Llano
Grande Journal
Hard Work and Dignity: Perspectives from the Fields of South Texas
The Llano Grande Center for Research and Development, Edcouch-Elsa High School, Edcouch, Texas
To recapture local history largely missing from conventional textbooks, students and staff of the Llano Grande Center for Research and Development, housed at Edcouch-Elsa High School, are conducting and publishing interviews with elders of their Rio Grande Valley community. In addition to conducting, transcribing, and editing interviews, students also collect and archive old photo-graphs from area residents. They publish their final products, together with narratives and reflections from community members, in the Llano Grande Journal, available in English and Spanish, in hard copy and on-line (www. esconett.org/ llanogrande/). Younger students in many area classrooms now read the Journal’s oral histories in their literature courses.
Ezequiel Granado knew F.H. Vahl’sing when he was but a little boy, and Mr. Vahl’sing knew him. “He called me Zeke,” Mr. Granado recalls of his friendly run-ins with Vahl’sing. Mr. Granado was raised in Elsa but moved to Edinburg when he took a job at the Vahl’sing ice plant at the famous “La Hielera.”
was
born in Baytown, Texas in 1927 and moved to Elsa in 1928. I lived in Elsa
until 1958 when I moved to Edinburg and have lived here since. My father
was Albino Granado and mother Sixta Padilla Granado; she was the sister
of Arcadio Padilla, who is in his 90s and still lives in Elsa. Both my
parents were born in Mexico, Dad in Mexico City, and Mom in Monterrey.
They both came to this country as youngsters.
My
father’s dad got killed in Mexico City when my father was very young.
My grandmother then married another fellow. After awhile, she came north
and made arrangements to cross through Brownsville. Soon after, she went
to see an acquaintance in Houston, but she couldn’t take my dad along,
so she left him in East Donna with some kinfolk of her friend from Houston.
My grandmother promised to come back for him, but other things happened
before she did.
The story goes that my father stayed with a man who beat him whenever my father did something wrong. My father was only eight years old. One day when the man sent my dad on an errand to get some smoking tobacco, my father decided not to come back. He actually was going to get the tobacco, but he first went to some sort of carnival that was in town. Well, he stayed at the carnival too late, and when he realized it was pretty late, he decided he wouldn’t return home. Going back home would mean getting beat up pretty badly, of course. So my dad went into the brush instead.
While wandering in the brush, he was found by two Texas Rangers. They
started asking him questions and wanted to take him back to where he belonged.
He said he didn’t want to go back. So one of the Rangers, a fellow
named Robert Puckett, asked him, “So what do you want to do?”
“I don’t know,” my dad said. So Ranger Puckett said, “Well,
if you don’t want to go back home to where you belong, if you ever
find your way back, ¿Te quieres ir conmigo?” My dad said, “Yes!”
So my father went with Mr. Puckett to his ranch out by Red Gate. Thereafter,
the Pucketts raised my father, first in Red Gate, then in the Brownsville
area.
Dad left the Brownsville area when he was about 21 or 22. He married my mother about that time, and they moved to Baytown because some kinfolk from Baytown helped my father get a job with Humble Oil Refinery, which later became Exxon. I was born there in ’27, but my mother didn’t like that area, so they came back to Elsa in ’28.
On September 11, 1933, one of the worst storms we’ve ever seen hit the Valley. Dad had bought a piece of a building from Mrs. Marciana Zavala’s parents and attached it to another building Dad had started to build. Our house was in the area north of the railroad tracks where the Mexican people lived, and it would be a place where many people would stay that night in September. When the storm came, we were out by Mile 171/2 picking cotton that had been left over. We noticed some dark clouds coming but had no idea what was happening. You know there was no media for us in those days, so we had no forewarning.
All of a sudden the storm was here. The Cardozas, the Padillas, and I
don’t remember who else, but it was quite a few people, they all
came to the house that night to seek refuge from the terrible storm. I
remember Dad spent all night throwing wires and driving stakes in the
ground to keep our house and some of the neighboring houses down.
And across the street Mr. Tomás Castillo, who had a real nice house, took in probably the whole town of Elsa, or at least the Mexican people who didn’t trust that their houses would stay up. On the south side of town, of course, the Anglo people stayed in their houses, because many of them had sturdier houses than what we had. Our houses, which were made by Frank Smith, well some were sturdy; even so, many of them just crumbled down during that storm. At the Castillo house some people were taking care of the wounded because some people had head injuries, others had broken legs, and things of that sort. That hurricane was terrible, even bigger and worse than Beulah.
Growing up in Elsa in the 1930s, I always went to school. In fact, I don’t even remember when I learned English. I’ve always known it, since I can remember. I always practiced it. Where I was, there was always English. When I was in school I used English, when I went into the service I used English, and when I was working I had to deal with Anglo people. I went to business school in Weslaco for two years under the GI Bill, got my certificate in 24 months, and of course used English throughout there; this was about ’50 or ’52. School was in the morning from 7:30 to 12:00 p.m. and in the afternoon we’d work. A bunch of us would drive from Elsa to Weslaco everyday. It was Pablo Ramírez the barber, Adan Pérez, Pedro Salinas, another barber, and myself. We used to drive in a Model A car that I think Pablo had. It was about a 1929 or 1930 model.
When I came out of the service in 1947, I drove trucks for Marvin Nattinger who had contracts with the F.H. Vahl’sing packing shed and with the Bell Brothers’ cotton gin in La Villa. I also drove a truck for Charlie Johnston who is from the Panchita Ranch Johnstons from La Villa. In 1948, I started working with Juan Morón, the old man Juan Morón, who had brand new ’48 trucks. I hauled cottonseed for him to the Stokes Gin there in Edcouch; old man Apolonio Gutiérrez ran that John Stokes gin. I also worked in the scale house of the gin. Me and Obe Leal, who I played a lot of baseball with, and Oscar Cardoza, who drives a bus for the school district these days, and a bunch of other guys, we used to work the gins. We did that during the cotton season. During the vegetable season, most of the people who worked in cotton then moved on to work for Vahl’sing, myself included.
During the off-season we loved to play baseball. I used to love to travel
around the Valley to play ball. We used to go to Alice and all the way
south into Mexico. We had a team in Elsa called The Merchants. I played
along with Obe Leal and a bunch of other guys. Before The Merchants, Vahl’sing
had a team; they called themselves the Bonitas. Hector Salinas, who was
the main timekeeper of the shed, and Víctor Zavala were in charge
of the team. Hector Salinas, Jr. was the mascot of the team. That’s
where little Hector got his start. He went on to play baseball at Pan
Am and now coaches somewhere in Corpus.
Oh yeah, baseball was a big deal here in the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s. Teams came down from Austin and even Dallas, but nobody could compete with the Vahl’sing team. They had a real good team. They had a field there south of the Vahl’sing shed around 2nd or 3rd Streets where the housing projects are now. They had bleachers and everything there.
I married in 1951, and we started having kids, and I started working day and night. When I started working here in La Hielera in ’54, six months out of the year my average working hours were 21 to 22 hours a day, seven days a week. I don’t know how I did it.
La Hielera was built in 1927. It was a very important place for the economy. Back in the late 1930s and into the War years, they used to ship, by rail, 35 to 40 carloads of ice from here to the Vahl’sing shed in Elsa every night to be out there in the morning to be spotted. Each car carried 160 blocks of ice, each block weighing 300 pounds. That’s how much ice they needed in the Elsa shed every 24 hours. As you can imagine, most of Vahl’sing’s profit was going to the ice plant, but he needed to buy ice to ship fresh vegetables out of Elsa. So he bought the ice plant from the Pacific Fruit Express, I think about 1941. Once he manufactured his own ice, he had everything.
worked
here at La Hielera from 1954 until I retired, and I ran the whole thing
for the last 15 to 20 years that I worked there. I was the janitor, timekeeper,
foreman, payroll clerk; I did just about everything in that ice plant.
I had five million pounds of frozen fruit there on a given day that I
was responsible for.
Fred Vahl’sing, Sr.’s vision and good fortune made La Hielera big during the 1940s and ’50s. When Vahl’sing first came to the Valley during the late 1920s, his main product was broccoli. He came over at first and bought what became known as Elsa Farms on Mile 6. That’s where they grew the first broccoli in this area that was then shipped to New York. The story goes that Fred Vahl’sing himself was on that first train that went from Elsa to New York. He carried a shovel in the train to ice down the vegetables.
When
I was about five or six years old, Dad was a night watchman at the Vahl’sing
shed in Elsa, and I would stay with him overnight sometimes. Mr. Vahl’sing
would make periodic trips to Elsa, and I remember seeing him and talking
to him while I was there with my dad. He got to know me pretty well; he
used to call me Zeke. He treated me like I was one of his sons, because
he knew me since I was about six years old. When I started working here
in ’54, he came by once and he remembered me. Shortly after that,
he turned me into assistant manager. He showed a lot of confidence in
me. Then one day he said, “Zeke, you are no longer assistant manager,
now you’re manager of the whole plant.” And he told his son
Fred Jr., “Freddy, you better take care of this man, because he’s
been taking care of us for a long time,” and that was that. I also
told him that I wanted to live in one of the houses on his property. He
wound up giving me a house and the land the house was on.
I had an experience in November of 1954, an encounter with a fellow named Angus Katzberg, a man who I didn’t know. He was, in fact, the manager of the ice plant, but again, I didn’t know. Anyway, I was working in the office as a timekeeper. I had gotten that job, because I had worked as a timekeeper for a company in Mercedes, by hand, for 600 employees and had to pay them every week. At the ice plant here, I worked in the office with Mrs. Angie Stewart from Edcouch. She knew what I could do. And one day all the employees were coming in to fill out their W-2 forms. But one fellow forgot to sign his form, so I went out after him. As I went out to catch him, I noticed he was pretty far away, so I whistled at him to stop him so he could come back to sign his form. At that same moment, this big German-looking man turns right around and just cusses me out from top to bottom.
He got really close to me, and I could only see him into his chest area because he was about six and a half feet tall. But whatever he was telling me, I answered him back in the worst language you could imagine--no nice words at all. After we had that really heated exchange, he turned right around and waved a trailer to come into the dock. My whistle, you see, had stopped a trailer this man had been waving in. It was all just an accident. I went pale back into the office, fuming. As soon as I stepped inside Bobby Burns says to me, “Zeke, do you know who that man you were fighting with is? He’s Angus Katzberg, the vice president of the company.” “Well,” I said to them, “I may not be around here tomorrow.”
ell,
about three days later, Mr. Katzberg called me into his office and says
to me, “Zeke, first of all, I want to know if you’ve forgotten
what I’ve told you?” I said, “Why?” And he says, “because
I’ve forgotten what you’ve told me.” “Well,”
I said, “it’s forgotten.” And he stretched out his hand
and shook my hand and said, “I want you to be my floor manager. You
know, Zeke, as of that day when you and I had that exchange, I’ve
had the best night’s sleep of my life. I’ve been here 27 years,
and nobody has ever talked back to me at all. Everybody is always ‘yes
sir, no sir’ but nobody ever stands up for himself. You’re the
first one who has defended himself against me since I got here. I think
I just needed somebody to talk back to me, and you’re going to be
my man.” And I was his man for some 30 years. We turned out to be
great friends.
You understand that the people Mr. Katzberg was talking about were mostly Mexican people who wouldn’t dare answer back at him because they feared for their jobs, and often times for their homes, too. Many of the workers came from Mexico and lived in the little houses provided by the company. People just took it, even when they were treated like something pretty close to slaves.
I changed all of that when I became manager of this place. I told the workers they had to get out of the labor camp they were in and go look for a small property close by that they could call their own. I told them I was going to tear all those little shacks down so none of them would remain dependent on that terrible housing. “Work hours are going to be fairer; you’ll only work from eight to four o’clock,” I said. “I might need you at two in the morning, but I’ll pay you overtime for every hour you work after four in the afternoon.” I told Mr. Katzberg I was going to do all that if I was going to run that place. I guaranteed him that we’d get more production from people if we worked them only 40 hours per week and paid them overtime when they came in after four. And Mr. Katzberg agreed. And we did get much more production.
The whole idea was just to treat people with dignity, just to treat them
like human beings. That’s all. 
Luisa
Garza