Rex travelled world and got paid for it

REX Kennard, known to readers of Riki's page as Sexy Rexy, was born on a farm near Keensburg, Illinois, and by his own definition is a Midwest farm boy. “And as I jokingly say, when I found out about that I immediately moved to the south of France.” This, however, sounds like the jests Freud wrote about: they are passed off as a joke, but behind the witty quip there lurks a truthful statement or, at least, wishful thinking. You certainly can't help feeling that Rex wanted to put a lot of land between him and Keensburg because from an early age he decided he wanted to see the world. He managed to do so, and in the best possible way – by getting paid to travel all over the globe.
Rex's early life was ruled by chance meetings and sheer good fortune in finding jobs that entailed worldwide trips to the kinds of exotic places most of us can only read about and dream of seeing one day. The south of France was actually one of the least fascinating places Rex eventually moved to. Rex was so lucky at times that even when fate seemed to deal him a bad hand he somehow won most of the tricks. When he graduated from high school in 1944 there was a war on and Rex was eligible for the draft, but what could have been a blow turned out to be a blessing. After 18 months in the Corps of Engineers, Rex was out of the Army and eligible for all the benefits that were available to ex–GIs. These included a place at university paid for by the government, so Rex soon found himself at the University of Missouri majoring in advertising. “Missouri University was the second best place for advertising after Columbia. But Missouri is just next to Illinois, so it meant I could send my laundry home at the weekends,” quipped Rex. Rex had a good reason for wanting to go into advertising. He has always been a voracious reader of non–fiction, but in the closing days of his service in the Corps of Engineers he read a novel by Frederic Wakeman called The Hucksters. This novel, published in 1946, is set in the volatile world of New York radio advertising – these were pre–television days when radio was the big thing. The novel's depiction of life at the top in New York City seduced Rex, and made him decide to do advertising at Missouri University. What university taught Rex about advertising was that...he didn't want to be in advertising. But Rex completed his four–year university course in three and a half years and carried 19 credits. The usual thing is three to 11 credits. University also taught Rex that he wanted to learn and he became an even more avid reader than before. He reckons he gained more from reading books than he did from his three and a half years at university. When Rex left university he was still enthralled by Frederic Wakeman's vision of life in New York City, so he headed straight there. “I wanted to travel, I wanted to see the world,” said Rex. In New York his chance meetings with people started to pay off. A photographer he met used Rex as a model for clothing adverts in newspapers and magazines. “This was well–paid freelance work,” said Rex, “so I lived the way New York should be lived, going to the theatre a lot, eating out.” So without actually being in advertising, Rex was on the fringes of the world that so seduced him when he read The Hucksters. But it still wasn't his kind of world, photographic modelling wasn't his kind of job. “It was a job that had no challenge,” said Rex. “It was too easy. I did it for the money. It was a no go place and I wanted to get on.” Rex had this thing about travelling and seeing the world, so when he saw an ad in the newspaper for a job in Morocco, he immediately answered it. “I found it was a government job,” said Rex. ”The government was building five Army bases in what was then French Morocco and I was told I'd be part of an advance party.” In Morocco Rex learned French and lived in Rabat, Casablanca and Marrakech setting up the bases' filing systems. “Marrakech is still my favourite city in the whole world,” he said. When the Morocco contract ended, Rex had saved a good amount of money and he set off on a six months tour of Europe with a friend called John Prisch whom he had met in Marrakech. This was another of those chance meetings that was to make an impact on Rex's life. John Prisch was a man who loved big sailing yachts, the kind of boats for which you need two fortunes – one to buy the yacht and the other to run it. John didn't have any money (at one stage he had to borrow Rex's last $100 to get back to the States) but he did have talent for meeting rich women and getting them to fall in love with him. He ended up marrying six women, five of whom had a love of the sea and big yachts...and access to huge fortunes.
So some three years after returning to the States, John invited Rex on a four–week trip around the Caribbean on a 185–foot schooner that belonged to his wife, Charlotte. About a year later, when Rex was working in Greenland on another government bases contract, he received a telegram from John, who was now living in Acapulco with his new wife, Fran, and her four children. John had another invitation for Rex and this was when he began to travel and see the world in a serious way – and actually got paid for it.
Rex became the tutor of Fran's four children, aged six to 16, and went with the family to Australia, Aden, Italy and then arrived in Majorca for the first time on New Year's Eve 1959. Fran rented a big house on the outskirts of Pollensa and Rex was given a house in Terreno's Calle Salud for the weekends. John fell in love with a woman he met here – and for the first time it was a woman who didn't have a fortune to keep him in a way the other wives had. So Rex reckons it must have been true love. Whatever it was, it meant the end of John's marriage to Fran and everyone went back to the States. Rex continued to work for Fran for a while before ending up in Laguna Beach, California, on his own. There he got involved in real estate and made some money buying and selling houses. About five years later Fran got in touch with Rex. Her son, Franky, was getting involved in the drugs scene and she asked Rex if he would take him on a round–the–world trip to get him away from bad influences. So Rex was once again doing what he liked best – travelling the world and getting paid for it. Rex and Franky started off in South–East Asia, taking in South Vietnam, Thailand, Bali, among other places. By the time they got to Nepal, Rex realised that young Franky wasn't really enjoying himself, so he talked him into returning to the States and going to university. They met up with Fran and her new husband in Hong Kong and when she heard of the places Rex and Franky had seen, she wanted to do the same trip. So Rex, not at all unwillingly, repeated the South–East Asian journey with Fran and her new husband. Over the next few years Rex worked in Africa, went on safaris, visited Europe, and returned to Majorca several times. Then Fran got in touch and invited him on an extended trip around the world that took in Tahiti, Australia, Papua New Guinea, Japan, the Trans–Siberian Express to Moscow and St. Petersburg and then on to other European countries. Rex finally settled down in Majorca in 1982, although the winters here didn't suit him, so he spent them in Thailand or Sri Lanka. This was a routine that lasted for 10 years, during which there were visits to China and South Africa. That trip to South Africa in 1999 was the last one for Rex. He now suffers from emphysema and is more or less confined to his eighth floor apartment in Plaza Mediterraneo overlooking the Bay of Palma. The emphysema means Rex must be hooked up to an electrical apparatus that produces oxygen and when he goes out he has to be connected to a bottle of oxygen. So he's very much limited to what he can do. He keeps in touch with friends via e–mail and thanks to that voracious reading of non–fiction when he was young he has a huge data bank of facts that he turns into questions for the Terreno gang's weekly trivia quiz. Rex didn't get to South America, so he sometimes feels there's a big gap in his travels around the world. “There's still a million places I want to go, and every place I've been to is constantly changing. So I'm paying a price now for all those lovely cigarettes I smoked.”