aid Highway Act—which would give us the 45,000-mile Interstate Highway System that today connects everyone to everything—by 1954, cross-country travel wasn’t quite the rough-and-tumble experience it had been just a few decades earlier. From Boston, they passed New York, crossed Pennsylvania, and spent the first night in Pittsburgh, where the Pittsburgh Press reported that “clothing for each is limited to two shirts, two pairs of pants, tropical hat, dust mask, and a heavy jacket… Food will consist of Army C-rations supplemented with whatever edibles are obtainable en route.”

In Cleveland the next day, where the Plain Dealer provided coverage, Baker and Fabry “paused here long enough to have their pictures taken, leave their press statements and visit a handy television station before plunging into the darkness toward Chicago.” From Chicago, they turned south to pass through St. Louis and Fayetteville, Arkansas, to Dallas, San Antonio, and, finally, the border at Laredo.

They crossed onto Mexico’s Federal Highway 85, part of the Pan-American Highway network first proposed in 1923, which ran, tentatively and incompletely—but always with grand plans—from Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, to Tierra del Fuego in Argentina. Mexico had completed its section of the route in 1950, the very same roadways that hosted the fifth and final Carrera Panamericana race later that year. Baker and Fabry’s own grand plan had always been to average 160 miles a day, and this route would have helped them do that. Through Mexico, anyway.

Southwest to Monterrey they went, then to Mexico City and Oaxaca, and on into the mountains of Chiapas, where they crossed the Continental Divide before arriving at the southern border town of Tapachula. From there, Baker steered the stout TD into Guatemala, where—for reasons neither could have foreseen—their adventure would begin in earnest.

***

In 1954, Guatemala was in its infancy as a democracy. Four years prior, Jacobo Árbenz had become the country’s second democratically elected president, and he continued to carry out and expand the social reforms enacted by his predecessor—namely allowing public debate and workers to organize, growing wages, and expanding voting rights. Árbenz, a moderate capitalist, also initiated major agrarian reforms, which had been a key platform of his candidacy. In a country where 2 percent of the population owned 70 percent of the land, he began to expropriate uncultivated tracts from large landowners in exchange for compensation. He then redistributed the land to nearly half a million peasants, many of them displaced Indigenous peoples.

The biggest landowner Árbenz came up against in his noble doings was United Fruit Company, the American corporation that controlled the banana trade and 3.5 million acres throughout Central America. In Guatemala, it owned 42 percent of the land, as well as the rail lines and telephone and telegraph systems. Shouting at the top of their corporate lungs the era’s most in-vogue accusation—many of the May/June news stories about Baker and Fabry’s trip shared real estate on the page with updates on the Army-McCarthy hearings—the banana republicans at United Fruit appealed directly to good friend President Dwight D. Eisenhower for help in dispensing with that Communist in Guatemala.

And so, on Friday, June 18, one day before the MG-shaped pack mule carrying Frank Baker and Gerry Fabry crossed into the country from Mexico, Operation PBSuccess saw CIA-trained rebels (reports vary between 150 and 480 men) follow a disgruntled Guatemalan military officer named Carlos Castillo Armas into the country from the east. Accompanied by strategic American bombing and strategic American propaganda, Armas and the rebels were able to take Guatemala City in just nine days. Árbenz went into exile, and by early July, Armas had declared himself president.

While the rebel march to the capital was relatively easy, as the teeth of the revolution bit down on them, Baker and Fabry had a considerably harder time getting there.

Baker’s account, dictated to the INS wire via telephone, was picked up by papers large and small across America.

“I have just driven through the western part of war-torn Guatemala,” Baker began, “and along with a companion have been arrested, manhandled, and put under almost constant police guard among trigger-happy police and peasants…

“The customs men made us drive into a big, dark building. They stood on a platform above us with guns, machetes, and knotted rubber hoses in their pockets.

“They pulled everything out of the car. They frisked us, even examined the lining of our coats.

“We explained to them that we were ‘just college guys on a vacation.’” Baker said they were allowed to keep their cameras but had their pocketknives confiscated, and “after many hours of questioning and examination of our papers, they let us into the country with a warning that ‘North Americans are not wanted in Guatemala.’”

They might not have been wanted, but for reasons we’ll never know and can only surmise—namely, grit—the two young men were undeterred, and it seems turning back never entered the equation. Over the next couple of days, as Baker and Fabry tried to get to Guatemala City, about 175 miles away, similar scenarios played out dozens of times—roadblocks operated by wary barefoot peasants loyal to their president—“citizens committees”—searching them, searching the car. “They were dressed in rags but were armed with revolvers, tommy guns, and double-edged machetes,” Baker said. “The way some of the wilder ones would wield those machetes close to your head, you’d wonder if you’d ever see home again,” he added in a later report.

In one stretch of countryside, they were shot at. In a small town, they were taken to police headquarters and questioned for two hours by the chief, who informed them they had no constitutional guarantees and could be arrested at any time, by anyone. “All towns are guarded,” he told them. “No one is allowed to drive across the country.” Then he kept them under house arrest for the night, questioning them once more and again in the morning before letting them go.

They weren’t allowed to drive across the country, but that is exactly what they did: Very slowly and with great difficulty, the TD soldiered on. In Antigua, they were fired upon again. “When we stopped, the police pulled us out of our car and shoved us down in the dirt,” Baker reported. Again they were searched, again the car was searched, again they were dragged away to a headquarters to be questioned for hours and then put under house arrest for the night. Again they were allowed to leave in the morning.

They did their best to dodge patrols, but the entire country was on patrol, and 5 miles from Guatemala City, they were caught again, this time by government troops. This time when questioned, however, Fabry lied and told them they were both French. Sacre bleu! Much to the great delight of the young men, it worked, sort of. “The regular troops agreed to give us protection to get into Guatemala City,” Baker said. “We were given a police escort the rest of the way, and these men turned us over to the city police, the Guardia Civil.” Once released, the two weary travelers took a room at the Hotel Florida, determined to figure out their next move as Guatemala collapsed around them.

In the capital, the threat of bombing from enemy (that is to say, American) planes was ever-present, even though Baker said it never happened. Still, Baker told the Boston Traveler in a later interview, “In one three-day period the Communists shot off a thousand rounds of ammunition a night. They would shoot up and down the streets at anything that moved…” Often, he added, “you’d see long black cars charging from embassy to embassy at 80 miles an hour.”

Baker had been snapping photos for much of the journey, and now that they were off the road, finally able to breathe and get their bearings, he brought some film to a place to have it developed, which proved to be a mistake. “The fellow who ran the developing shop turned us in,” Baker told the Boston Traveler later that fall. “Fabry and I were taken to the chief of the secret police.” There they were searched, then escorted back to the hotel, where two police officers ransacked their room.

Right about then, mid-morning on June 22, there was a knock on the door.

***

Fred Sparks was a swashbuckling foreign correspondent for the Chicago Daily News who cut his teeth covering the American occupation of Germany in the wake of World War II. He bounced around then, contributing stories both serious and humorous to various outlets, including Esquire magazine. He was one of six journalists to win a Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for his early coverage of the Korean War. A 1994 New York Times story claimed that Sparks “rarely missed a revolution”—and that he was rarely without an umbrella. “After covering a good many revolutions,” Sparks once told a young reporter, “I’ve noticed that no one ever shoots at a man carrying an umbrella.”

Naturally, Sparks and his umbrella were in rainy Guatemala City in June 1954 when the fledgling democracy went sideways. And naturally, his reporter’s nose led him (along with a fellow reporter, Briton Patrick Catling) to the Hotel Florida on the morning when Frank Baker and Gerry Fabry were holed up in their humid tiny room, under the watchful gaze of the local constabulary.

“We wanted to chat with a Harvard student named Frank Baker, who had just arrived from the Mexican border on an automobile tour of Latin America,” Sparks wrote in his syndicated dispatch, which was framed as a chummy letter to his boss. He referred to Baker as “a 6-foot husky.”

“As we walked into Baker’s room, we found him sitting on his bed with his driving companion, a young Frenchman. Two plain-clothesmen were in the room. I asked them, ‘Who are you?’ One of the men stepped forward and flashed a small badge. It looked like the kind of detective badge you get for 100 box tops and a dime.”

Sparks reported that all of the young men’s things were spread out across the room, much of it—their tent, their combat boots—the kind of things one could get at an army surplus store for camping. “But stretched out here in Guatemala on the floor of the Hotel Florida under the suspicious eyes of those two plainclothesmen, it sure looked like military gear.”

It didn’t help that much of Baker’s gear was stamped “U.S. Navy,” courtesy of his time in the service. “They thought we were American soldiers, or at least aides of Castillo Armas, the insurgent leader,” he told the Traveler. “They were convinced I was connected with the American ‘fifth column,’—that I had been dropped from a plane.”

Despite the deep suspicions of the two cops in the room, Sparks noted they were at least respectful and added, “After all, how would we have acted in 1941 if we’d picked up a couple of Heidelberg U. boys touring the USA in similar circumstances?” As material shortages had already begun to grip the country, however, he also noted they took two rolls of toilet paper before they “invited” Baker, Fabry, Catling, and himself to accompany them to the police station.

Sparks was detained for a half hour. “But the police liked my pictures so much they kept the film.” For their part, Baker and Fabry were bailed out by an American embassy attache whom Sparks knew, and that seems to be the last the men saw of each other. Sparks went on to grab dinner at a nearby restaurant, which was interrupted by a power outage and then gunshots. “We thought we’d better hit the floor,” he told his boss, “but I do digest poorly on the floor.”

Baker and Fabry, on the other hand, were told in no uncertain terms by “the Communists” to get out of the country, which was far easier said than done. They were issued a safe conduct pass to the border, which they put no faith in given the difficulties they’d already faced. And they knew it was no guarantee to get them over the border and into El Salvador once they’d arrived. If they arrived. But Fabry, ever resourceful, had noticed a pile of exit visas sitting unguarded in the customs office at the embassy and pocketed one. That, they hoped, would get them out.

The only thing standing in their way was 120 miles of hostile road between the capital and El Salvador. That evening, as they reorganized and repacked all their belongings in the Hotel Florida, their MG a curious sight parked out front, thunder rolled in and it began to rain again. Hard.

***

With the entire city under blackout and a tropical storm pounding the country, three hours before dawn on June 23, Baker and Fabry crept out of the hotel, hastily loaded up the MG, and made their way east. In that direction lay El Salvador, but also, quite inconveniently, the brunt of the rebel siege making its way toward the capital. Fuel had been shut off, and Americans were forbidden from traveling—but, as Baker reported in a story titled “Two Students Run Civil War Gantlet” that was picked up by the Lubbock Morning Avalanche on June 26, “We took this opportunity because police patrols would be indoors.”

All the main roads were heavily fortified and reserved for military traffic, so they stuck to back roads, the MG’s skinny tires slicing through mud, its tiny windshield wipers struggling to keep up as they sped along in the night. The area they traversed had been under attack by enemy planes, and now and then the men craned their necks beneath the TD’s feeble top to look skyward, but darkness and the cloud cover prevented them from seeing much. They pressed on, counted their blessings, and hoped not to get strafed.

Eventually, even the back roads led to heavily guarded fortifications. For a time, at least, so long as Baker kept silent, Fabry spoke French, and they flashed the safe conduct pass, the combination was enough to get them through. Their luck ran out at Jutiapa, about 25 miles from the border. “This town was expected to be the first target of the rebels,” Baker said. “It had received considerable bombing. We were caught approaching it and taken to the colonel in charge,” a tall mustachioed man who “wore cavalry boots and carried pearl-handled pistols.” The colonel had been educated in America and spoke good English, and although he explained that many rebels were trying to get into the country disguised as tourists, he believed them when they said they were only students passing through. To help them on their way, he ordered guards to escort them to the border—and to ensure they “did not take any pictures or see too much.”

“Many boxes of ammunition were stacked against the sides of buildings along the route,” Baker noted, with sandbags and rock piles erected as interior defenses and sentries carrying foreign-made automatic weapons. Below Jutiapa, all the villages he could see had been barricaded with rocks and logs, and all the people in them stood by on high alert, armed with machetes, knives, and pistols to defend their homes. “Local villagers trust no one,” Baker reported. “We would never have gotten through without the guards. If you are a foreigner, it is enough to start them swinging machetes.” Even still, at each successive barricade, “about 50 men would rush at the car” and tear apart the men’s baggage looking for weapons. “The guards would let them do this but kept them from harming us.”

Finally, they reached the border, and a guard there asked for their papers. Baker presented the exit visa Fabry had swiped the day before. “He looked at the seal and the signature but did not check the name. He waved us on, and we burned up the road getting to the El Salvador side,” Baker said.

“It felt mighty good to be out of the revolution.”

***

If Guatemala had been a gantlet, and indeed it was, then certainly the remaining 10,000 or so miles that still lay ahead for the MG of Baker and Fabry would be a relative Sunday drive, rainy roadless jungle notwithstanding. But for a bent muffler and a leaky transmission housing brought on by impact with a rock, the MG remained ever reliable. At some point, they picked up a roll of chicken wire to unfurl as a traction device in particularly sticky situations, and they were back to camping out roadside in the two-person tent and cooking over the single-burner gas stove. Through El Salvador they went, where, like Mexico, the entire section of the Pan-America Highway was paved. They stopped in San Salvador, the capital, just long enough for Frank Baker to file his harrowing account of the previous week’s events via telephone. They then crossed into Honduras, rounding the Gulf of Fonseca, and went over the border into Nicaragua, where they would have passed through Managua on a brief paved section in the east and then driven the long shoreline of Lago Cocibolca before entering Costa Rica.

By the 1950s, for citizens with means, the cars of Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler dominated the roads of Latin America. Big Three ubiquity had been one of the primary goals of the Pan-American Highway, and as a result, Ford had been building cars in Brazil since 1919 and in Mexico since 1925. GM was up and running in Brazil by 1925 and in Mexico by the mid-1930s, which is also when Chrysler began its Mexican operations. By contrast, Volkswagen didn’t open its first plant in Brazil until 1953.

Outside of cities, most of the citizenry lived in poverty and got around on foot, on horseback, on bicycles, perhaps aboard the occasional small-bore motorcycle. What a sight it must have been, then, to see the laden MG trundling along among the Tudors and old Ts, the Fleetlines and Capitol Express trucks, the Cranbrooks and DR sedans of the day.

“Most of the roads are about one car wide and follow along steep hills,” Baker later told the Boston Traveler. “If a car comes in the opposite direction, you blow your horn, stop, and get out with your machete to discuss who goes ahead. There is prestige in a big machete,” he continued. “The sign of peace is to put the instrument on the ground. All the ones we met were reasonable, fortunately.”

It was jungle and more jungle all the way through Panama, and more than once they enlisted locals (and their beasts of burden) to help pull them through stretches of muck that had defeated the chicken wire and threatened to swallow the car whole. Elsewhere they waded the car through flooded crossings, sometimes hundreds of feet long. Given the low-slung stature of the TD and the requisite height of its doorsills, it’s not hard to imagine soaked footwells, sodden feet, and booming laughter at the ridiculous fun of it all. And all the while, the chugging four-cylinder up front gave no complaints.

After what must have seemed like an endless, slow-going slog through the tropics, Baker, Fabry, and the MG entered Panama City and, rather than continuing south, most likely they hung a left and took the transisthmian route up to the coastal Caribbean city of Colón. They had only barely survived the trek through Guatemala; they had no interest in rolling the dice again through the Darién Gap.

Then as now, the Darién Gap is a roughly 70-mile section of unnavigable, mountainous, swampy, unstable Panamanian jungle that adjoins Colombia’s equally uninviting Chocó region, with the border lying somewhere in between. To date, this area remains the only place in the world where two neighboring countries lack a single road that connects them. For decades, ever-hopeful politicians and overly confident developers dreamed of getting a road in there to link the Western Hemisphere end to end, to complete the Pan-American Highway at last, but the efforts were blocked for various reasons over the years (the sheer squishiness of the earth, for starters) and petered out for good by the late 1970s, thanks ultimately to legal arguments that the Gap served as an effective deterrent against the spread of hoof-and-mouth disease. 

Inaccessibility and viral contagion had never been a part of Land Rover’s vocabulary, and the marque’s 1971–72 effort to drive a pair of new Range Rovers the 19,000-mile length of the Pan-American Highway, including the Darién Gap, is its own grueling feat. In all, it took the British Trans-Americas Expedition 96 days to traverse the Gap, accompanied by 64 men cutting a path and heave-ho-ing, plus 30 horses hauling supplies and also probably heave-ho-ing in particularly sticky spots.

In 1954, our intrepid explorers had no men, they had no horses, and they certainly didn’t have that kind of time. What they had instead when they reached Colón was petty cash and crossed fingers, and there they engaged a crew with a dockside crane to load the MG onto a small wooden cargo boat, aboard which they secured passage for themselves and the car out to a coastal steamer for a ship-to-ship transfer, before riding it across the Caribbean to arrive a few days later in Cartagena, Colombia.

Once off-loaded, the pair made their way back to the Pan-American Highway in Medellin and headed south out of Colombia, ascending to the Ecuador border, into the Andean foothills and Quito just beyond. A long, gradual descent into Peru would have taken them just about to sea level, where they had the mountains on their left, the Pacific on their right, and shimmering fresh pavement for 600 miles, from Piura to Lima, the capital. Here they turned inland and climbed.

“From Peru, they cut over the west wall of the Andes,” reported the Boston Traveler in a recap story published that November. It was winter in the mountains, sunny and dry but chilly, and “the roads were like corkscrews…” Up they went, sometimes digging their way through rock slides, the TD’s hardy four huffing and puffing but persevering, carrying them ever upward from the sea to the 15,889-foot Anticona Pass. Both men battled altitude sickness. Both got sun- and windburned in the thin, dazzling air. At night, they drained the radiator into one of the jerrycans and slept with it between them in the tent to keep the water from freezing. Somewhere among the Indigenous people who have called the Andes home for thousands of years, Baker discovered a real disdain for llamas. “They don’t carry much and are easily the most obstinate animal in the world,” he told the Traveler. “When they sit down and don’t want to get up they can’t be prodded, beaten, or set on fire. The natives simply sit down and flip pebbles at the animal until he becomes annoyed and bounds off.”

It was on the descent, as they negotiated a dry riverbed, that the MG finally gave in to the forces being lobbed against it and broke a rear spring. Crudely, creatively, Baker shoved a chunk of wood into the space in such a way as to prop up the back of the car and they limped ahead for 10 miles, over the border into Bolivia, around the southern shore of Lake Titicaca, and into the port town of Guaqui.

“There was a fiesta in progress,” Baker said, “and both the town’s blacksmith and mechanic were borracho, or drunk, as just about everybody was. We finally got some broken springs from the village priest, bent them with stones, tied them with baling wire, and went to La Paz, the capital, at the rate of 10 mph.”

Whether or not Baker and Fabry were able to source a proper set of rear springs for the TD in La Paz is unknown, but we hardly think they would have kept on without first making the car roadworthy at more than a crawl. Nevertheless, down into Argentina they rolled, through the Jujuy and Tucumán provinces and across the broad pampas west of Buenos Aires, where the frigid southwest winds—the pamperos—coming off the Andes buffeted and stung them incessantly. They veered northeast, up through tiny Uruguay before crossing the border into Brazil on August 12, less than a thousand miles to go.

Baker and Fabry rolled into Rio de Janeiro on or about August 18—76 days, 1 hour, and 30 minutes after they’d departed from Boston. They were well ahead of schedule, and just as planned, they’d done it in the most sporting way possible—no fishing for brook trout with deep-sea tackle for these two.

In Rio, they cleaned themselves up, got haircuts, shaved, bought suits, then met with members of the Automóvel Clube do Brasil (ACB) to share stories of their adventure.

Gerry Fabry flew home to Paris to spend the remainder of the summer with his family, while Frank Baker stayed behind to make arrangements to have the car shipped back to the States. Perhaps at the invitation of the ACB, he and the TD also paced a local race in Rio with the first Miss Brazil, Martha Rocha, alongside.

The end of the journey did not, as it happened, bring the end of witnessing political intrigue: Baker was still in the capital on August  24, when Brazilian President Getúlio Vargas, embroiled in controversy and having lost the faith of his cabinet, shot himself in the chest. His suicide note was read over the radio within hours of his death, and it sent the country into a riotous frenzy. The following day, making one last use of his INS press pass, Baker talked himself into the Catete Palace and was in one of the reception rooms when Vargas’ body was brought out in a glass-topped coffin for display to relatives and close friends.

“Vargas’ youngest son started shouting the national anthem, waving his arms,” Baker reported. “The mob went wild with hysteria. The room started to vibrate, plaster began falling off the ceiling. A chandelier then fell and knocked me cold. I came to with a woman’s foot in my face. Soon the other chandelier came down, throwing the room into complete darkness. That was a rough experience. I ended up with four stitches in my forehead.” He took a final photograph, though.

It’s entirely possible Baker and Fabry’s car is still out there somewhere.

Baker flew back to the States shortly after, and both men returned to Harvard in the fall. There was no book, but Baker did make several speaking appearances, which helped recoup some of the money they’d spent to fund their incredible, important odyssey. They completed their MBAs in 1955, and following graduation, Gérard Fabry returned to France and joined industrial gas supplier Air Liquide before getting into banking, first with Lazard Frères and then Crédit Mobilier Industriel (Sovac), from which he retired as director general. Frank Baker had a short stint at Arthur D. Little consulting before starting a venture capital firm. He retired from electronics manufacturing firm Andersen Group after serving as CEO for 30 years.

The two men remained close friends throughout their lives, and their families became friends as well. Frank Baker died in 2017, Gerry Fabry in 2020. Their adventure, however, lives on through their descendants (who, in turn, shared it with HDC magazine along with the accompanying photos).

“I remember key pictures from the trip in his den, like he and Gerry standing in Rio, along with a Spanish newspaper cover about Guatemala,” said John Baker, Frank’s son. “I remember finding the slides in the attic as a kid. They were well boxed and had metal edges, which made them incredibly cool.” John credits his father with his own love of vintage cars and boats, not to mention a bit of wanderlust. “I’ve taken jobs that have taken me all over the world,” he noted.

Although the whereabouts of their magnificent MG remain unknown, so tough was the TD, so easy to maintain, that it’s entirely possible that Baker and Fabry’s car is still out there somewhere, puttering around back roads on sunny weekend days in the hands of a loving owner oblivious to its remarkable history.

***

This story came to us in a rather confusing and roundabout way more than a decade ago. After a few false starts and a few trips to the back burner, we were finally put in touch with John Baker, son of Frank Baker, who was kind enough to share with us an outline of the events of his dad’s 1954 road trip, as well as press clippings and all the amazing photos seen throughout. Our sincere thanks to Mr. Baker for allowing us to share this story with our readers.

***

This story first appeared in the May/June 2025 issue of Hagerty Drivers Club magazine. Join the club to receive our award-winning magazine and enjoy insider access to automotive events, discounts, roadside assistance, and more.