The Optic’s 125th anniversary observance recently was a great opportunity to see acquaintances of yesteryear.
It was great to see Margie Crespin, whose father Carlos was a pressman at the Optic when I was there. I saw Jose “Luger” Lucero, Max Maez, Eloy Gonzales, Freddie Baca and others.
And I met a man almost my age whose face meant nothing to me, but whose name meant everything, for in the moment it took to identify himself, a torrent of memories surfaced.
Unfortunately, I cannot use his name. There never has been a name like his, and I suspect at his nativity, his parents were enjoying a good joke. I’m christening him only with a generic name: Sam.
I met Sam as part of a group that rode the 16-passenger bus I drove to the village of Los Alamos, roughly between Watrous and Sapello.
On a good day, with a stiff tail-wind, the route took about 45 minutes per trip. I used my paycheck to help finance college tuition, which was $55 per quarter. My $35-a-month check averaged out to about 60 cents an hour. On a good day.
While on the route, I came to realize that some of the boys really must have liked me; why else would they willingly spend so much time with me?
The road was part dirt, part gravel. Because every spring rain meant having to install chains, occasionally I needed to put on and take off the chains TWICE each trip, four times a day.
It didn’t take long to master the mechanics of applying a pre-Civil-War jack to the rear axle and installing chains which forever modified my J.C. Penney clothes.
At Lincoln Park, Sam reminded me of some of his antics–antics which in war time might have been called atrocities. In the early spring I was getting a flat a day, always in the afternoon. My boss, Alfredo Maez, had a contract with a garage to perform any repairs, and that usually tied me up a few more hours. The strange thing is that the mechanics never found a nail, just a hole.
It was always the right rear tire, and invariably the flat occurred shortly after we left Highway 85 and entered the rough road by what is now Mathews’ Trailer Park.
After almost daily flats one April, I even accused the contracted maintenance crew of ignoring my flats, assuming a blast of air would fix the problem, and sending me on my way, patchless.
When I made the accusation, Mechanic No.1 showed me the tube (oh, yes, tubes used to go inside the tires, like they still do for bicycles). The tube had a series of patches, lining the right-hand surface of the tube. Still no clues.
On the last day of school, as she boarded the bus, one of my riders whispered the secret of the phantom leaks.
Here’s that they did:
Three boys used to wait for the bus near what used to be the Cardinal baseball field. It had wooden bleachers held loosely by three-inch nails. As two of the boys slowly entered the bus and distracted me, Sam would place a piece of the bleachers, complete with nail, under the right rear tire. So on the LAST DAY of school, another student squealed on him.
That day, I went outside the bus, removed the offending plank and in anger whacked the snotty-nosed kid with it. My regret, as I drove home later, fully expecting to be arrested for brutality, was that I’d smacked the kid’s bottom with the flat side of the board, not with the nail. He never flattened the tires again. Of course, the fact that I left the job that year and he transferred schools may have had something to do with the reformation.
Because of the size of the plank, it would rest under the wheel just long enough to puncture the tire, but with the first revolution, would fall to the ground, leaving a hole but no nail. Sam may have used the same board and same nail several times.
I’d forgotten the incidents until Sam, now 63, refreshed my memory at Lincoln Park.
Looking back, I think it was exciting, crawling under the bus in blasting rainstorms, back when I was just nearing my 20th year. But even more exciting, and a source of appreciation, was the fact that every time the bus got mired down by the long driveway that led to his house, Sam would get help.
His father had a team of horses. In minutes, they hitched them to the front bumper and got us out.
At the Optic festivities he made an excellent point when he sad, “We were brats then, but we showed you that the bus,” which had about 100 horsepower, “needed two more to get you out of the mud.”
All of these memories came back to me that day. But I realize now why he looked so different to me, some 45 years later: the last time I saw him, as I recall, he had a much flatter bottom.