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When we picture White House policemen, it''s usually in black suits and ties, sporting dark glasses and whispering covertly into their wrists, with little apparent interest beyond the comings and goings of the President’s home.

However, according to Diario Vasco Washington correspondent Adolfo Echevarría, reporting in the newspaper 50 years ago, one such White House minder had a rather unexpected pursuit.

Echevarría, who was at that time based in a flat within spitting distance of the President''s home, was reporting the story of his encounter with White House policeman Michael R. Nazarawh, who knocked on his door one day: "They tell me in the Spanish office of the State Department you''re Basque," was Nazarawh''s opening line to the reporter, who had feared his frequent walks past the government building had begun to raise suspicion.

According to Echevarría''s report in the Diario, the agent had recently been on holiday in Tampa, Florida "where he had been playing in the Jai Alai, displaying proof of his love for pelota by showing me a picture of himself dressed in a white suit, red sash, with a Jai-Alai basket at the ready."

Echevarría went on to explain that Nazarawh how was so keen on the sport of pelota that he intended to create a diplomatic Ibero-American society in Washington, hoping to gain the reporter''s support in order to build the city''s first fronton. (Pelotaris in Florida had apparently told him he was probably of Basque heritage since the word zara, meaning old, appeared in his name).

His ambition didn''t stop there, Echevarría reported in the Diario: Nazarawh, "a shooting and pelota champion, had taken a lot of trouble only to find there was no Basque-English dictionary in the Congress Library, so he had decided to create one along with pelota champion Justo Basterrechea."

According to Echevarría, following the dictionary''s publication Nazarawh was planning a trip to the Basque Country "to visit his pelota friends in Marquina, Villabona and Bilbao, while staying in San Sebastian to learn Basque at the Royal Academy of Basque".