Hometown visit dredges up memories: Ramón Rentería

February 24, 2007

Ramón Rentería / El Paso Times

Small hometowns renew your soul every time you go back.

Mine just celebrated its 125th anniversary, a remarkable feat considering you could have put all of Valentine's population (186, mas o menos) on Red Brown's 18-wheeler flatbed trailer that masqueraded as a float in the West Texas town's Feb. 17 parade and pachanga.

The railroad's arrival in 1882 injected the town with life and transformed the little pit stop on U.S. 90 into an important shipping point for cattle ranchers. And the railroad's gradual departure a few decades later pretty well stunted Valentine's growth forever.

So, I'm sitting there in the high- school auditorium the other day, trying not to burp after lunch and watching one of those PowerPoint gizmos with all sorts of historical images, pictures of people and buildings we once knew but no longer exist.

And memories started flowing.

Growing up in Valentine in the '50s and '60s, you could chase girls, rabbits, lizards and javelinas -- and steal peaches -- all in the same day.

For 50 cents, you could get a crew cut at Richard Calderon's barbershop, a dusting of nice-smelling powder and a sex education. Los hombres there told wonderful, raunchy stories and jokes that a young boy with an overactive imagination could ponder and digest for a long time.

If you didn't whine too much, your uncle might let you tag along the next time he went to fix a flat on the Model-T at Bell's Garage. He might even buy you a Grape Nehi. And as you drank it, you could stare at the coolest thing you had ever seen as a boy -- a single-engine airplane, up there, hanging from the garage ceiling like some mysterious artifact.

Deep in your heart, you now know that Fritz Bell, another memorable character, was a kind man. Yet, the little guy wearing a locomotive engineer's cap, overalls and sneakers scared a couple of generations of boys and girls simply because he looked different. No one ever explained to us why.

Later on, dances in the high- school auditorium were an exercise in bravery or humiliation. The guys cluttered the two doorways like turkey vultures. And the girls (or at least the ones you really wanted to dance with) sat across the auditorium near the bandstand.

You stood there for what seemed like an eternity, building up the courage to walk across the auditorium, knowing this journey was at best a crapshoot. Once in a while, the girls would say no. So, you had to figure out how to gracefully walk back to the cluttered doorway, and then drum up enough courage to try again or simply go outside and drink beer.

So, I'm sitting there reminiscing as the school superintendent is telling us that Harry S. Truman spoke to 500 people in Valentine from the rear platform of his rail car during his 1948 whistle-stop presidential campaign.

A couple of hours later, I stood before the friends and people that I've known forever and reaffirmed my wedding vows to Noemi, the girl that swept me off my feet in Valentine and then stood by me all these years, through the premature birth of our youngest daughter, Ana, the brain surgery that could have killed me and too many funerals.

In the summer of 1955, award-winning director George Stevens shot a portion of his Western epic movie "Giant" in a fake Mexican village that Hollywood erected behind the Catholic cemetery and just down the block from the adobe house in which I daydreamed too much. The locals mingled with Rock Hudson, James Dean and a very young Elizabeth Taylor.

My dog, a white mutt with attitude problems, and I earned a free lunch and five or six bucks a day as extras, along with a handful of other boys in town with dogs. We were told to show up on the Valentine set, take off our shirts and pretend we were Mexican boys.

Maybe I should have stuck to making movies. I mean, how hard is that?

This article originally appeared on El Paso Times: Small hometowns renew your soul every time you go back: Ramón Rentería