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Alejandro Finisterre, a poet, inventor (of the foosball among other things) and editor, was born Alejandro Campos RamÃrez in Galiza in 1919.
When his father's shoemaking business failed, the director of his school made Finisterre pay his tuition by correcting the homework of lower grades. Later he became a construction worker and worked in a print shop.
Finisterre was injured by the fascist bombings of Madrid during the Spanish civil war. In the hospital he saw many children injured and unable to play football. This was his inspiration for foosball which was born from the concept of table tennis. Alejandro credits his friend Francisco Javier Altuna, a Basque carpenter, for making the first foosball following Finisterre's directions. Although the invention was patented in 1937, Finisterre had to escape from the fascist coup d'etat to France and he lost the patent papers in a storm.
After he invented the foosball he fled Francisco Franco's Spain to the Latin America. His leftish ideology, however, would lead him to problems in Guatemala where he was kidnapped when Carlos Castillo Armas took over the country and he was sent by airplane to Madrid. During that flight Alejandro threatened the pilot by telling him that he had explosives (one of the first aircraft hijackings).
Later in Mexico, he become an editor.
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