Marie Teresa Ríos, who eventually achieved fame as a writer under the pen name Tere Ríos, is the author of the 1965 book The Fifteenth Pelican, which was the basis for the 1960’s Screen Gems television sitcom, The Flying Nun. She also answered the call to serve on the home front in the global fight against the Axis powers. Ríos was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1917. Her father was originally from Puerto Rico and moved to New York city in the early part of the 20th century. Her mother was an American of Irish heritage. Ríos was proud of her Puerto Rican heritage and a devout Catholic. She became interested in writing at a young age. In the 1930’s, Ríos married Humbert Joseph Versace, a graduate of the United States Military Academy. As an Army wife, she traveled to different places around the world, including Hawaii, where her first child, Humbert Roque Versace was born. After the United States entered World War II, several Puerto Rican women enlisted to join the military. Ríos was one of them. These women often faced hardships such as racial discrimination while serving in the military. Some of Ríos’s duties during World War II included transportation services, driving trucks and buses as needed for the U.S Army. Ríos also assisted the Civil Air Patrol with its domestic support for aviation needs and priorities during the war. It is believed that her involvement with the Civil Air Patrol further strengthened her interest in human flight, a passion that is very evident in her fictional work The Fifteenth Pelican. After the war, Ríos wrote and edited for various newspapers around the world, including places such as Guam, and Germany, and publications such the Armed Forces Star & Stripes. Ríos also received nationwide attention for her longtime fight to secure the Medal of Honor for her oldest son Captain Humbert Roque Versace, who was captured and killed by the enemy during the Vietnam War. Ríos expressed her frustration and anguish through poems and in unpublished novels. Ríos died in 1999, at age of 81, and her ashes were buried with her husband, who had passed away 27 years earlier, at Arlington National Cemetery. In 2002, President George W. Bush presented their surviving children with a posthumously awarded Medal of Honor for Captain Humbert Roque Versace.

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