So I explain where La Feria is, more or less, but I can never explain what La Feria is. Nor was. Nor what it meant to me.

It’s the "was" that I’ll write about in this series. I grew up in La Feria some 60-odd years ago. To me, the memories are still vivid. I’ve been back, yes, on several occasions, and a few archeological reminders of growing up still exist. Yet it’s always a bittersweet return. Revisiting, I feel like a cat in a room full of furniture that’s been moved around.

I truly don’t know what it’s like to live in La Feria today, but back then it was like Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer, Andy Hardy and me, all of us running full tilt toward Holden Caulfield. La Feria turned out to be a wonderful experience—warm, tranquil and supremely innocent. It’s the innocence I miss most.

My parents moved to La Feria in 1939, when I was three years old. My mom and dad were both doctors, and I suspect a few people—old residents of La Feria—might still remember them: Heinrich and Annie Lamm.

I went through all 12 years of the town’s school system, starting in first grade in 1942 and graduating alongside 24 classmates in 1954. I then went away to college in Oregon and New York, and although I did return to La Feria for holidays and on other occasions, my life there effectively ended after high school. And yet the town has continued to be my geographic and emotional center, and I’ve always realized that I owe it more than I can say.

In writing this series, I’ve decided to throw chronology to the winds. So figure on coming in at the middle, somewhere between about 1942 and 1954. In the end, my ramblings might make a little sense, but they’ll tend to be impressionistic. ______________________________________

The two of us worked out of a tiny office at the front of the Alto movie theater on Oleander Avenue. The one-room office contained a desk, two chairs, a phone, a police radio and a filing cabinet.

Mrs. Galt was then about 35 years old: a tall, dark-haired, pleasant-looking woman with glasses. I remember her as being constantly cheerful and very energetic, always full speed ahead.

Mrs. Galt loved photography, had won numerous prizes, and several magazines had published her pictures. She owned a great, huge 4x5 Speed Graphic, and I think her energy and that camera were really why the Star hired her. They sent her all over the Valley to take pictures. She kept film holders and flashbulbs everywhere: in her purse, inside her old Mercury coupe and all over our office.

She had a darkroom at her home on the lake in Adams Gardens, and when she wasn’t out shooting for the Star, she’d be processing film and making prints. Typically, Mrs. Galt would listen to the police scanner until she heard something interesting—news of a fire, an auto accident, whatever. Then she’d dash out with her Speed Graphic, take pictures, get names and information, rush back to her house, develop and print the photos, write the copy and whip everything over to the Star’s headquarters in Harlingen.

Meanwhile, it was my job mostly to stay at the office and mind the phone. I also had a day-to-day assignment that involved reporting on La Feria’s city activities. My beat took me to the mayor’s office, police department and water works. I’d hop on my bike first thing in the morning and pedal over to the mayor’s office, talk to his secretary and ask if she had any news. Same at the police station and the water office. Most mornings were pretty quiet. One thing about being a 10-year-old cub reporter: I wasn’t exactly a threat to my news sources.

The city secretaries indulged me and treated me with good-natured bemusement. And yet I was very serious about my job. When something newsworthy did happen, the secretaries would usually tell me about it. I’d write the story in longhand, and if Mrs. Galt felt it was significant or interesting, she’d type it up and pass it along to her editor in Harlingen.

Mrs. Galt paid me out of her own pocket. The arrangement was that I got 50 cents per column inch of printed copy. I kept track of my stories, cut them out of the paper and pasted them in a scrapbook. At the end of the week, Mrs. Galt would get out her ruler, measure the text and pay me. I’d typically earn a couple of dollars a week.

Whenever I wasn’t gathering news, which took half an hour or so each morning, I’d sit in Mrs. Galt’s office and wait for the phone to ring. The office had a rear door that opened into the Alto movie theater, and I’d often go back there and savor the cool darkness. Of course, I’d spent many a happy Saturday afternoon watching B westerns in the Alto, both before and after working for Mrs. Galt.

When I sat there alone in the dark, I could smell the popcorn and disinfectant and feel the sticky floor under my feet. Since I had such easy access to the theater, it occurred to me to let friends in through our office door on Saturdays when movies were playing, but I never worked up the courage.

By far the biggest story I ever wrote for Mrs. Galt was about the six-year-old La Feria boy who dropped down a chimney. The kid’s name was Dougie Garrison, and I knew him vaguely. Seems Dougie decided one afternoon to enter his house by climbing down the chimney. He promptly found himself solidly stuck. Luckily someone heard him yell, and even more fortunately, he’d gone down with his arms up over his head. Dougie’s dad and a couple of neighbors climbed on the roof, lowered a rope and pulled Dougie out.

His family then delivered him to my dad’s medical office to get him a tetanus shot, and that’s where I heard about Dougie’s ordeal. Mrs. Galt took pictures of the still-sooty Dougie, and I wrote up the story. It made the front page of the next day’s Valley Morning Star under my byline. It was the first time I’d gotten my name in print. I was thrilled by the byline and doubly pleased when Mrs. Galt measured the text and handed me $5.50.

At summer’s end, I returned to school, and that pretty much ended my newspaper career. But Mrs. Galt had already pointed me in the direction of my eventual life’s work: writing, editing and book publishing. So I’ve been eternally grateful to her. Thank you, Eleanor Galt.

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Anyway, I wake up, discover they’re gone and start to cry. I run out of the house looking for them, run up Main Street past the Wander Inn. There, sitting on a wooden bench, are three or four grizzled old codgers in bib overalls. They yell at me to stop, which I do, and one of the men takes out his dentures and clacks them at me. Scares the bejeezus out of me. I let out a yelp and run back home as fast as I can.

And there, thank goodness, is my mother, who takes me in her arms and carries me back to bed. This was not a dream, and I remember those teeth as clearly, even today, as if they’d been captured on film.

A few months later, I’m walking around town one afternoon and I discover who clacked those teeth at me that night. It’s an old La Feria character named Slim Green. Slim Green rented a room a few blocks away and made a living, such as it was, by fishing in the La Feria main canal. The canal contained good-sized alligator gars, and Slim Green would catch them and take them to the rear of his boarding house and slice them up and sell the meat.

So on this particular afternoon a couple of friends and I are playing cowboys and come across Slim Green out behind his boarding house, slicing up this huge gar on a wooden table. The gar’s maybe six feet long, or so it seems to us. We’re fascinated: the blood, the scales, the knife, somebody’s dog patiently waiting for scraps.

And in the midst of our mesmerization, Slim Green takes out his dentures with this dirty, bloody hand and clacks them at us...and he laughs this toothless laugh. Again, it scares me good; in fact, it freaks all of us poor kids, and we scatter and run for home. Then I realize at last that it was Slim Green who clacked his teeth at me in front of the Wander Inn, and that memory all floods back.

Later, when I’m a teenager, I happen across Slim Green on a hot afternoon when some friends and I are swimming in the La Feria main canal, and I ask him about gars. Slim Green is a tall man, painfully thin, with stubble growing out of a tan, leathery face and eyes as blue as a glacier. There aren’t many gars left, he tells me. The Messkins (his word) have caught them all.

And then, without provocation, he launches into his life story...this old man pouring out his soul to a teen that he’d scared witless several times. Turns out Slim Green has no family and no money to pay the rent.

One day poor old Slim Green disappears, leaves La Feria, never comes back. No one ever hears from him again. No idea what ever happened to him. Today we’d probably call him a homeless person. But except for his teeth, he was never a threat, never sinister, no one to fear as we might fear a homeless person today. He was just a character who happened to live in La Feria for a time, same as me.

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My mother, Annie, had won several riding competitions as a young girl. This was in her native Germany between the wars. Anyway, in 1942, when I was six and my sister, Miriam, was four, my mother bought herself a lovely tri-color horse named Spot. At the same time, she bought us kids a little bay range pony named Pigeon. Pigeon was larger than a Shetland but considerably smaller than Spot.

Mother taught us how to ride, and the three of us often went out together, two on Spot and one on Pigeon. My mother, as part of her medical practice, also occasionally made housecalls on Spot.

The countryside around La Feria was ideal for horseback riding back in the 1940s and ‘50s. Most roads weren’t paved, and farmers didn’t seem to mind if you rode across their open fields or through their citrus groves.

Horseback riding was mostly a boys’ activity at that time, and although Miriam and a few of her friends had horses, I usually rode with my school buddies. We often played cowboys and Indians on horseback, and it wasn’t unusual to take our horses swimming in the La Feria and Mercedes main canals.

But even during my love affair with horses, I was learning how to drive. That education started when I was 12. My best friend, Mike Eaker, lived out on Kansas City Road, and his dad owned a little Ford-Ferguson orchard tractor. Mike Eaker knew how to drive the tractor, and it didn’t take him long to teach me.

So I was driving, albeit slowly, when I was 12. Texas at that time allowed 14-year-olds to get drivers’ licenses if they had compelling reasons. When I applied for my license, I told the lady at the motor vehicle department that my parents needed me to run errands. This wasn’t strictly true, but it satisfied her.

So on the day I turned 14, I went to the DMV in Harlingen, took my driver’s test and passed. I subsequently worked at a succession of after-school and summer jobs that involved cars. I’ll talk more about them in the future, but for now suffice it to say that I worked first at Kelly’s Garage, then at Miller’s Garage, both in La Feria, and finally at Joe Machner’s Humble filling station for a couple of years, loving every minute.

These jobs taught me a lot more than why cars ran or didn’t—they taught me the difference between good and bad bosses, good and bad workmanship and good and bad customers.

During that time, from age 14 (1950) through 18, when I went away to college, I bought, sold and traded a stable of cars that I very much wish I still had today. One was a 1932 Cadillac V-16 sedan for which I paid $90. Another was a Ford hot rod roadster with a hopped-up V-8 and a Columbia 2-speed rear axle. I owned a 1938 Packard Super Eight three-window coupe, four Model A Ford roadsters, two Ford flathead V-8s coupes, two La Salle convertibles, a 1935 Pontiac sedan, a 1936 Plymouth coupe, a 1931 Hudson 8 sedan that my dad bought for me, three early 1930s Studebakers, a 1934 Buick sedan that was given to me by J.C. Dunn, and maybe a dozen more.

I rescued most of these cars from imminent scrappage, and the price I paid was typically $15 to $30. A lot of these cars didn’t run when I bought them but did afterward. On some I made money, on most I lost, but again the experiences served as a good education.

The point is—and this will come up again as I write—that my personal life involved, first and foremost, my family and second, horses and cars. These passions intertwined and overlapped to some degree, and except for the fact that I have no horses today, they still do.

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Not that this trio had to fight a lot of crime. La Feria was pretty peaceful back then, and the lawman’s duty was more to prevent crime than solve it. All three lawmen were well known and properly respected.

Jake and Pablo were physical opposites. Jake, who was then in his 50s, stood tall, thin, gaunt and, I think, patterned himself after Randolph Scott. Pablo was 20 years younger, short and rotund. Both were immaculate dressers, and their "uniforms" consisted of heavily starched and beautifully ironed cowboy outfits. Their wives must have spent hours at the ironing board.

Jake Cain’s typical getup would consist of gray twill trousers, gray cowboy shirt with green piping and brown inserts at the shoulders, hand-tooled cowboy boots, a beige Stetson and, most fascinating to us boys, a big, shiny badge and a chrome-plated .38-caliber Colt revolver in a tooled hip holster.

Jake Cain was the consummate cowboy lawman, and Pablo Lopez was, in our eyes, his sidekick. Pablo wore similar outfits, also starched and ironed to a fare-thee-well, with creases as sharp and straight as a knife edge.

Both lawmen drove identical Ford sedans, each with a big red light on the roof and a chromed siren on the passenger-side fender. Pinky Dierks also drove a Ford, but his was a black-and-white with Texas stars on both front doors.

Pinky was a large man, well over six feet tall, with his red hair neatly crewcut, his skin florid, freckled and looking perpetually sunburnt. Pinky was in his 30s. He wore the standard-issue Texas highway patrol uniform, which again looked a lot like a cowboy outfit, Stetson and all.

Pinky’s patrol wasn’t limited to La Feria or even the surrounding area. During the day he covered the Valley from McAllen to Brownsville. But he lived in La Feria and spent quite a bit of time in town, so we considered him another of "our" peace officers.

I got to know all three men when I worked as a pump jockey at Joe Machner’s filling station at the corner of Main and Commercial Streets, just off the old Highway 83. This was in the early 1950s. Machner’s Humble station (Humble Oil was a subsidiary of Standard Oil of New Jersey) served as a gathering place for all sorts of La Feria citizens, partly because Joe was a very likable person and partly because the station breezeway was usually blessed with a breeze.

We all perched on the front fenders of two or three or four cars parked grille to grille in the breezeway. These gatherings took place on most weekday evenings when things got slow at the station. I was always the youngest of the group. The cast included the three lawmen—Jake, Pablo and Pinky—my boss, Joe Machner; my co-pump jockey, Jorge Guzman; a man named Butler, who ran La Feria’s only taxicab; Mr. Simandel, the town’s night watchman; and maybe one or two farmers who happened by.

Discussions were always led by the three lawmen, who regaled us with their days’ adventures: domestic tiffs, speeders, drunk drivers, stray animals, car accidents and so forth. Innocent as it was, we all thought this was local news and gossip at its juiciest.

Of the hundreds of tales told in the breezeway, I remember only one. This story came from the lips of Jake Cain, and the reason I remember it is because it haunted Jake for a long time afterward.

Seems one evening he got a call from the owner of a bar in the south part of town. The barkeep asked Jake to come over and pick up a woman named Angelina, who was very drunk. Angelina, as all of us fender sitters knew, was the town hooker; in fact, she was La Feria’s only hooker and much talked about for that reason.

Jake drove to the bar, picked up Angelina and deposited her in the back seat of his Ford, whereupon she immediately fell fast asleep. Jake knew where she lived, so he drove her to her house.

When they got there, Jake opened the Ford’s rear door. Angelina woke up, looked at Jake, smiled sweetly and cooed that one fateful word, "Daddy!"

Jake told us the story, and we all laughed, but immediately Pinky said, "Hey, Daddy, what happened after that?" So we had another good laugh. And from that night on, we all called Jake Cain "Daddy." It always caused a titter. Poor Jake must have hated that word, but he never got angry, never called anyone on it, and after a while we started calling him just Jake again.

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I remember J.C. Dunn as a tall, imposing, powerful-looking man with salt-and-pepper hair and a crewcut. He marched when he walked, and he mostly stayed within walking distance of the industrial complex he’d built alongside the Southern Pacific tracks in the northeastern part of town. By the time I became aware of J.C. Dunn’s empire, it sprawled over several blocks along the railroad tracks and East First Street and contained a number of not only tin buildings but substantial yellow-brick packing sheds and his own red brick home on the same property.

My grandfather, Ignatz Lamm, worked for J.C. Dunn during World War II. My grandfather had been a metalsmith in Germany, and he needed a job when my parents brought him to La Feria in 1940, so Mr. Dunn put him to work soldering tin cans. In those days, cans arrived as sheet stock, and the cannery had punch presses that cut and rolled the flat metal. My grandfather and other workmen then hand-soldered the side seams. The round bottoms got crimped on by machine before the cans were filled, and the tops were crimped on afterward.

A pervasive cannery odor often hung over La Feria, depending on the season and what fruits and vegetables were being processed. Sometimes the town smelled like grapefruit juice, sometimes like frying bacon (this was from the making of cottonseed oil at the various gins), sometimes like tomato soup, sometimes like pineapple juice.

Pineapples were brought in from Mexico, and La Feria’s streets were often black with the sugary pineapple goo that leaked from the incoming trucks. When these blackened road surfaces got wet, they were as slippery as axle grease, but the pineapple juice soon washed away during a rain.

J.C. Dunn’s canning and shipping operation ranked as the biggest, liveliest business in La Feria at the time. I have no idea how many people he employed, but it had to be a goodly percentage of the town’s population.

I knew J.C. Dunn’s son, James, in high school. We were both interested in old cars, and James owned a Ford Model T coupe. I’d go over to his house, and together we’d explore the sheds and semi-abandoned outbuildings on his father’s property. J.C. Dunn was one of those people who never threw anything away. Out on the weedy back lots behind the cannery, for example, we found a fleet of aluminum Nash Quad military trucks from World War I. Bulging cans of over-ripe tomato and pineapple juice stood among the trucks in great, messy heaps. Occasionally we’d hear a can explode in the hot sun.

Inside a nearby abandoned powerhouse, James and I discovered a huge generator attached to a four-cylinder diesel engine that stood nine feet tall. Another shed contained cartons of new but obsolete, never-used auto parts, including stuff for Model T Fords.

In one such shed, parked in a dark corner, we came across a dusty green 1934 Buick sedan that obviously hadn’t moved in years. James had never seen the car before. I asked whether his dad might want to sell it, because the body and interior were in good condition. James said he didn’t know, but we could ask.

So the two of us marched unannounced into J.C. Dunn’s private office, and I asked Mr. Dunn if he’d sell me the Buick. He told me it hadn’t run since the war, and if I could get it going again, I could have it for free. For free? Yes, for free! Well, what better challenge could a car-struck 15-year-old ask for?

James and I spent the next two weeks working on that Buick. We didn’t really know what we were doing, but we were learning. We must have disassembled the carburetor and distributor half a dozen times, cleaned everything and put it all back together. But time after agonizing time, the Buick refused to start. Finally, I went back to the shed that contained those new old auto parts, found a new ignition coil and condenser, installed them, and lo and behold, the engine fired right up.

True to his word, J.C. Dunn signed the Buick’s title over to me. Why he didn’t include James in the deal I don’t know, but I wasn’t asking. I thanked Mr. Dunn and drove the car home. Four days later, a fellow stopped me on Main Street and asked if I wanted to sell the Buick. I said sure. The guy paid me $30 cash.

That $30, and especially the immediacy of it, felt mighty good. But it took me years to realize that J.C. Dunn, the man who’d made his fortune adding sweat equity to a windfall of corrugated tin, was teaching me how to do the same. ____________________________________

The 4-H Club encouraged kids to take on certain farm-oriented projects. Some of my friends raised calves, lambs, chickens or goats and took them to the Valley Mid-Winter Fair and won prizes and sold their animals for a lot of money.

I, too, belonged to 4-H, but my sister and I didn’t want to raise chickens except as pets, and we couldn’t raise cattle, so we got left out when fair time rolled around.

One year our high-school science teacher, Mr. Kell, who was also the girls’ basketball coach, became a 4-H leader. When I talked to him about the possibility of using my horse, Smokey, as a 4-H project, he said horses weren’t allowed but suggested that I raise a pig instead. A pig? Why a pig? Because, said Coach Kell, he had a bunch of piglets out at his place in the country, and if I wanted one, he’d give it to me. That way I could raise it, keep the required 4-H records, show it at the fair, maybe win a prize and sell it.

The idea appealed to me. So I arranged with Coach Kell to ride Smokey out to his place one Saturday morning and pick up the piglet. I rode out to his place, riding bareback as usual, brought along a gunnysack to carry the pig home in, and headed out about five miles along Parker Road which, at that time, wasn’t paved. When I got to Coach Kell’s house, he caught the piglet: reddish brown it was, and very cute, but a squealer. The piglet was none too pleased to be caught and even less happy when the coach and I stuffed him into my gunnysack.

I climbed back on Smokey and set the piglet in front of me, crosswise, for the ride home. The piglet screamed and squirmed at first, but the rhythm of riding along seemed to calm him, and within half a mile or so the piglet got very quiet. And that’s when I felt the first dribble running down my leg.

I thought to myself, Oh, well, no big deal, and I kept on riding. Another half mile down Parker Road and I smelled something that almost took my breath away. There was no question where the smell was coming from, and pretty soon the gunnysack got gooey with pig poop.

I tried to gallop so I could get home faster, but the piglet did not take kindly to Smokey’s stiff-legged lope, so we slowed down again to a very anxious walk.

I’d made a little pigpen inside our horse pasture in town, and that’s where I unceremoniously dumped the piglet when I got back. I then rode home and washed myself and Smokey with a garden hose.

My parents hadn’t known anything about my 4-H plans. At the dinner table that evening, when I told them about bringing the piglet home and leaving it in the horse pasture, my dad chuckled at first and then got very serious. "Mike," he said, "Don’t you know that it’s illegal to keep a pig within the city limits?"

"No," I replied, "I’d never heard of that."

"Well, it is, and you’re going to have to take that pig back to Coach Kell."

Next morning, my dad phoned the coach and explained the situation. That afternoon, sadly, I stuffed the piglet into another gunnysack, draped it over Smokey’s withers, and headed back out into the country. The piglet pooped again on the way to Coach Kell’s house, and that pretty much ended my craving for a 4-H project.

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Back in the 1940s and ‘50s, the 60-mile drive from La Feria to Port Isabel seemed endless to my sister and me. But then all car trips seemed endless. Our parents sat up front talking, while Miriam and I rode in the back seat wearing the hot, heavy, itchy, woolen bathing suits of that day.

Back then, only two structures existed on Padre Island. At the very tip, the Coast Guard station looked like a building washed up from New England. It bristled with radio antennas and had a wire fence around it: remnants of World War II.

Then about a mile up the island, north, stood the second structure, a wonderfully weathered old wooden building that we called simply "The Hotel." The hotel faced the beach on the ocean side. It was built on a platform atop a series of tall, spindly, gusseted, wooden pilings.

The hotel was one room deep. Architecturally, it consisted of a central lobby/dining hall flanked on either side by long verandas that led to the guest rooms. To get to the lobby, you climbed up from the beach on a wide central stairway. Once up top, about 14 feet off the sand, you had a wonderful view of the entire island.

At the top of the stairs, you turned right or left and walked along the veranda to the guest rooms. The rooms had screened-in fronts and backs so you got a cross breeze. I don’t believe the hotel had any glass windows at all. The doors were also screened and had just hasps, no locks.

Curtains inside the screen provided what little privacy there was. Each room was furnished with several canvas cots, a wooden dresser and a couple of wicker chairs. That was it. There was no electricity, so at night we guests lit kerosene lanterns. Sanitary facilities consisted of an outhouse in the dunes and a shower off the back of the lobby.

I don’t have any idea where the fresh water came from. And it wasn’t really fresh. It always tasted a little salty.

The shower drained through slats in the floor and emptied onto the sand below. It was possible to look up through the shower floor and watch people soaping themselves; a fascinating perspective for us kids.

To get to the hotel, you began the trip by boarding Colley’s ferry boat down at the foot of the pier in Port Isabel, where the causeway now leaves the mainland. Once on the ferry, you putt-putted across the bay and were met on the other side by a man driving a rusty Model A Ford truck. The truck had been converted into a halftrack so it could get across the dunes.

We passengers sat on wooden benches along either side of the truck’s bed, and a canvas roof provided a modicum of shade. Model A’s, durable as they were, didn’t last long on the island, but they were cheap and plentiful on the mainland, so when one died, another was brought over to take its place.

The halftrack ride across the dunes took about 20 minutes, and you never knew whether you’d make it all the way. This lent extra excitement to the trip, and I remember one afternoon we had to walk the mile or so back to the ferry landing when the Model A simply quit.

We didn’t need a lot of vacation gear in those days: bathing suit, overnight bag, maybe a straw hat and a book or two. The hotel employed a marvelous cook, a black man who caught fish out in the surf and pan fried them for the guests. We usually had fish for dinner and sometimes for breakfast.

The hotel catered strictly to families, so there was never any rowdiness except from us kids chasing crabs in the damp sand below the hotel. The hotel was usually filled to capacity, meaning 10 to 12 families and lots of children. My parents read and chatted with the other guests while we kids belly-surfed or ran around the dunes.

Idyllic? Oh, yes. And did we appreciate it nearly enough? No.

Well, the hotel blew away periodically in various hurricanes, but it always got rebuilt. Always, that is, before the first causeway, when Padre Island became more developed. After that, there wasn’t much point in resurrecting the old hotel, so it simply faded away into memory.

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The library portion of this room was separated by a counter and had maybe two rows of stacks plus additional shelves on three walls. Books were mostly things like Mark Twain and Jack London, some Nancy Drew mysteries, Thorne Smith novels, stuff kids liked to read.

I read most of those books as part of my daily sentence to pass the time in study hall. Study hall was a part of every school day, but there was rarely any need to study anything. I duly served my time, and then one afternoon, almost by accident, I discovered the real treasures of our high-school library: dusty old magazines.

These were bundled by title and year, each neatly tied with brown twine. Most of these magazines were from the 1930s. Apparently some enterprising librarian had sorted and arranged them for posterity. I happened to be that posterity, and what got me interested in the old issues of Time, Life, Fortune, The Saturday Evening Post, Colliers, etc., were the car ads.

As I’ve mentioned before, nothing interested me more at that time than automobiles. I was thoroughly smitten, and more than anything else I wanted to learn everything I could…not about literature, not about science, not about math, not about geography…I wanted to learn everything I could about cars. Also, to me the most beautiful cars ever built were those of the early 1930s, particularly 1932 models, and this remains an opinion I still hold today.

Well, I began my new-found automotive treasure trove by reading those old copies of Fortune in the study-hall library, undoing each neatly tied bundle and starting with the premier issue in 1930. Fortune had the most gloriously opulent classic car ads ever created, many of them in color at a time when most magazines printed only black and white.

I use the word "classic" with some reservation, because in the 1950s, automobiles of the 1930s were plainly and simply used cars. The concept of classic cars was in its infancy. Duesenbergs, Auburns, Cords, Packards, Pierce-Arrows, 16-cylinder Cadillacs, LeBaron Imperials and coachbuilt Lincolns were often drugs on the market, relegated to the back rows of used-car lots.

Even so, to me they were very beautiful and special, and I spent hours in study hall poring over those richly illustrated, wonderfully luxurious ads in Fortune. I even did the unthinkable: I took my pocket knife and razored out a lot of those ads, smuggled them home and pasted them in a scrapbook. Today, I’d kill a kid if I caught him doing that, but if it’s any consolation, I still have the scrapbooks.

Once I’d ravaged Fortune, I moved on to Time and Life. The cars and car ads in those two magazines weren’t nearly so glamorous, but they did give me a sense of how auto manufacturers pitched their products to ordinary citizens. Here were ads for Fords, Chevys, Plymouths, Dodges, Hudsons, Willys, Grahams, Studebakers and so forth, each trying desperately to weather the Great Depression.

Going through Time and Life magazines of the 1930s, I couldn’t help but discover the history of that decade. In my quest for car ads, my eye landed on pictures of men smashing whiskey casks, men standing in bread lines, men camped alongside railroad tracks...also such events as the shooting of Chicago’s Mayor Cermak, the Hindenburg, President Roosevelt at his desk and in open cars, Hitler and Mussolini coming to power...the events of the Depression leading up to World War II. I would be stopped by the photo, read the caption and then the article, not because a teacher had assigned it but just because I couldn't help it. And so I learned a little history.

Nor were Colliers or the Post safe from my knife. National Geographic didn’t carry ads in those days, but I flipped through great stacks of them anyway, looking for pictures of bare-chested women from Tonga or Borneo. Cars might have been my burning passion, but they weren’t my only interest.

My point is this: Here was a library doing what libraries are meant to do: provide pleasure and information. My level of inquiry might have been low, La Feria’s high-school library might have been tiny, it might have been humble, but it fed my fascination with old cars, and it incidentally/accidentally sparked an interest in history. What better can a library do?

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Lloyd LaFond, like his dad before him, sold nothing but Hudsons. So most people in town drove Hudsons, my father included. My dad must have been Lloyd’s favorite customer, because he bought a new car every three years—the usual interval back then—and he never haggled. Whatever Lloyd said the car cost, my dad paid. And Lloyd set the trade-in allowance.

Everybody in town loved Hudsons. The factory ran an aggressive racing program, and for three years, 1951-52-53, the Fabulous Hudson Hornet won more NASCAR and USAC races than anything else on wheels. Every time Hudson scored a major victory, the company would congratulate itself with full-page ads in all the local newspapers.

I pored over those ads and got to know the drivers the way kids nowadays know basketball stars and baseball players. Marshall Teague was Hudson’s winningest champion, and my other Hudson heroes included Fonty Flock and Herb Thomas. They came roaring out of those newspaper ads, smiling in triumph, white circles around their eyes where they wore their goggles, and the romance of it all captivated me in the way that the Beatles enthralled teenagers a decade later.

I had a personal affinity for Hudsons, not only because they won races but also because I’d worked for LaFond Motors for a short time when I was eight years old. Then, too, my dad and mom drove nothing but Hudsons from 1939 through 1960.

The car-buying season had a rhythm in those years. Carmakers would announce their new models each autumn. Lots of hoopla ensued. About a week before each year’s grand unveiling, dealers would whitewash their showroom windows. Then, the night before the latest model was to debut, they’d set up searchlights, clean the windows and park the new cars amid banners and signs.

Next morning people would be lined up waiting. In La Feria, this annual ritual represented entertainment of the highest order. We teens got all excited and couldn’t wait to see the new Hudsons.

On the designated morning, we’d go to Lloyd LaFond’s dealership first. Later we’d drive over to Harlingen and check out all the other makes: Ford, Chevy, Packard, Nash, Cadillac, Dodge, Willys, etc.

Well, in 1948, Hudson had come out with a truly innovative design, the so-called "Stepdown" body style...very low and modern. And that style continued through 1950. But then for 1951, the factory started hyping the "all-new, totally changed" Hudson, and I was primed for the Second Coming.

I dragged my parents down to LaFond’s, and there it stood, the new 1951 Hudsons. They looked suspiciously like the old Hudsons. Yes, there was the new Hornet model, but outwardly all 1951 Hudsons looked 95% like 1948 Hudsons. As did, disappointingly, the following models for 1952 and 1953.

So everybody in town was looking forward to the 1954 Hudson, which we’d heard really was going to be all new and different. Hudson needed a shot in the arm, because by late 1953, the company was in terrible financial shape. Worse, Hudson was losing races to Chrysler and Oldsmobile.

Then one sunny afternoon in September 1953, about a week before new-car announcement time, my high-school buddy, Larry Myers, came to me and told me he’d already seen next year’s Hudson, the 1954 model.

"It really is all new and different," Larry assured me. Larry was Lloyd LaFond’s nephew, so he had the inside track.

I asked him, "Where’d you see it?"

Behind Lloyd LaFond’s house, in Lloyd’s home garage.

"Okay, let’s go check it out right now," I pleaded. This was serious business. I was jumping up and down.

So Larry and I went to Lloyd’s house, sneaked around back, and Larry slowly opened the garage doors. There it stood, a big, green, brand-new sedan, facing inward. My first impression was of the rear. So far not so good. It looked fat and finless. Fins were all the rage in 1954. This car had wimpy little fins on a broad backside, with a Ford-like, squared-off bustle.

We walked through the garage to the front of the car. Ohmygosh, the front was even uglier than the rear. Hudson had obviously tried to copy Oldsmobile’s "fishmouth" grille, but the design was awkward and amateurish. If I hadn’t been a senior in high school, I would have cried. I was crestfallen. What a horrible anticlimax.

But my father was due for a new car. He liked the 1954 model, and we all loved Lloyd LaFond and Hudsons in general, so he bought an ugly 1954 Hornet as soon as he could, and he drove it for the next six years. My dad finally traded it in...his last Hudson...on a new Volkswagen Beetle. The times they were a-changing. ______________________________________

Larry owned a sorrel quarter horse named Charro. Charro was astonishingly fast and had a lot of personality. My horse was a blue roan named Smokey. Smokey tended to be skittish. He’d rear up at imagined dangers, like a paper bag blowing across the road, and he had a habit of loping sideways. But I liked Smokey, and we got along fine.

In those days, La Feria was surrounded by open fields and citrus groves, and most country roads weren’t paved. Privacy was less an issue then than now, and people didn’t mind us riding across their farmland. So one of the charms of horseback riding was the absolute freedom to trespass pretty much wherever we wanted.

Larry was one of those guys who had everything going for him. He had the looks of a Brando when Brando still looked like Brando. Larry was bright, brash, witty, full of energy, a good athlete. He played football, rode horseback extremely well, and had confidence to the point of guttsiness. Everyone liked him.

When we’d ride, we nearly always rode bareback. And we often took our horses swimming in the La Feria or Mercedes main canals. The horses weren’t anxious to go swimming, but with enough prodding, they’d take the plunge. Larry and I would be stripped down to our skivvies, and in the water we’d hold onto our horses’ manes as they swam.

One day Larry happened across an orphaned baby raccoon. He adopted it, named it Jake, and Jake would ride behind Larry on Charro, hanging onto Larry’s waist with his tiny, human-like hands. Eventually Jake grew up and turned mean, so Larry set him free.

I also remember once riding along the arroyo toward Harlingen. About halfway there, we came upon a good-looking young woman on a farm. She was hanging out wet laundry near the levee. Larry stopped and flirted with her. She was obviously flattered and interested, but she kept telling him that her husband would be coming home soon. Larry didn’t believe she had a husband. I sat there fascinated and scared to death. The husband finally showed up, and we left in rather an awkward hurry.

The summer between our junior and senior years in high school, Larry rode his Triumph motorcycle out to Los Angeles. He got a job parking cars near Hollywood and Vine. When he came back to La Feria, Larry told my classmates and me about the movie stars he’d seen, what cars they’d been driving and what they looked like in person. His Hollywood stories struck us as the height of romance and adventure.

We graduated together, but then Larry went his way and I went mine. I saw him only three times after that. He’d taken a job in Harlingen, married a wonderful, beautiful girl named Lorraine, later started a couple of businesses, and his life seemed to be going well. Then, in the early 1970s, I heard from a friend that Larry had come down with MS, multiple sclerosis. My parents, who knew about such things, said it was serious, although Larry might live with MS for a long time.

He did. He struggled on for the next 30 years. Lorraine steadfastly stood by him. The two of them must have gone through some tough times together, and the one I know about had to do with their motorhome catching fire. Larry was badly burned, but he survived.

The third and last time I saw Larry, he and Lorraine owned a very nice home in Rio Hondo alongside the arroyo. Larry had chosen not to come to one of our La Feria high-school reunions, so a group of us drove out to Rio Hondo and visited him. He was cordial and still confident, and his voice sounded exactly the same. But he wasn’t Larry anymore, not the horseback-riding, motorcycling adventurer he’d been in school, and that’s probably why he didn’t want to attend the reunion.

Larry passed away a few months ago, and his death not only made me sad, it made me wonder again about the mechanism of human chance: how luck, good and bad, gets parceled out to various people. Larry showed me that luck is way beyond winning the lottery. Luck has to do with being spared the misfortunes that befall the innocent through no fault of their own.

Larry Myers was as good a person as you’d ever want to meet. He was that before he came down with MS and also afterward. Why his luck turned remains a mystery, but I think I was lucky just to know him.

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Guy Miller was a big, burly man of about 40. His hair and beard stubble were starting to gray. He usually wore bib overalls and a black, quilted welding cap. The cap was his trademark. Miller smoked a lot, swore a lot, but he didn’t drink, and he was actually one of the sweetest, kindest, most considerate people I’ve ever known.

Miller, unlike Kelly, was an excellent mechanic. He’d always worked alone before he hired me, although occasionally he’d bring in his cousin, Bramwell, when he needed an additional pair of hands.

Bramwell, whom Miller called Cuz Bram, was perpetually unemployed except when Miller called him in. To some extent, Miller hired me to supplant Cuz Bram, because on occasion Cuz Bram could be unfindable.

Miller’s Garage occupied a large tin Quonset hut that fronted on Primrose Street in downtown La Feria, just east of Main Street. Miller had a loyal following, and because he was so good at what he did, he sometimes had to turn jobs away. He was meticulously clean in his work, totally honest, and the garage enjoyed an excellent reputation. I was 15 years old that summer, proud to be working for Miller and happy to get this chance to learn from the master.

Guy Miller had a great sense of humor, and he loved a good laugh. His buddies would often pop in while Miller was hard at work, but their presence didn’t slow him a bit. Miller might be busy welding or lying on his back under a car, but it didn’t affect his conversation. He was always cordial and engaging and never missed a beat.

Miller’s personal car was a motley 1941 Chevrolet sedan that he called "Old Blue." Old Blue was his baby, and he lavished a lot of mechanical skill on that car. He’d replaced Old Blue’s Chevy motor with a newer, hopped-up GMC engine, so the car ran really fast. He’d also installed truck brakes, so it stopped like a sports car.

One weekend, driving through the King Ranch, Miller hit a deer. Next morning, back in La Feria, he and his wife, Aileen, surveyed Old Blue’s mangled front fender. "Guy," said Aileen, "if you hadn’t been driving so fast, you never would have hit that deer." To which Miller replied, "Yeah, but if I’d been driving a little faster, I wouldn’t have hit it either."

I learned a lot of new swear words from Miller, and although he never swore in front of women, he made up for it around men. Also, when he worked, he often broke wind, usually with trombone-like resonance, and whenever he let out an especially loud blast, he’d chuckle and say, "Well, that system’s still working."

Once when I was replacing the head nuts on a flathead Ford V8, Miller told me, "Okay now, I want you to tighten those nuts down so hard that I can cut lockwashers off your a__hole." Classic Miller!

My apprenticeship at Miller’s Garage taught me a number of things that MBAs rarely learn. First, it taught me how to tell the difference between a good boss and a bad one. Very important if you’re going to be happy in your work. Kelly was the archetypal bad boss; Miller the best.

My summer with Miller also taught me how to manage time. Guy Miller didn’t waste it, and he had the ability to do two and three things simultaneously, like work and talk.

Third, he made me aware of, and gave me an appreciation for, very high standards of craftsmanship. Miller did things right; never cut corners.

And finally, he taught me that it’s in the best interest of any business to make the customer happy. That’s so basic it shouldn’t need saying, but I’m constantly amazed when I deal with clerks, waiters, technicians or airline personnel who really don’t care how their customers feel. Those are the businesses I usually don’t go back to. Guy Miller had the opposite problem: too many customers. He’s a lesson for us all.

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On those hot, humid summer afternoons when school let out, we young boys—and this was strictly a boys’ activity—would run to the end of either West Verbena Avenue, scramble up the canal bank on a diagonal footpath, rip off our clothes under the hackberry trees and plunge happily into the milkshake-colored water that flowed through the locks.

If indeed it flowed. We’d go there never knowing whether there’d be water in the canal or, if so, how deep it would be. Occasionally, the farmers wouldn’t need water and the canal would be empty. Most days, though, the canal was full, which meant that excess flow was spilling over the lock. In that case, we’d dive off the lock toward the deep side.

The canal bed itself was clay, but directly beneath the lock stood a concrete apron that extended out about 10 feet and then dropped straight down. We couldn’t see the concrete under the water, but we kids all knew it was there.

I remember once diving off the lock and entering the water a bit too close to the apron. I surfaced with long, straight scratches on the tip of my nose, chest and toes. I’d just barely cleared the concrete apron. If I’d dived a quarter inch closer in toward the lock, I probably wouldn’t be writing this now. It was one of a half dozen scrapes I survived by sheer luck in my pre-teen and teen years. I’m sure everyone’s had similar experiences.

Anyway, the canal was one of our high social gathering places—sort of an exclusive boys’ club. We spent a lot of lazy afternoons swimming, diving and playing in the water and running around naked on the tree-shaded banks. Fish would occasionally bump against us as we swam.

When the canal was low and nearly empty, we’d walk down the bed looking for fish pools. We could always find minnows and a sunfish or two. More fascinating were the deeper, larger pools, where the alligator gars got trapped. We'd dare each other to jump into those pools, but no one ever did.

We’d also sometimes make little figurines out of the yellow clay that we’d dig out of the inner canal bank: cups, bowls, animals, cars, whatever. We’d leave them in the sun to dry, but they never cured uniformly and nearly always cracked.

The other thing we liked to make were canal boats. We could always discover all the necessary materials in backyard scrap heaps. If you’ve never made a canal boat, here’s how:

First, find a piece of used, corrugated, galvanized roofing tin and a couple of 2x4s. Bend the tin lengthwise into the shape of a canoe. Nail 2x4 uprights in the prow and stern while flattening out the tin corrugations. Then nail two more 2x4s crosswise near the top of the open hull. These become the seats and also add strength.Finally, find some tar and fill all the old and new nail holes.

Voila! Your boat is now ready to launch into La Feria’s bounding main canal. Couple of tips: Before crafting your boat, it’s best to hammer and bend over what will become the upper edges of the hull. Otherwise the tin can be dangerously sharp. And if you can’t find tar to fill the nail holes, chewed bubblegum works pretty well if you smear motor oil over it to keep it from sticking to your anatomy.

For paddles, we used old brooms drizzled with molten tar. And although we did make such boats about once per season, we spent a lot more time swimming than paddling. That was because the boats tended to leak, so the fun was more in construction than use. Nights, we’d leave them on the canal bank, and they’d eventually disappear. Easy come, easy go.

My parents, who really weren’t all that keen to have me swim in the canal, would sometimes slip my sister, Miriam, and me a dollar so we could go to the Fair Park pool in Harlingen. We’d take the Valley Transit bus, always with friends.

The Fair Park pool was a lot of fun, too, but totally unlike skinnydipping in La Feria. The canal was "our place," devoid of adults, girls, bathing suits, towels, life guards and rules. The pool, clean and pleasant as it was, seemed too civilized, too formal. We kids owned the canal; we didn’t own the pool. It always felt like someone else’s place.

So to me, the swimming hole of choice throughout my childhood and teen years remained the La Feria main canal.

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Joe Machner owned and ran the Humble service station just south of where Main Street crosses Highway 83. I should explain that Humble Oil and Refining Co. became Exxon in the mid 1960s. The station itself was anything but humble, nor was Joe. Joe was a robust fellow, average height, dark hair, quick wit, and always a big smile, but a genuine smile, not put on.

In 1952, when I started working for him, Joe was about 35 and married. He’d been an aspiring professional baseball player in his younger years, a member of a Texas League team that made it to the finals in Kansas City. Unfortunately they lost the last game, and Joe stopped playing after that. But he still had the energy, confidence and physique of an athlete.

On my first day at work, Joe told me: "No matter how busy you are or what you’re doing or how important it might seem at the time, if you see a real, live customer pull in for service, drop everything and run out to greet him. And I mean RUN! Don’t walk. Never walk. Run out there with a smile on your face and say, ‘Yessir, what can I do for you?’ and start cleaning his windshield." So that’s what I always did. I still feel it’s a good policy for anyone in the service business.

People were drawn to Joe, and he treated each customer like a personal friend. I started out at the station working part-time after school, then full-time throughout the summers of 1952 and ‘53. My co-workers were Jorge Guzman, fondly known as "Choche," and Jorge’s cousin. We all got paid by the hour, and we were often on duty from seven in the morning until nine in the evening. I enjoyed the work immensely, and Joe soon gave me a raise to 35 cents an hour.

One of Joe’s devoted customers was Mrs. Harpst, La Feria's principal realtor. She owned a black 1947 Lincoln sedan that she was very proud of, and she brought it in faithfully every 1000 miles for a lube and oil change. I was allowed to wash her car, but only Joe could service it.

One Saturday morning, Mrs. Harpst dropped off her Lincoln and asked Joe to deliver it to her house after he’d changed the oil. Choche and I tended the pumps while Joe serviced the Lincoln on the grease rack. He finished, let the car down and asked me to follow him in the station pickup.

As we headed out toward Mrs. Harpst’s house in the country, I noticed smoke coming out from under the Lincoln. It promptly got thicker. I honked, and Joe acknowledged the smoke but kept going.

Finally, after we’d driven another mile or so, the Lincoln simply stopped. The engine had seized. Turned out Joe had forgotten to add new oil after he’d let the car down off the grease rack.

Well, Joe felt pretty terrible, and Mrs. Harpst wasn’t too pleased either. Fortunately, Humble Oil had insurance, so Joe didn’t have to pay for a new engine.

About a week after Mrs. Harpst’s Lincoln died, I arrived at the station after school and noticed Joe sitting in his car across the street. This was already pretty unusual, because Joe was always either in the station, working, or at home with his family. But here he was, sitting behind the wheel of his Hudson, windows up, sobbing. Or it looked like he was sobbing. And it made sense, given the upset of Mrs. Harpst’s Lincoln.

Joe sat there in his car, shaking, his face crinkled up, eyebrows and cheeks twitching, and it simply looked to me like he was crying. Which was pretty scary, because men like Joe didn't cry. I stood there for what seemed a very long time, watching out the station window, and finally I walked over and wanted to console him...pretty presumptuous now that I think about it: me, the kid, consoling this big, tough, former athlete. But that’s what I’d intended to do.

As I walked across the street, Joe rolled down his window, and I could see a stack of comic books on the seat beside him. He had a copy of Archie comics on his lap. So instead of sobbing, he’d been sitting there all that time laughing. Boy, was I relieved!

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My parents would give my sister and me each a quarter: 15 cents for the ticket, a nickel for popcorn and a nickel for a Coke. The show usually started at one in the afternoon, and we often stayed until four or five, depending on how many short subjects there were and whether we wanted to watch the main feature one more time. When we emerged from the darkness into La Feria’s dazzling sunlight, it was like a million flashbulbs going off at the same time.

Legend has it that the Alto Theater on East Oleander began life with a marquee that flashed "Rip’s Alto." The owner’s first name was Rip. It wasn’t long before the bulbs that formed the "P" went out, so Rip renamed his moviehouse the "Rialto." Eventually the "RI" also went dead, and Rip, being a practical sort, re-renamed his emporium the "Alto" Theater.

If you’ll recall, the Alto was where I worked as a cub reporter when I was about 10 years old, in Mrs. Galt’s office just to the right of the ticket booth. On Saturdays, an exuberant mob of us kids—virtually everyone in town under the age of 16—descended on the Alto. My buddies and I got there at about 12:45 p.m. in anticipation of another magical matinee.

We were never disappointed, because we would have sat there and watched anything that moved. All moving pictures were good. We had absolutely no critical sense, and part of the fun was simply being there. The best seats in the house were on the first row downstairs and the first row of the balcony. Being nearsighted, I preferred to sit right up against the screen.

Moviegoing back then was a social event and one of the highlights of the week. Before the movie started, we’d run up and down the aisles, yelling, screaming, bumping into the girls, throwing popcorn and raising as much benign hell as we dared. Even so, it was all pretty tame, and while the teenager who’d been hired as an "usherette" tried to shush us, it never worked, and eventually she’d just give up.

Saturday-afternoon fare at the Alto took on a format that rarely varied. First came a cartoon, and we always loved that no matter what it was. Next were previews of coming attractions, which interested us moderately. Third was News of the World, through which we wriggled and squiggled in anticipation of the short subject. This might be the Three Stooges, Our Gang, Little Rascals or Pete Smith in one-reelers.

Next on the bill came the weekly serial: Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, Superman, The Masked Marvel, Gang Busters, The Phantom, something like that. Each weekly installment ended in a cliffhanger, and my buddies and I would speculate all week long on how The Phantom or Buck Rogers was going to get out of his seemingly insoluble predicament.

And finally, at long last, the wondrous adventure we’d all been waiting for: the main feature, a wild and woolly western.

My favorite cowboy star was Johnny Mack Brown, and I’ll tell you why. We accepted that Roy Rogers was King of the Cowboys, but he wasn’t my favorite because he sang a lot and used Jeeps and cars, which ruined his movies’ authenticity. Gene Autry was worse, because he sang interminably and had no charisma at all. Even his horse, Champion, was grossly misnamed.

Whereas Johnny Mack Brown always stayed in character. His movies seemed historically correct, his plots were filled with action, and he didn’t sing. Singing just slowed everything down. We never understood why cowboys felt they had to sing.

In about 1944, when I was eight, Johnny Mack Brown actually came to La Feria on a war-bond drive. I remember seeing him above the crowd, standing on a flatbed trailer towed by a Jeep. Whenever anyone bought a bond, he’d come down and shake the buyer by the hand.

On one occasion when he climbed down, he passed one of his pistols out to us kids. We were absolutely thrilled; he couldn’t have done us a bigger favor if he’d slipped gold coins into our palms. Along with a dozen or so of my friends, I got to hold Johnny Mack Brown’s pistol for maybe 15 seconds. I stared at that gun, moved it from hand to hand, marveled at its shininess and heft, its pearl handle, and those 15 seconds felt like the most glorious of my life, certainly up until then.

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We did not have TV. Radio was our television, and the screen was in our heads. There were quite a few radio shows timed specifically to air when kids came home from school. Among my favorites were Jack Armstrong, All-American Boy, Sky King, The Lone Ranger and Terry and the Pirates. Each episode ended with a cliffhanger. My friends and I couldn’t wait to find out what happened next, and speculation often ran high. We also occasionally listened to adult soap operas: Stella Dallas, The Romance of Helen Trent, Ma Perkins, Lorenzo Jones and his Wife, Belle, Mary Noble, Backstage Wife and a bunch more.

During World War II, I became very involved with newspaper comic strips. I’d lie on the living-room floor, the Valley Morning Star spread out before me, and I’d pore over each drawing and every bubble of dialogue. I especially liked Buzz Sawyer, a strip about a young Air Force pilot fighting the war in the Pacific. He had a sidekick named Sweeney, and together they got into and out of all sorts of harrowing scrapes.

Buzz Sawyer was very real to me, and some of the episodes, like Buzz and Sweeney being captured and sent to a Japanese internment camp, went on for months. After the war, Buzz and Sweeney’s adventures became more commonplace and a lot less interesting.

Another favorite was the cowboy comic strip, Red Ryder. I could somehow identify with both Red and his sidekick, Little Beaver. The strip was drawn in a very angular, gritty style, which somehow lent it reality. Nor did it hurt that I owned a Daisy Red Ryder BB gun.

As kids, we lived in a number of different worlds. The reality of La Feria was one, but so were our intertwined images of radio characters, the funnies and those from the silver screen.

La Feria had the Alto Theater, which I talked about earlier. There was another moviehouse in town, one that showed only Spanish-language films. I don’t remember the name of the theater, but I do remember that the building didn’t have a roof, so it showed movies only at night and in fair weather. I went there a couple of times, but I preferred Saturday matinees at the Alto.

There was also a moviehouse in Harlingen, the Arcadia, which my parents considered much more glamorous than the Alto. My family sometimes went to the Arcadia on Sunday afternoons. The Arcadia advertised air conditioning ("20 degrees cooler inside") and showed Technicolor double features, usually a drama plus a musical...and, of course, the requisite cartoons, short subjects, news and, occasionally, the giving-away of china to lucky ticket holders.

Going back a bit, I vividly recall the experience of seeing my first-ever movie. This was at Rip’s Alto in La Feria, probably around 1942, when I was six. My mother took me, and I believe the main feature was Walt Disney’s full-length cartoon, Dumbo, about a flying circus elephant.

The first thing that came on the screen, though, was an appeal to buy war bonds. To dramatize the war effort, a military tank appeared on the screen. At first, it seemed to be far in the distance, but it came slowly forward, clanking and chuffing closer and closer. I knew what a tank was, but I’d never seen anything like this, and to my mind, the tank was real.

When it seemed that the tank was about to come off the screen and run down the middle of the theater, I leapt out of my seat, ran screaming up the aisle and fled out the door. My mother came running after me, and outside she took me in her arms and comforted me as best she could.

I was determined not to go back into the moviehouse, but she assured me that the tank was gone, and I reluctantly returned to see Dumbo, which I thoroughly enjoyed. I was hooked on movies after that and have been ever since. ______________________________________

Baby birds, for instance, would regularly fall out of trees. We’d bring them home, make warm little nests out of socks, carefully feed them bits of milk-soaked bread and canned catfood on a toothpick. About a week later they’d die. I don’t believe Miriam and I actually ever saved a single baby bird, but we did try.

We also had a number of pet chickens that we raised from chicks. We’d buy the chicks down at C.C. Buck’s Feed & Seed for a nickel apiece. I’d build a little pen for them out of two-by-twos and rabbit wire, and in time the chicks would grow up into adult hens and roosters.

Our favorite was Ranger, who started out as a young rooster but was soon laying eggs on the front porch. Ranger had a lot of personality, and we became quite attached to her. She was a Rhode Island Red, and as an adult chicken she was allowed to roam the neighborhood. But then one day a big dog came along and attacked poor Ranger and mortally wounded her. Even so, Miriam and I managed to raise a number of other chickens, some of whom lived long, happy lives.

One sunny afternoon when I was eight or nine years old, I was riding my bicycle along Magnolia Street, and there in front of the Baptist church, I happened to see a dead possum lying at the curb. The possum had been hit by a car.

What caught my eye was the fact that although it was obviously dead, the possum seemed to move. I stopped and looked, and sure enough, it did move, and yet its head was crushed and there was no doubt that it this possum was not playing possum.

What seemed to be moving were the hairs on the possum’s belly, and when I looked more closely, I could see tiny hands and feet poking out of the possum and wriggling around. So I got off my bike, found a small stick, and very carefully parted the hairs along the possum’s abdomen. I didn’t know at that time that possums are marsupials and that they carry their babies in a pouch, but much to my surprise I could see these wee baby possums, very much alive, inside the mama possum. Each one was about an inch and a half long, and their eyes were shut, like a puppy’s. They were hairless, with pink skin so thin you could see through it.

I pedaled my bike back home as fast as I could and told Miriam about what I’d seen. She didn’t believe me, so I said, "Come on, I’ll show you," and we went back to the possum, and sure enough, together we discovered that there were six baby possums inside the mother’s pouch.

Miriam returned to our house and came back with a cardboard box that she’d lined with cotton. We gently removed the baby possums and placed them in the box, covering them with the cotton to keep them warm. They wriggled around helplessly and looked very hungry.

Miriam rigged up a possum baby bottle, using one she’d gotten with a doll set. She then warmed some milk, filled the bottle, and fed it to our new charges. They drank eagerly, and as they did, we could see through their skins that the milk was filling their stomachs.

When my parents came home from the office that evening, we showed them the possums and proudly explained how we’d rescued them. My mother shook her head and said we shouldn’t hold out a lot of hope for their survival; they looked awfully young, almost fetal. But Miriam and I persisted, and Miriam, especially, took very good care of them, feeding them every few hours and making sure they stayed covered and warm.

But one by one, the baby possums died. The last of the six lived for about a week, and then it, too, passed into possum heaven. Miriam and I held a service for each one and buried it in our backyard, marking the grave with a little cross made of Popsicle sticks.

In addition to the possums, we also "rescued" a number of grass snakes, lizards, horned toads, frogs, and even a large, hairy tarantula. But as attached as we became to all these creatures, none ever affected us so much as our six baby possums.

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She was in her early 60s at the time, a woman of average height and appearance. She wore sensible shoes and sensible cotton dresses, wire-rimmed glasses, and she pulled her hair back in a bun. She used no makeup, and her thin lips made her seem stern and severe, but she always had a twinkle in her eye.

Twinkle notwithstanding, Mrs. Buck brooked no nonsense in class. She controlled us great lumps of teenaged boys without ever raising her voice. We considered her strict, yet all she ever did was give us "That Look." If we got out of line, Mrs. Buck would purse her lips and fix us with a flinty, squinty glare. "That Look" meant that whatever she said, we did, immediately and with the respect she expected.

Mrs. Buck loved to teach, but she certainly didn’t have to. Her husband, C.C. Buck, owned La Feria’s most successful feed and seed store. Mrs. Buck could have stayed home and lived the quiet life of a garden-club matron. But somewhere in Edith Buck’s experience, she’d developed a passion for books. She enjoyed literature and the English language, and at some point she must have decided to try to pass those enthusiasms along to us lumps. I suppose she thought she might make a difference in our lives. She certainly did in mine.

Mrs. Buck had a rare quality: She taught by encouragement. She praised us when we did something right. She wasn’t effusive, but she had this ability to make us feel good about ourselves when we pleased her. So we were anxious to please and thus anxious to learn.

Mrs. Buck taught intuitively. It was in her nature. As was a sense of humor. We teenaged lumps considered her strict and serious, but we couldn’t help noticing that she occasionally chuckled at little personal jokes that we didn’t quite get. On reflection, those chuckles must have been her way of coping with the ironies of her situation.

I don’t know how it is now, but in those days, high-school students and teachers tended to keep their distance. Teachers socialized with teachers; kids with kids. There was no precedent for students and teachers sitting down together over a Coke or a cup of coffee. How nice that would have been, but it didn’t happen. If anything, we were a little afraid of our teachers, and that fear acted as a barrier to any social involvement outside the classroom.

After I graduated high school in 1954 and had gone away to college, the one and only subject I was really prepared for was English. Mrs. Buck had taught me to write and edit a decent sentence, and she’d introduced me to many of the British and American authors on my college reading lists.

A couple of years later, when I came home on spring break, my dad mentioned to me that Mrs. Buck was in the hospital, dying of cancer. Did I want to visit her? My dad was Mrs. Buck’s doctor, so he knew what was happening. He told me she didn’t have a lot of time left. I thought about it and made one of the stupidest decisions of my life. I decided not to go see her.

Somehow, despite my realization of what Mrs. Buck had done for me in high school, despite her stature as a teacher and the importance of what she’d taught me—taught all of us lumps—that social barrier between student and teacher still existed. I couldn’t bring myself to face her, lying there in a hospital bed, especially since both of us would know we’d never see each other again. So I didn’t go, and I’ve regretted it ever since. ______________________________________

The Wander Inn was a little mom-and-pop cafe on Main Street, just north of Primrose, run by a family named Jones. The front of the cafe, facing Main Street, was screened in, and you entered through a screen door with "Rainbo Bread" emblazoned on the push guard.

There were no tables inside the Wander Inn. You sat at a counter on revolving stools, and although I never counted the number of seats, I’d say there were no more than 15.

For years, the Wander Inn had a big lighted sign outside, way up on a pole above the sidewalk, that said simply EAT. And eat we did. The Wander Inn was that day’s equivalent of a McDonald’s, but with infinitely better food and service.

Mr. Jones cooked; Mrs. Jones served us the enchiladas or burgers and Cokes or malts and rang us up on the cash register. A plate of enchiladas cost 45 cents, plus a nickel for a Coke, so my parents always gave my sister and me each 50 cents for lunch.

This was in the early 1950s, when the old high school on West Lilac had no cafeteria, so we kids either brought our lunches or went home or downtown to eat. I was one of the downtowners and, of course, in those days most of us got our driver’s licenses on the day we turned 14. Fourteen was the legal licensing age.

So I got my own car as a freshman in high school: a pristine, shiny black 1931 Hudson sedan that Lloyd LaFond, the only new-car dealer in La Feria, sold my father in 1950 for $300. Came lunchtime five days a week, a bunch of us kids would pile into my Hudson, and we’d all go down to the Wander Inn.

There’d always be enchiladas waiting for us. Where Mr. Jones learned the art of cooking enchiladas I’ll never know, but he did it with love and consistency. Mr. Jones wrapped corn tortillas around seasoned, fried, crumbled hamburger meat, with chopped raw onions and grated cheddar cheese inside plus more of the same sprinkled on top, all baked in a magically delicious red sauce made from Mr. Jones’s own secret recipe. And Mrs. Jones served up his enchiladas on large, heated china plates. No plastic or paper in those days.

So this noontime ritual took place every school day, and the Wander Inn became quite the social lunch club for us high schoolers. We looked forward to eating there, jabbering up and down the counter and thoroughly enjoying the enchiladas (or hamburgers; Mr. Jones also made wonderful burgers).

Anyway, one noontime, the usual four or five of us arrived at the Wander Inn, took our seats and discovered something new. A traveling salesman had left vending boards on the lunch counter. These boards stood propped up, and each contained little cardboard canisters filled with peanuts. The canisters were cylindrical, about an inch across and an inch and a half long, and they fit into holes in the boards.

As I remember, there were three such boards along the counter, each containing 25 canisters in five-by-five groupings. Mrs. Jones promptly explained to us that the peanuts sold for a dime a canister, but the kicker was that, in each board, two of the 25 canisters contained not just peanuts but also a quarter. So theoretically you could "win" a quarter, 25 cents, by paying a dime.

Well, here we were, a bunch of kids waiting for Mrs. Jones to serve up our enchiladas, and we spent the time waiting to be served by taking each little canister out of the board, shaking it, and weighing it in our hands. It wasn’t that hard to figure out which canisters contained the quarters, and those were the only ones we bought that noontime.

The poor Joneses had the devil’s own time selling the rest, and much to our disappointment, the traveling salesman never brought more peanuts. But the enchiladas remained, and with the same savoriness as always. In the intervening half century, I have yet to discover an enchilada that tasted as good.

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Mr. Reitz was a remarkable man, although you wouldn’t suspect it to look at him: average height, bald, with a moustache and unusually short arms. But in terms of energy and personal magnetism, Mr. Reitz was the right guy to lead a band. I don’t recall ever seeing him in a bad mood. And although he did get angry with us kids from time to time, he had a way of yelling in an almost frantically comic fashion. He’d flail those short arms and slap at gnats on top of his head, or he’d twist his nose and fling his baton at whoever was misbehaving. Somehow his half-real, half-faked frustration always seemed to defuse the situation.

We in the band had tremendous respect for Mr. Reitz, partly because we realized how much he liked us, partly because he enjoyed his job so much and did it so well, partly because he brought huge amounts of enthusiasm to the very hard work of musical performance and presentation. It wasn’t easy to whip a bunch of farm kids into an organization that consistently won awards on the concert stage and wowed audiences at halftime on the football field.

Football overshadowed other activities at La Feria High in those days, and if any extra cash showed up in the till, football coaches got first dibs. Mr. Reitz realized early on that if he was going to get money for things like band uniforms, instruments, sheet music, music stands, travel and all those other things necessary to the making of a good school band, he was going to have to raise it himself.

So with the help of a faithful group of hardworking band mothers, Mr. Reitz raised the money not only for those items but for a whole new band hall.

Looking back, it seems to me that the band hall began life as a small residence somewhere in La Feria. Mr. Reitz simply had it moved out behind the high school, then gutted the interior so that it became one big room. I remember that, to muffle the acoustics of that original shell, Mr. Reitz asked all band members to bring in as many empty egg cartons as we could find, and for weeks we collected hundreds of them. Finally, in the manner of a barn raising, a bunch of us boys came to the band hall one Saturday at Mr. Reitz’s request and proceeded to nail up egg cartons on every surface of the walls and ceiling. We also laid down tarpaper on the floor, and at the end, we had a band hall that didn’t sound like a big echo chamber.

A lot of the band’s funds came from tamale sales. Bucky Zeitler’s and Danny Gunn’s moms organized little tamale factories in the basement of the Methodist church. The men and boys would drive over to the next town, Mercedes, and fill a pickup bed with masa; then we’d get meat and corn husks, and everyone in the band would set to work.

The tamales were the best I’ve ever tasted, like the Wander Inn’s enchiladas, and we kids went door to door and had no trouble selling the tamales around town. They sold for 35 cents a dozen or three dozen for a dollar. People snapped them up.

Bucky Zeitler, who played first cornet in Mr. Reitz’s band, reminded me that the maestro had yet another way to raise money. "What I do remember," Bucky told me after I’d sent him a rough draft of this reminiscence, "were the cakewalks in the middle of Main Street. These were to raise money for new uniforms. I remember them as a lot of fun.

"When the band started playing, you walked around this big circle of numbered chairs, and when the music suddenly stopped, you had to sit down quick on one of the chairs. Then Mr. Reitz pulled a number out of the proverbial hat and the lucky winner got a freshly baked cake that had been donated by the band moms."

Bucky also reminded me of some of the expressions Mr. Reitz used with us kids. When someone got out of line, Mr. Reitz would tell him to, "...go out for a short beer," meaning the unruly student would have to stand out on the front porch of the band hall. Mr. Reitz didn’t believe in sending kids to the principal’s office.

When a band member missed a note or a beat, Mr. Reitz would say, "You sound like someone from Van Buren," a town in Arkansas that had a reputation for a terrible band. Or he’d say, "You’ve got to be from Seguin," a Texas town with discipline problems.

And to get kids to come to the marching field on time, Mr. Reitz would fire a starter’s pistol. He had a flair for the dramatic.

Peter Llewellyn, another LFHS band alum (trombone) to whom I sent a rough draft, remembers that Mr. Reitz took us places we’d never have gone otherwise. "With Reitz," says Peter, "we’d march in the Charro Days Parades in Brownsville, take trips to Laredo to march in their Washington’s Birthday celebration and go to Raymondville to march in the Onion Festival." In Raymondville, we each played carrying an onion, and we sang "I'm a Lonely Little Petunia in an Onion Patch" while Sarita Seward, the cutest girl in school, danced around dressed in a petunia costume.

"Reitz," continues Llewellyn, "was a musician's musician. He was a fiddler, wind man, percussionist, an excellent singer, director of both the band and the high-school chorale. So Warren Reitz introduced us to classical music and jazz in addition to the great old marches by Sousa and others.

"He was also instrumental in getting us band kids out of town for things other than football games. Mr. Reitz took us on tours to perform at other schools, and I fondly remember how he introduced us to the wonders of San Antonio. Remember the visits to the Longhorn Saloon for those big El Stinko cigars, the late-night frolics of five and six to a room in the Bluebonnet Hotel, the excitement of riding the escalators at Joske's, and the wonders of Breckenridge Park: the zoo, the Sunken Gardens, the novelties and souvenirs? Most of us kids would probably have had to wait until adulthood for these experiences. He gave us a peek at the larger world...the first excursion off our ‘island’ of the Lower Rio Grande Valley.

"There was also Mr. Reitz’s homespun philosophy," concludes Llewellyn, "that included such gems as the difference between playing notes and playing music: ‘...eggs with and without salt,’ as he put it. He’d warn us about getting shipped off to Seguin if we didn’t watch our P’s and Q’s, because he viewed Seguin as hell on earth. And when we played well, Mr. Reitz would praise us and say we were ‘playing up a storm’ and were ‘as hot as a two-dollar pistol.’"

Mr. Reitz’s drove an ancient Chevrolet panel truck, which he’d use to ferry musical equipment and sometime students from place to place. I can remember sliding around on the steel floor of the "panel job." No seatbelts, of course. Today OSHA would throw him in jail, but we thought the panel job was great fun. Peter Llewellyn recalls, "When Mr. Reitz’s old Chevy panel truck finally got so bad that it looked like terminal ugliness, he went out and hand-painted it a flat black.

"There was never any money available, so he personally made and sold music stands to the school at cost. Mr. Reitz likewise saw to it that we could get first-rate used musical instruments inexpensively from San Antonio’s recently defunct Santa Rosa School of Nursing band. Remember all of those instrument cases initialed with SRSN in nail polish? My King trombone was one of them."

Band performances in that era were as competitive as the football games themselves, and Mr. Reitz set very high musical and marching standards. He pleaded with us to "woodshed" our music at home, and in the early morning, out on the football field, we’d go through the marching routines again and again, until we all got them just right, both musically and choreographically. He wasn’t a perfectionist, fortunately, but he came awfully close. So thanks to just that one man, the La Feria High School band won awards both in marching competitions and on the concert stage year after year.

The big event was always the Pigskin Jubilee, held annually in different towns around the state. We’d woodshed and woodshed and practice some more, and by golly, La Feria managed to take first place every time.

"I remember the day Mr. Reitz announced he was leaving La Feria," recalls Peter Llewellyn sadly. "For many of us it was our first experience with losing a loved one. We just knew that the good feelings, friendship and instruction couldn't be duplicated by anyone else."

Warren Reitz moved to Austin in 1952, where he and his son, Robert, opened a music store. In 1978, Mr. Reitz was riding as a passenger in a car that was hit by another automobile. He was badly injured and died from complications in 1980.

-copyright Michael Lamm, 2004