Two Lifetimes as One: Ele and Me and the Foreign Service

Two Lifetimes as One is an autobiography of Irving Tragen and his late wife, Eleanor "Ele" Dodson. Irving, who suffered a severe hearing loss from the aftereffects of scarlet fever, relives their odyssey from their first meeting at International House at the University of California, Berkeley, through a dozen appointments in the United States Foreign Service and the Organization of American States. Ele and Irving lived in seven Latin American countries. Irving worked in all thirty-three Latin American and Caribbean countries on diplomatic, development, and drug trafficking-control assignments over nearly sixty years. He details each of those assignments and the lessons he learned and makes it very clear that he could not have carried out those assignments without Ele's support. Read more