The time machine is ready; the batteries are charged

Sorry, my time machine only goes in reverse. The more expensive Teslas that go into the future get you messed up with insider trading laws, election polling franchises, and Las Vegas betting rules. It’s just safer for me not to take you ahead where you could see future stock market prices, the winner of the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election, or the winner of Super Bowl LIV.

Oh, by the way, I’ve invited a couple of Generation Z TAMIU students who are interested in local history to come along with us. It will be great to have along another septuagenarian (Isn’t it a relief not to be a sexagenarian anymore? People who don’t know Latin were always giving us weird looks as though we were some kind of perv.) Two tour guides are better than one.

Laredo 1959 is going to be a foreign country for the twenty-year-olds. Seeing things that are now long gone will be surprising for them. You’ll help me explain, won’t you?

As we emerge from the time travel landing zone in the basement of the Kress Store, the blast furnace heat is familiar to all of us, but out on the corner of Hidalgo and Convent the students are amazed to look in all directions at a busy downtown retail scene. They are disoriented as they look down Convent Avenue toward the river with its single, four-lane bridge to Nuevo Laredo.

It looks like Havana with all the 50s model cars and trokas.

T-34 propeller trainers from Laredo Air Force Base buzz like mosquitos overhead.

A few blocks walk to the east and we show them through the Azteca historic district they always thought was just the terminus of I-35 and U.S. Customs. Heading off in the other direction, at the Missouri Pacific railroad station at the west end of Matamoros we watch the South Texas Eagle from San Antonio pull in and see passengers connect to the Águila Azteca sleepers headed for Mexico City. The kids wonder why everyone is wearing such dressy clothes, and we explain that in 1959 people only wore running shoes and sweats on the school track during P.E., and that excluded grown-ups.

We gloat about 18¢ a gallon gasoline at full-service gas stations and point to the cars with fins and whitewall tires but no seat belts, turn signals, air conditioners, FM radios, or Bluetooth. They want to take selfies with Mayor Martin’s black Cadillac parked on the Flores side of City Hall, but you can’t take phones, cameras, or recorders with you in the time machine. Your only device is your memory.

Across town at Chic-E-Lin’s they pick up 7¢ Cokes and a couple of 5¢ candy bars. The Jax beer and Buck soda in the cooler make it an archeological museum of brand ruins.

In the Laredo we grew up in, the young tourists marvel condescendingly at the quaintly primitive technologies of typewriters, pay phones, paper maps, Brownie cameras, record players with turntables, and black and white TVs with rabbit ears.

We walk right through the tiny, one-room Trans Texas passenger terminal on Saunders where students had expected to find a Post Office, out on to the airport runway. We watched passengers coming down the ramp stairs from the DC-3 that just landed after its two-hour flight from Houston. There was no TSA, no gate, no security check!

Unbelievable!

Since we are at home in 1959, we can show them City Drug, the cotton gin by Three Points, poodle skirts, pachucos, ranch lands three blocks east of Lamar Junior High, Ursuline Academy, police officers in light blue shirts and white hats, the Cactus Gardens Café, the Greyhound bus station on Convent, the little train on the top of the earth dam at Lake Casa Blanca, and Laredo Junior College at Fort Mac.

When you’re time traveling there’s no schedule, no rush to skip anything.

We tune in for them listen to “Uncle” Mervil Moore’s Western Auto ads on KVOZ and Johnny Horton’s “Battle of New Orleans” on AM radio through a car’s single speaker, …and lots of other things I’m forgetting to remember.

Wow! The relentless march of inflation, technology, and culture has left a lot of Laredo 1959 behind. Who’s to say how much of this deserves to be called progress?

The past sixty years have brought many novelties. Our young companions dearly miss their cell phones loaded up with text messages, Instagram, Google, Facebook, a mobile payment app, and ebooks, plus GPS, a camera, maps, and memes.

The 1959 soundscape before the age of electric guitars, synthesizers, Autotune, bass beat boxes, and drum machines is completely different. The students ask us: no progressive country, banda, stadium rock, or rap music in 1959? And no Dallas Cowboys, either, and no Astrodome, but wait! They haven’t ever heard of the old Astrodome. “What was that? Something in the U.S. Space Program?”

“What? No bar codes, no ear buds, no Spotify, no Amazon, no Toyota, no Starbucks, no Fortnight, no microbreweries, no bottled water, no drones, no malls, no drive-thru taquerías, no air conditioning? How did you live back then?”

“Well,” we’d explain in our rambling, long-winded, geriatric style, “lots of things haven’t changed. In 1959 Laredo was always 105° and higher for weeks in the summer, just like now.”

“People started sentences in English y luego siguieron en español pa’ terminarlas, igualito. The bad words in both languages are still all the same ones. Didn’t you hear people saying, ¿Qué pasó?”

“Politics and corruption were in bed together for afternoon trysts back then, too.”

“There has always been deer hunting season. Screeching grackles have always mobbed at night in the oaks behind the Post Office. Summers used to bring explosions of chicharras. After a rain, we found Santa Claus bugs, too.”

“If Don Trino’s lonche stand on Iturbide is gone, there are new loncherías. El Gallo Bakery on San Agustín may be a parking lot now, but you can still get classic conchas at La Reynera. La India is still on Marcella supplying the spices to give food its authentic Laredo flavor.”

“You wondered about tamales at Christmas and angry mothers’ chanclazos? Sirol.”

“We watched and marched and rode on floats in Washington’s Birthday parades, too, even though they had a different route.

“Didn’t you see the same cartoneros and their three-wheeled bikes in 1959 just like 2019.”

“It’s still Laredo. People have always loved growing up in Laredo.”

Hey! That was fun. You were enjoying that stroll down Memory Lane, weren’t you?

Now you’re thinking, “Oye, Danny. Vamos. Let’s go back and revisit some more happy places.”

Someone says, “Will your time machine please take me back to my old neighborhood?”

“Could we go by my father’s store?”

“How ‘bout Mrs. Staggs’ 5^th grade class at Ryan?”

“Let’s go to a drag race out on the Mines Road.”

“I want to watch TV through the window at ABC Music.”

“We could get into a Saturday afternoon movie at the Plaza with an empty Coke bottle.”

“Couldn’t we go have one of Mr. Zamarripa’s raspas with tamarind syrup?”

Sorry, Boomer friends, the Gen Z kids are bored with all this.

The thing about nostalgia is that it’s both insatiable and unshareable. Each of us wants to go back to different moments and our own special places. I can’t satisfy my own desire for reliving the past, much less yours.

I can’t bring back to life the Laredo of our childhood any more than I can bring back my parents, or Cesar Hall, Pat Palacios, Eddie Guerra, Hector Torres, or Richard Goodman. I can’t use a time machine to be young and strong and good-looking again  – okay, the again part doesn’t apply to the strong or good-looking parts.

So why did I sucker you in with the make-believe time machine?

Because I wanted you to experience Laredo through the fresh eyes and noses of the young time travelers and notice something we’ve all forgot. Instead of us being the guides, they could show us something about the past.

I needed them to notice smoking.

Their question, “How did you live back then?” was not about our low-tech childhood. No, in fact, they asked it coughing and gasping for air in the thick cloud of cigarette smoke that enveloped everyone and everything back in 1959. They weren’t just missing their tech toys. They were wondering how we lived without smoke-free air.

Sure, they know all about e-cigarettes and vaping. They live with the 14% of us Americans who foolishly take up and stubbornly continue smoking, but before going back to 1959, they had no idea how much first- and second-hand cigarette smoke there used to be around us.

Unlike our twenty-year-old time traveler companions who judge everything by 2019 standards, when I was a child, I couldn’t see or smell the cigarettes. They were invisible because smoking was everywhere, and odorless because the smoke was everywhere, too.

Smoking in Laredo and America has changed a lot since then.

The easier question to answer about 1959 would be: where wasn’t there smoking?

Church, the movies, and classrooms are the only places that I can remember. Heck, I remember seeing people floating on their backs and smoking in the Sands Motel’s swimming pool. I saw show-off water skiers at Lake Casa Blanca being yanked up out of the murky water with a cigarette clinched in their “hey, watch this” grins.

My parents didn’t smoke, but most of my friends’ parents did, and it was natural to see ashtrays on lamp tables in everyone else’s house. When you are a non-smoker, burning cigarettes have a strong odor, but none of my childhood memories has the smell of smoke in it. It was everywhere and unnoticeable.

Cigarette smoke billowed out of the teachers’ lounges we walked by without looking in at Lamar and Nixon. One teacher at Lamar smoked three packs of Camels a day, and her hours in class were the only time she wasn’t smoking.

At the end of the Little League Yankees’ bench, Coach Hale chain smoked through the close games we played against Baltazar Ramos’ Rotary and George Haynes’ Tiger teams.

Patients and doctors smoked in the old Mercy Hospital downtown. Certainly, Dr. Malakoff always had a cigar in his teeth when he took care of my minor ailments.

Second-hand smoke being inescapable, by the time we became teenagers, it was but a small transition to inhaling first-hand smoke and blowing it out our noses.

Forty five percent of American adults in those days, a lot of them our parents, were full-time smokers. Many of us were happy to follow their example.

We took our first unpleasant drags off cigarettes pilfered from parents, uncles, or neighbors. We sneaked smokes with siblings, cousins, or school pals behind bushes in backyards or vacant lots and at friends’ ranches.

There was smoking aplenty on Boy Scout Troop 131 campouts, mainly Swisher Sweets. Besides smoking cigars and cigarettes, we also had to learn how not to swallow, gag, and throw up the Red Man chewing tobacco filling our cheeks as we played Capture the Flag in the dark out at Camp Richter on the Zapata highway.

An ethnologist might say that smoking was an adolescent rite de passage among us aborigines. Lucky us, it was our lot to grow up at the high point of what Allan Brandt called The Cigarette Century.

Our dads had fought in the war and found 4-packs of Lucky Strikes in all their K-rations. Rest from combat or duty was a smoke break. By the time we were born, mass-produced cigarettes had only been around for forty years, but they were already as American as baseball, hot dogs, and apple pie. Or as Laredoan as canicas, mariachis for breakfast, and the Border Patrol.

My father had been an occasional smoker in high school, but after leaving high school to enlist in the Army, he became a typical pack-a-day soldier. He smoked when my parents married in ‘44 and was still hard at it in ‘49 when I was born.

I take full credit for breaking his habit. During my crawling months, one evening I pulled myself up the leg of the upholstered chair to the arm where he’d left his pack of cigarettes, pulled out one of the Lucky Strikes, and ate it. If you’ve ever swallowed tobacco, you know that it is an even more effective emetic than ipecac syrup.

My dad was so appalled at my mess and mom’s distress that he gave up smoking on the spot. Without my early intervention, he might not have lived to be 93.

Both of my grandfathers smoked cigars, as did so many American men of their turn-of-the-century generation, especially in the South.

Someone thought a photo of me with a cigarette in my mouth when I was an eight-year-old boy was cute enough to save in a family photo album.

If I set the time machine dial to the year 1963, we could all stop by Yeary Battery where I worked after school and summers for my father. Dad was one of the few non-smokers there. The employees at Yeary’s smoked a range of brands, and five or six of the mechanics in the shop out back rolled their own with Bugler tobacco. There was a complicit fiction that I was helping Leonardo López install new Uniroyal tires on customers’ old rims with a pneumatic tire mounting machine.

Among Leo’s many admirable accomplishments was his ability to roll Bugler cigarettes using only one hand. Having tried and failed to master this feat of legerdemain, I’d watch in awe as Leo held the air hose tightly on the inflating tire’s valve with his left hand and rolled a perfect cigarette with his right. He’d lick the paper, pop it into his lips, and light it as soon as the tire had popped into place.

I wasn’t supposed to smoke at work, but I did. There was always a large inventory of new truck and bus tires stocked in a rack at the back of the warehouse, and I learned to crawl into the tunnel their centers made where I could stretch out for secret smoking. The smell of rubber in tire stores still brings back tender memories of horizontal smoking.

Once I looked up from the front of the store and saw a prominent Laredo businessman trotting across Houston St. outfitted in hospital-issue pajamas and slippers. Mercy Hospital was two blocks away, and he’d gone AWOL from the room where he was recovering from a heart attack. He needed a smoke. It wasn’t that cigarettes were banned at the hospital: he couldn’t smoke in his room because of the explosion danger of the oxygen tent.

The Clouse’s were Southern Baptist, a Protestant denomination in those days mistakenly thought to be anti-everything, anti-evolution, anti-dancing, anti-drinking, anti-gambling, and anti-smoking. I say mistakenly because although Baptists did take stands against all of the other sins on the list, there was no forbidding of smoking — unless of course you mean smoking by women.

The deacons of First Baptist Church stood around outside the church opposite St. Peter’s Plaza smoking cigarettes before and after Sunday service and Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting. Laredo Municipal Court Judge Roy Blackshear rolled his own with pipe tobacco from tins of Prince Albert. As the worship service began, the organist inside would begin an introductory fugue, and the men threw down half-finished cigarettes. If you come along on the time machine with me you’ll see them twisting the butts under their well-shined shoes and blowing out both lungs’ worth of smoke from their heads turned sideways away from the door as they entered the church at the top of the green steps.

With almost all the adult men around smoking, it’s easy to see how a nine-year-old boy would get the idea that smoking cigarettes was part of being a man

Taking the time machine back to 1965, you’d see me getting my driver’s license and buying a midnight blue 1947 Plymouth 4-door for $85. By then I’d had plenty of practice smoking, and unlike Bill Clinton, I knew how to inhale.

The beloved Plymouth of yore had several mechanical issues other than its intermittently functional brakes and the wiring fires behind the dashboard. The most serious one was the way it burned crankcase oil. A lot of the oil smoke from the six cylinders desperately in need of new rings didn’t make it out the exhaust pipe as intended but seeped into the front seat area in a blueish, stinking cloud.

Every school day morning, I picked up my passenger and partner-in-crime, Johnny Snyder, at the side door of his house on Martin Avenue, just around the corner from my house on Garfield. Often late, we’d roar up Bartlett leaving a dense fog bank of oil smoke for the cars behind us to drive through. Even with windows down, there was a smelly haze inside, so Johnny and I lit up L&M’s to mask one kind of smoke with another.

The Plymouth waited in the dirt triangle that served as a parking lot across Malinche from Nixon High while our natural urge to learn was being squandered in a certain well-perfumed English teacher’s mind-numbing classes. Once a couple of rogues (whose names have been redacted to protect the guilty) got suspended for the afternoon for some long-forgotten misdemeanor. They whiled away the three hours before football practice after school in my car smoking the cigarettes I’d left on the front seat. Since they’d stretched out on the banquette seats and kept the windows rolled up to stay out of Mr. Sánchez’ sight, the car filled up with smoke. At the 3:45 bell, they got out, cracked open one of the windows, blew the smoke of the pack’s last two cigarettes into the opening, and rolled the window back up to seal in the smoke. By the time I got out to the car, you couldn’t see inside. It was as if it had tinted privacy glass. When I opened the door, smoke belched out. You’d have thought Danny’s Plymouth was on fire.

You remember, but the Gen Z kids we’re mentoring don’t have a clue about all the advertising we saw broadcast on TV and radio, and in print.

We can still repeat the jingles and slogans. Bet you could improvise the Marlboro song on the spot. “Winston tastes good like a cigarette should,” right? Or was it “as a cigarette should?” Or did you want great taste or good grammar? “I’d rather fight than switch.” L.S.M.F.T. wasn’t some contemporary texting acronym like BTW, YOLO, or LMAO. It stood for “Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco,” of course.

Who can say how strongly the ad campaigns’ subliminal effect on us was? There’s no denying we saw a lot of glamorous people to admire in cigarette ads.

It was advertising that made our choice of cigarette brands to smoke such a badge. Why not? The tobacco industry had perfected advertising that deflected attention away from the tobacco product itself and over to images of people you’d like to be. Just like your clothes and your hairstyle, your brand of cigarettes was intended to be part of your identity. And so it was.

Girls smoked Tareytons, Benson & Hedges, or Virginia Slims. Twiggy smoked St. Moritz and Marianne Faithful Vogue cigarettes, all the French existentialists smoke Gauloises, and clandestine members of the illegal Partido Comunista Español smoked Celtas, brands you could buy in London, Paris, or Madrid but wouldn’t find at Statler’s across from Jarvis Plaza.

A lot of black guys smoked KOOLs. Why was that?  Almost no one else in our generation smoked menthols. During my junior year in college, in the fall of ’69… oops, forgot to clue you in that we had jumped forward to another year. Anyway, in the fall after Woodstock, just before the first draft lottery and Altamont, I tried out the affectation of smoking KOOLs for a while, but cool as they were (and I thought I was,) and no matter how well they grooved with Sly and the Family Stone’s “I Want to Take You Higher,” obviously, they weren’t the real me.

All of this was five years after the Surgeon General’s 1964 report on the health risks of smoking and four years of health warnings printed on every pack of cigarettes. There was no mystery about smoking’s danger, but we persisted.

As authoritative a source as M.A.D. Magazine had been warning us about cigarette’s health hazards since we started buying it in fourth grade.

There’s a name for this sort of thing now. We call it ‘cognitive dissonance.’

Only later did we find out that the tobacco industry had known all along that it was tricking us into getting hooked on an addictive killer. It’s been called cynical, but that sounds like a terrible understatement.

What I thought my smoking Chesterfields said about me I don’t know, other than the fact that no one else I was hanging around with smoked that unadvertised, retro brand. Maybe I thought I could make Chesterfields mean anything I wanted. At least they weren’t a phony cowboy brand like Marlboros.

Not long after my KOOL phase I switched to Winstons. I can’t remember what I supposed that brand signified about who I was. Certainly, it had nothing to do with flavor, since as far as I could tell, all cigarettes tasted the same.

I do know that one of the most powerful attractions to cigarettes were all the smoking actors and rock stars I worshiped.

My daughter used to read her mom’s fashion magazines as a 4-year-old. She’d point to the picture of a beautiful model on the pages of Elle or Vogue and say, “That’s me, okay?”

That daughter’s father had been no different as a college student thirty years earlier. As I watched Paul Newman, Jean Paul Belmondo, James Dean, Sean Connery, or Humphrey Bogart light up in a movie, I was thinking the same thing, “That’s me, okay?”

And when I saw photos of Keith Richards, Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, Jimi Hendrix, Frank Zappa, or Carlos Santana with a cigarette in hand or stuck in their guitars’ tuners, it was also “That’s me, okay?”

As a teen miscreant, trips ‘across’ to the off-limits watering holes of Nuevo Laredo always involved smoking. The Cervecería Munich had open packs of Viceroys and Winstons, and the bartender would sell you individual cigarettes if the Chesterfields ran out. Or, you could buy a pack of Delicados from the street vendors and smoke those foul, oval-shaped cigarettes while pouring down Mexican pilsener in frozen mugs. You might call it “cigarette tourism.”

Fast forward to 1967 (or was it back?), and of the 95 louts inhabiting my Animal House college dormitory, about 85 of us were smokers. Rooms could be as thick with cigarette smoke as the Plymouth was in the Nixon parking lot. Faculty smoking in seminars and office hours was not that different from our dorm. By the time I saw them, the lurid colors of the library’s José Clemente Orozco murals created in 1932 were dull under decades of accumulated tar from students’ cigarette smoking. After all, this was America in the 1960s.

Setting the time machine ahead to 1972, we’ll see me quit smoking around the time I voted for McGovern in my first Presidential election. By then I’d traded in Led Zeppelin for Così Fan Tutte, Budweiser for Rioja, Rolling Stone for the NYRB, boots for Puma’s, and dope for organic food. Getting rid of cigarettes felt like just another step in growing up.

Sometimes the enthusiasm of storytelling casts old tales in an inappropriately rosy evening light. I regret that these memories may sound more nostalgic than remorseful, so please forgive me for fouling the air you had to breathe with all that cigarette smoke.

I’m sorry.

And what a crying shame that some of our friends never did manage to quit, and we’ve had to weep at their untimely funerals.

When a storyteller shrugs and says, “I guess you have to have been there,” he’s admitting failure. After all, the whole point of the story is to take you somewhere you haven’t been before. Or in this case, take you somewhere you haven’t visited in a long time.

I cranked up the creaky, old time machine hoping to have you be there in Laredo one more time, but on this trip with the twenty-somethings to help us realize just how much cigarette smoking there used to be.

As the threadbare cliché goes, “The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.”

In the case of smoking, we call that difference progress. Not everything in Old Laredo was better.

Did it work? Were you there?

Did you see through your smoky tears how once upon a time in Laredo smoke got in your eyes?