By this time in June 1968, I'd survived freshman year and made it home.
I flew back from Boston to the 105-degree days of Laredo to work as a gofer, tire changer, shipping clerk, and janitor at my dad's auto parts store and garage. There was a brand-new employee uniform for me: blue pants and a lighter blue shirt with "Danny" stitched on a dark blue patch above the pocket.
Work at Yeary Battery was a reunion with the mechanics out back in the garage, Nicho, Alberto, Pablo, Poncho, Leo, and Abraham, men I'd spent summers with ever since 8th grade.
Nicho and Leo spoke English because they'd been in the Army, but the other guys lived in glorious monolingual Spanish. It was a relief to get back into cursing and joking in the Tejano demotic after 3 exhausting terms of classes in Dartmouth Hall trying —and judging by my grades, failing—, to master the imperfect subjunctive or opaque verses by Modernist poets from Spain.
Those men were my father's age, but it felt as though they treated me as an equal without the clear lines of authority that classified me at Boy Level 2 or 3 in the male hierarchy of my dad's gringo friends. The mechanics and I took smoke breaks together out of sight of the shop foreman, and I covered on mornings for Leo when he was hungover and had to crawl into the tunnel of truck tires in the rack to sleep off la cruda. He'd been in combat in Korea and still had nightmares about the cold and the Chinese. Although Leo was a patient instructor, I never did learn how to roll cigarettes using only one hand.
My mostly unearned pay was $1.45 an hour, minimum wage, 15¢ less than the mechanics made. But I had no expenses other than buying records, beer, and cigarettes. My dad handed out the payroll checks Saturday afternoons at 1 o'clock closing time. I took mine to the Laredo National Bank and deposited $60 in a 2.5% savings account. By the end of August when I left for the DFS Program in Salamanca, I had over $500 saved. With 1968 prices in Spain and the exchange rate, it turned out to be a fortune.
The sales room of Yeary Battery was air conditioned, but I avoided it, because my father and the assistant manager were usually there, both of whom interrupted my salaried leisure by finding another task for me. So although afternoon temperatures could hit 110 under the tin roof in the garage, I tried to stay out there where it was easier being hard to find.
Back on the Border, there was no more discomfort food on Thayer trays. Instead, there was mouth-watering, classic Mexican slow-food cuisine served by cocineras 24-7 at all of my friends' kitchen tables. Every workday morning I went by Don Trino's lonche stand, a prototype of the modern food truck, and bought his delicious cabrito, chorizo, and lengua sandwich rolls prepared according to secret recipes. Señor Briseño made world-class enchiladas at the Acapulco Café, a still-lamented historical dish that followed him to the grave. The great Lala's Café, a culinary institution of such renown that it has a Texas State Historical Marker, was serving home-style Mexican food a short drive 35 miles away in Mirando City.
And there were the raspas, shaved-ice with fruit syrups in paper cones, treats I'd grown up loving. Señor Zamarripa had a busy raspa stand on his front porch because he made all his syrups from scratch. The watermelon, lime, and peach syrups he brewed were especially good. His tamarind raspas are still remembered with yearning in posts on Laredo nostalgia Facebook groups.
Deliveries at work were great. There was a WW2 military jeep, the kind with no top, a fold-down windshield, and 4-wheel drive that you engaged by turning the locking hubs on the front axle. There were pals on the sidewalks to wave at and bumpy dirt roads to bounce down minutes away from downtown. Somehow a 15-minute delivery in the Jeep could take an hour.
The other delivery vehicles were a couple of pickups, a '59 Dodge and a '63 Chevrolet. I used those to smuggle auto and bus parts into Mexico. During the 25-year boom in US-Mexico trade, the fixed exchange rate of 12 pesos to the dollar made it cheaper for the bus manufacturers in Monterrey to buy all their electrical systems from Detroit than to manufacture them in Mexico. Most of my father's profits weren't from selling batteries, tires, and after-market air conditioners to Americans, but from exporting alternators and electrical systems to Mexican bus manufacturers. I delivered pickup truckloads of the parts to the Laredo bus terminal weekly.
The Mexican government tried to control this by imposing high import tariffs on these products, which meant that Transportes del Norte S.A. figured out how to smuggle these parts across from the US. Most of this contraband was moved by drivers in the cargo bays of their passenger buses headed south.
Every once in a while though there would be an inventory crisis at the factory in Monterrey, and my father would get a call to rush an alternator or two down to them as soon as possible. That's when I'd put the boxes out of sight on the passenger side floor of one of the trucks, take $5 from the cashier, and head across the International Bridge to Nuevo Laredo.
At the Mexican customs checkpoint, I'd been trained to hold the $5 bill folded lengthwise in the fingers of my left hand like a cigarette and rest my forearm along the window ledge of the door. When the official asked "¿Algo que declarar?" I'd look down at the cash and answer, "No, señor." The money disappeared from my hand with no visible motion, and he waved me through. There was a fellow in a pickup by the Plaza Benito Juárez waiting for the contraband who sped away with it to the Monterrey highway. It was "kanban inventory management" twenty years before the American financial press gave the Japanese term its fifteen minutes of fame.
With the inevitable devaluation of the peso in 1983, this chapter of international trade came to an end and never returned. Nowadays with NAFTA, the direction of manufactured goods flows the other direction as any drive down I-35 from San Antonio to Laredo demonstrates.
Dartmouth followed me home to Laredo, and not just my bad habits. During freshman year I'd become acquainted with the eccentric anthro major, DOC legend, and train-hoppper, John Merriam '70. Merriam is the guy who brought the news of the Great Fairlee Beer Train Derailment to campus back in February. His passion (it was way more than a hobby) was riding freight trains, and he had a bucket list of tunnels and bridges to ride through and over. When we were talking one evening, he told me that he might drop in on me in Laredo during his summer transcontinental train hobo trip. I thought "yeah, yeah, Laredo is a hell of a long way out of your way" and forgot all about it.
One hot morning the assistant manager comes back to the garage and tells me there is some gringo in the store asking to speak to me. I look up and there's crazy John Merriam, absolutely filthy but grinning at me as he walks up. He'd just ridden in the cab of a giant International Harvester machine headed to Mexico on Missouri Pacific. I call my mom and ask her to set an extra plate so one of my Dartmouth classmates could come for lunch. Lunch was the day's big meal anyway, and she said sure, eager to meet an Ivy Leaguer in real life.
I'll never forget the look of shock and horror as she got a look at Merriam walking in the kitchen door. We postponed lunch while he took a shower and cleaned up. My mom is shaking her head in disbelief. East Coast folks are crazy. But Merriam redeemed himself with his gracious manners and easy conversational style over the fried chicken washed down with quarts of sweet iced tea. By the end of the lunch, my parents had decided that maybe there was hope for me among Dartmouth classmates.
That afternoon I dropped Merriam off on the highway where he hitched a ride to Del Rio to catch the Union Pacific freight to L.A. By the end of the summer he'd made it up the coast to Portland, across to Chicago, and home to New York. From the Pomfret School to Dartmouth to the hobo life. Still, it probably wasn't the strangest trip any of us took.
A delightful difference from the nine months of being a freshman at Dartmouth was the availability of girls. Before arriving in Hanover, I'd had no idea what their absence would feel like. How many times freshman year in the barbaric chaos of New Hampshire Hall had I wondered what kind of trouble I'd got myself into.
My success rate with girls from distant campuses was .000, even lower than Mario Mendoza's notoriously low batting average. Unfortunately, throwing up on Mt. Holyoke girls' shoes at mixers was not a good opening move, mistaking as I did the Animal House manner for the natural behavior of a boy wearing a green Dartmouth jacket.
Back in Laredo, there were the girls I'd known forever, ex-girlfriends, girls who'd broken up with boyfriends, girls who'd got a lot prettier over the winter, and all of them were just a phone call away. There were movies to see. It was the summer of Jack Nicholson's awful B-movie "Psych-Out" and John Wayne's equally bad "Green Berets" as well as Cantinflas comedies and Antonio Aguilar charro movies in the two Spanish-language theaters in Laredo or the five across the river. Hugh Masekela's "Grazing in the Grass," Simon & Garfunkel's, "Mrs. Robinson," and The Young Rascals "People Got to Be Free" were playing on KTSA.
There were hamburger joints to cruise, a Lovers' Lane for making out at Lake Casa Blanca, and an all-ages nightclub that had a light show and played psychedelic music. It felt like breaking through the surface and gasping for breath after a long dive.
Most of the girls' fathers had a strict prohibition about taking them on dates across the river to Nuevo Laredo. Once I broke that rule, not knowing that my date's father had an arrangement with every bartender in town to call him if they ever saw his daughter in one of their bars. The taste of a Cuba libre still gives me a flashback to looking up from my drink to see Claudia's dad striding menacingly toward us at our little table in the Club Alma Latina.
Nuevo Laredo had all the customary border town attractions. It was a 10-minute drive from my house and a 10¢ bridge fare to cross in my '47 Plymouth.
Three blocks from the International Bridge there was the air-conditioned Bar Munich that served supercooled lager in pint chalices of heavy glass that were kept in the freezer. These restorative "bolas" went for 25¢.
You could get a buzz and smoke most of a pack of cigarettes for the $1.45 I earned in an hour at work! There were other bars and nightclubs across the river in Nuevo Laredo, but we mainly avoided them and embarrassing moments with someone's tipsy father. We went to night baseball games to watch the Tecolotes play teams from around the Liga Mexicana de Béisbol.
On August 2nd, Rolando García, Chiqui Torres, and I drove up to San Antonio to catch the Jimi Hendrix Experience at the Municipal Auditorium, a thrilling, very loud concert that ended with Hendrix's dedication of his version of "Wild Thing" to all the guys in 'Nam and the signature Stratocaster destruction finale.
Before the show, we checked out HemisFare 68. On the way to the ticket kiosk, who should be exiting but our '71 classmate Tim Risley, another New Hamp survivor. Back then, when everything was so strange, I'd come to expect weird things to happen.
The Summer of '68 turned out to be the last summer of my childhood. It was a summer of fun and of tragedy: the three best athletes of my Laredo generation were killed in a car wreck on the way home from a seeing a baseball game at the Astrodome. Another friend was stopped for speeding on the same highway, and after a search was arrested for possessing an ounce of marihuana. He was sentenced in July to a year of 'rehabilitation' at the Texas State Mental Hospital. Howard's year of confinement where there was an abundant supply of LSD and heroin turned a regular guy into a schizophrenic junky with a preference for living on the street.
At the end of the summer, I took a fork in the road, completely unaware that it would be the last time I ever lived in Laredo or that I was about to meet the girl who would be wife.
The ending of Vernon Scannell's little poem "No Sense of Direction" reminds me of that Laredo summer fifty years ago:
For I lack their gift,
Possess almost no
Sense of direction.
And yet I owe
a debt to this lack,
A debt so vast
No reparation
Can ever be made,
For it led me away
From the road I sought
Which would carry me to -
I mistakenly thought -
My true destination:
It made me stray
To this lucky path
That ran like a fuse
And brought me to you
And love's bright, soundless
Detonation.
https://books.google.com/books?id=ySdLAQAAQBAJ&lpg=PT159&ots=g7IMvthKQz&dq=vernon%20scannell%20no%20sense%20of%20direction&pg=PT160#v=onepage&q&f=false
I flew back from Boston to the 105-degree days of Laredo to work as a gofer, tire changer, shipping clerk, and janitor at my dad's auto parts store and garage. There was a brand-new employee uniform for me: blue pants and a lighter blue shirt with "Danny" stitched on a dark blue patch above the pocket.
Work at Yeary Battery was a reunion with the mechanics out back in the garage, Nicho, Alberto, Pablo, Poncho, Leo, and Abraham, men I'd spent summers with ever since 8th grade.
Those men were my father's age, but it felt as though they treated me as an equal without the clear lines of authority that classified me at Boy Level 2 or 3 in the male hierarchy of my dad's gringo friends. The mechanics and I took smoke breaks together out of sight of the shop foreman, and I covered on mornings for Leo when he was hungover and had to crawl into the tunnel of truck tires in the rack to sleep off la cruda. He'd been in combat in Korea and still had nightmares about the cold and the Chinese. Although Leo was a patient instructor, I never did learn how to roll cigarettes using only one hand.
My mostly unearned pay was $1.45 an hour, minimum wage, 15¢ less than the mechanics made. But I had no expenses other than buying records, beer, and cigarettes. My dad handed out the payroll checks Saturday afternoons at 1 o'clock closing time. I took mine to the Laredo National Bank and deposited $60 in a 2.5% savings account. By the end of August when I left for the DFS Program in Salamanca, I had over $500 saved. With 1968 prices in Spain and the exchange rate, it turned out to be a fortune.
The sales room of Yeary Battery was air conditioned, but I avoided it, because my father and the assistant manager were usually there, both of whom interrupted my salaried leisure by finding another task for me. So although afternoon temperatures could hit 110 under the tin roof in the garage, I tried to stay out there where it was easier being hard to find.
Back on the Border, there was no more discomfort food on Thayer trays. Instead, there was mouth-watering, classic Mexican slow-food cuisine served by cocineras 24-7 at all of my friends' kitchen tables. Every workday morning I went by Don Trino's lonche stand, a prototype of the modern food truck, and bought his delicious cabrito, chorizo, and lengua sandwich rolls prepared according to secret recipes. Señor Briseño made world-class enchiladas at the Acapulco Café, a still-lamented historical dish that followed him to the grave. The great Lala's Café, a culinary institution of such renown that it has a Texas State Historical Marker, was serving home-style Mexican food a short drive 35 miles away in Mirando City.
And there were the raspas, shaved-ice with fruit syrups in paper cones, treats I'd grown up loving. Señor Zamarripa had a busy raspa stand on his front porch because he made all his syrups from scratch. The watermelon, lime, and peach syrups he brewed were especially good. His tamarind raspas are still remembered with yearning in posts on Laredo nostalgia Facebook groups.
Deliveries at work were great. There was a WW2 military jeep, the kind with no top, a fold-down windshield, and 4-wheel drive that you engaged by turning the locking hubs on the front axle. There were pals on the sidewalks to wave at and bumpy dirt roads to bounce down minutes away from downtown. Somehow a 15-minute delivery in the Jeep could take an hour.
The other delivery vehicles were a couple of pickups, a '59 Dodge and a '63 Chevrolet. I used those to smuggle auto and bus parts into Mexico. During the 25-year boom in US-Mexico trade, the fixed exchange rate of 12 pesos to the dollar made it cheaper for the bus manufacturers in Monterrey to buy all their electrical systems from Detroit than to manufacture them in Mexico. Most of my father's profits weren't from selling batteries, tires, and after-market air conditioners to Americans, but from exporting alternators and electrical systems to Mexican bus manufacturers. I delivered pickup truckloads of the parts to the Laredo bus terminal weekly.
Every once in a while though there would be an inventory crisis at the factory in Monterrey, and my father would get a call to rush an alternator or two down to them as soon as possible. That's when I'd put the boxes out of sight on the passenger side floor of one of the trucks, take $5 from the cashier, and head across the International Bridge to Nuevo Laredo.
At the Mexican customs checkpoint, I'd been trained to hold the $5 bill folded lengthwise in the fingers of my left hand like a cigarette and rest my forearm along the window ledge of the door. When the official asked "¿Algo que declarar?" I'd look down at the cash and answer, "No, señor." The money disappeared from my hand with no visible motion, and he waved me through. There was a fellow in a pickup by the Plaza Benito Juárez waiting for the contraband who sped away with it to the Monterrey highway. It was "kanban inventory management" twenty years before the American financial press gave the Japanese term its fifteen minutes of fame.
With the inevitable devaluation of the peso in 1983, this chapter of international trade came to an end and never returned. Nowadays with NAFTA, the direction of manufactured goods flows the other direction as any drive down I-35 from San Antonio to Laredo demonstrates.
Dartmouth followed me home to Laredo, and not just my bad habits. During freshman year I'd become acquainted with the eccentric anthro major, DOC legend, and train-hoppper, John Merriam '70. Merriam is the guy who brought the news of the Great Fairlee Beer Train Derailment to campus back in February. His passion (it was way more than a hobby) was riding freight trains, and he had a bucket list of tunnels and bridges to ride through and over. When we were talking one evening, he told me that he might drop in on me in Laredo during his summer transcontinental train hobo trip. I thought "yeah, yeah, Laredo is a hell of a long way out of your way" and forgot all about it.
One hot morning the assistant manager comes back to the garage and tells me there is some gringo in the store asking to speak to me. I look up and there's crazy John Merriam, absolutely filthy but grinning at me as he walks up. He'd just ridden in the cab of a giant International Harvester machine headed to Mexico on Missouri Pacific. I call my mom and ask her to set an extra plate so one of my Dartmouth classmates could come for lunch. Lunch was the day's big meal anyway, and she said sure, eager to meet an Ivy Leaguer in real life.
I'll never forget the look of shock and horror as she got a look at Merriam walking in the kitchen door. We postponed lunch while he took a shower and cleaned up. My mom is shaking her head in disbelief. East Coast folks are crazy. But Merriam redeemed himself with his gracious manners and easy conversational style over the fried chicken washed down with quarts of sweet iced tea. By the end of the lunch, my parents had decided that maybe there was hope for me among Dartmouth classmates.
That afternoon I dropped Merriam off on the highway where he hitched a ride to Del Rio to catch the Union Pacific freight to L.A. By the end of the summer he'd made it up the coast to Portland, across to Chicago, and home to New York. From the Pomfret School to Dartmouth to the hobo life. Still, it probably wasn't the strangest trip any of us took.
A delightful difference from the nine months of being a freshman at Dartmouth was the availability of girls. Before arriving in Hanover, I'd had no idea what their absence would feel like. How many times freshman year in the barbaric chaos of New Hampshire Hall had I wondered what kind of trouble I'd got myself into.
My success rate with girls from distant campuses was .000, even lower than Mario Mendoza's notoriously low batting average. Unfortunately, throwing up on Mt. Holyoke girls' shoes at mixers was not a good opening move, mistaking as I did the Animal House manner for the natural behavior of a boy wearing a green Dartmouth jacket.
Back in Laredo, there were the girls I'd known forever, ex-girlfriends, girls who'd broken up with boyfriends, girls who'd got a lot prettier over the winter, and all of them were just a phone call away. There were movies to see. It was the summer of Jack Nicholson's awful B-movie "Psych-Out" and John Wayne's equally bad "Green Berets" as well as Cantinflas comedies and Antonio Aguilar charro movies in the two Spanish-language theaters in Laredo or the five across the river. Hugh Masekela's "Grazing in the Grass," Simon & Garfunkel's, "Mrs. Robinson," and The Young Rascals "People Got to Be Free" were playing on KTSA.
There were hamburger joints to cruise, a Lovers' Lane for making out at Lake Casa Blanca, and an all-ages nightclub that had a light show and played psychedelic music. It felt like breaking through the surface and gasping for breath after a long dive.
Most of the girls' fathers had a strict prohibition about taking them on dates across the river to Nuevo Laredo. Once I broke that rule, not knowing that my date's father had an arrangement with every bartender in town to call him if they ever saw his daughter in one of their bars. The taste of a Cuba libre still gives me a flashback to looking up from my drink to see Claudia's dad striding menacingly toward us at our little table in the Club Alma Latina.
Nuevo Laredo had all the customary border town attractions. It was a 10-minute drive from my house and a 10¢ bridge fare to cross in my '47 Plymouth.
Three blocks from the International Bridge there was the air-conditioned Bar Munich that served supercooled lager in pint chalices of heavy glass that were kept in the freezer. These restorative "bolas" went for 25¢.
On August 2nd, Rolando García, Chiqui Torres, and I drove up to San Antonio to catch the Jimi Hendrix Experience at the Municipal Auditorium, a thrilling, very loud concert that ended with Hendrix's dedication of his version of "Wild Thing" to all the guys in 'Nam and the signature Stratocaster destruction finale.
Before the show, we checked out HemisFare 68. On the way to the ticket kiosk, who should be exiting but our '71 classmate Tim Risley, another New Hamp survivor. Back then, when everything was so strange, I'd come to expect weird things to happen.
The Summer of '68 turned out to be the last summer of my childhood. It was a summer of fun and of tragedy: the three best athletes of my Laredo generation were killed in a car wreck on the way home from a seeing a baseball game at the Astrodome. Another friend was stopped for speeding on the same highway, and after a search was arrested for possessing an ounce of marihuana. He was sentenced in July to a year of 'rehabilitation' at the Texas State Mental Hospital. Howard's year of confinement where there was an abundant supply of LSD and heroin turned a regular guy into a schizophrenic junky with a preference for living on the street.
At the end of the summer, I took a fork in the road, completely unaware that it would be the last time I ever lived in Laredo or that I was about to meet the girl who would be wife.
The ending of Vernon Scannell's little poem "No Sense of Direction" reminds me of that Laredo summer fifty years ago:
For I lack their gift,
Possess almost no
Sense of direction.
And yet I owe
a debt to this lack,
A debt so vast
No reparation
Can ever be made,
For it led me away
From the road I sought
Which would carry me to -
I mistakenly thought -
My true destination:
It made me stray
To this lucky path
That ran like a fuse
And brought me to you
And love's bright, soundless
Detonation.
https://books.google.com/books?id=ySdLAQAAQBAJ&lpg=PT159&ots=g7IMvthKQz&dq=vernon%20scannell%20no%20sense%20of%20direction&pg=PT160#v=onepage&q&f=false
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