Meet Wanda Garner Cash, author of Pancho Villa’s Saddle at the Cadillac Bar; Thurs., Dec. 10, Laredo Center for the Arts

In her professional life as one of the state’s preeminent journalists, native Laredoan Wanda Garner Cash has lived by the career credo of asking questions and not answering them.

When I asked why she had waited until now to write Pancho Villa’s Saddle at the Cadillac Bar, she answered with a measure of reticence in the eight words of an incomplete sentence.

“A sense of my own mortality, I guess.”

Garner Cash has held every position on the editorial side of a newspaper — reporter, editor, and publisher. In 2006 she was named the First Fellow to the S. Griffin Singer Professorship at the University of Texas School of Journalism, and in 2011 she became associate director of the School of Journalism. She retired in 2016.

Her newly released book from Texas A&M University Press begins the Cadillac Bar’s timeline about a quarter century before first-born, first-grandchild Wanda Jean Garner first clambered atop the beautiful saddle of Pancho Villa in Mayo Bessan’s legendary eatery in Nuevo Laredo.

Mayo Bessan with Jack

At the socially distanced outdoor book signing on Thursday, December 10, at the Laredo Center for the Arts, Garner Cash may recount that her grandfather Achille Mehault “Mayo” Bessan of New Iberia, Louisiana, traveling on his 1923 honeymoon trip with his eighteen year old bride, Odette Savoie Bessan, left her in the care of a San Antonio cousin, and took the train south to Nuevo Laredo to scout for the location of the Cadillac Bar.

He returned for Odette, and they rented a small apartment next to Sara and Octavio Longoria in Nuevo Laredo. Odette set up the household, and Mayo established the bar on Avenida Guerrero.

Mayo Bessan at Jarvis Plaza

“It was prohibition that brought my grandfather to the border. He was a gambler who used his nest egg to come here,” Garner Cash noted.

The original Cadillac Bar, a cantina with a dirt floor, became Nuevo Laredo’s top drawer eatery when the establishment moved on July 4, 1929 to Belden and Ocampo, half a block west of Avenida Guerrero. “Peter Cossoulis ran the kitchen, though Mayo later bought him out and recruited some of his Louisiana friends to staff the kitchen. They thought it was exciting to be on the border,” she recounted, adding that the staff would grow to 40 full- and part-time employees, most of them from Nuevo Laredo.

The Cadillac Bar

“Mayo asked my father Porter Garner Jr. to work at the Cadillac in 1947. He was Mayo’s right hand until Mayo retired in 1960 at 75 to enjoy hunting, fishing, and cards,” Garner Cash said.

“The Cadillac Bar had a legion of loyal employees, some who worked there 30 years. Porfirio Robles, a prince of a man, was the mayordomo, the captain. My sister Clay and I knew all the waiters and bartenders. They watched us grow up,” she said, “as my grandfather had watched their children grow up and helped them with school and college expenses.”

The author writes with tenderness of her father, a World War II hero injured so badly in combat that it was thought his wounds would leave him unable walk again. Walk he did, however, marrying his high school sweetheart, Wanda Mae Bessan, in 1946. His would be the kind, amiable face that welcomed thousands of local and out of town diners to the beloved landmark Mayo Bessan had established two decades earlier. Porter’s ability to remember names and his drive carried the enterprise well into the late 1970s, through the Flood of 1954, peso devaluations, and an ever-changing taxation policy.

After the July 1954 flood

“The day after Thanksgiving was always the Cadillac’s best day. In the mid-1970s the Mexican government began to assess the Cadillac’s taxes on that day rather than on a yearly average of sales. The increased corruption of the tax structure eventually made it untenable to operate, and my father gave the restaurant to the employees. My father signed documents transferring ownership and handed them the keys,” Garner Cash recalled.

She speaks tenderly, too, of grandparents Mayo and Odette and her mother who would be called Big Wanda to differentiate daughter from mother.

Porter Garner Jr.

“Mayo was courtly, formal, and self-disciplined, giving attention to living each day to the fullest, enjoying a meal without rushing off, sitting and savoring it. He paid great attention to how he prepared for the day, what he wore, the cufflinks he chose, that the crease of his trousers aligned with his shoelaces. I may have inherited from him how he prepared for the day,” she said, adding, “I’m not a casual partaker of life. I, too, want to be dressed for the occasion.”

She called Odette “an intuitive cook who had an easy way around the kitchen.” Odette consulted no recipes and never measured ingredients. “She taught me to cook. We were very close. She doted upon us. The South Louisiana traditions of her childhood never left her. She always deferred to Mayo as her protector and provider,” she said.

Garner Cash recalled the friendship between Odette and first neighbor Sara Theroit Longoria, who spoke French. “My grandmother spoke no Spanish, but she did speak French. Mrs. Longoria adopted Odette as her protégé, took her to the grocery store, and made her feel less alone in this new place,” she said.

She described her mother’s part in the workings of the Cadillac as “the interior decorator,” the purveyor of table linens, drapes, lamps, chairs, and tables. “She also held down the fort in the typical role of housewives of the fifties and sixties, raising us while also maintaining a very active civic and social life. Her work at home allowed my father to make a very successful business,” she said.

Garner & Bessan families at the Cadillac Bar

Garner Cash reflected on the process of writing Pancho Villa’s Saddle at the Cadillac Bar. “It has been rewarding to gather up the memories, photos, and recipes. It has brought me to an intimate introspection into feelings, places, family, and my own personal life. It has been overwhelming at times,” she said, recalling a childhood memory of being on the streets of downtown Nuevo Laredo with Jacque Frank and Jack Suneson, being in the mercado, and in the businesses their respective parents owned. “The most interesting was the Frank’s Acapulco store where you could see pre-Columbian artifacts or try on a real matador’s hat, a montera. It was a remarkable time in our lives when Laredo and Nuevo Laredo were one place on the map, and safe.”

She said that as a child she was oblivious to the Cadillac’s fame. “It was where we celebrated birthdays. It was not a big deal to us, but in the lives of others it was a place where good memories were made. I hope the book will be a touchstone that evokes who they were with at the Cadillac and what they were celebrating, what it looked like, how the food tasted, how it smelled, how agreeable the chilled temperature was if they had been shopping in the summer heat that day.”

Wanda Jean on Pancho Villa’s saddle

Wanda holding sister Clay onto the saddle

She said the place that is most evocative of those who made and carried the history of the Cadillac Bar is her home on a hill near Hunt where she lives with her husband Richard Cash. “It is the home of my heart, a place that was purchased by my grandparents in 1949 two months before I was born. This place harkens the sum of the best times of my life. We spent so much time on this hill and on the Guadalupe River below. My house is adjacent to the house my parents built as a summer home and where they lived when they left Laredo in 1979.”

Pancho Villa’s Saddle at the Cadillac Bar is no thin recuerdo. Wanda Garner Cash has written with rich, deep detail of Mayo Bessan’s choices for ingredients and how the Cadillac Bar’s signature favorites appeared so effortlessly on the cloth-topped tables of the dining rooms. There is an intimacy to this writing, that of the grandchild who was part of and witness to the workings of so legendary a restaurant and of the gifted wordsmith who has deftly crafted a family story inside the history of Prohibition, Los Dos Laredos, the devastating Flood of 1954, international trade, and circumstances far less complex than those that define the frontera today.

(The December 10 reception and book signing are from 5 to 7 p.m. on the patio of the Laredo Center for the Arts, 500 San Agustin Avenue. Copies of the book are available for purchase at the event. Attendees are asked to wear a mask and to practice social distancing. For further information or to order a copy, call the LC4A at (956) 725-1715.)

SIDEBAR

I have known Wanda Garner Cash for about 55 years, which gives me license to say the following:

For the few who may not have known her, she grew up on Malinche in the Montrose neighborhood near Chacon Creek. The daughter of the late Wanda Mae (Bessan) and Porter Garner Jr., she is a 1967 graduate of Nixon High School.

On the flipside of being an academic standout known for her brilliance, intellect, and eloquent articulation, she was briefly an enigma at Nixon High, arriving in our public school milieu without explanation in a cohort of en masse transferees from parochial education.

She was editor of the school paper, The Pony Express, and she awed us with her UIL performance as Noah’s wife in the drama department’s production of “Noah.” As I recall, the makeup was ghastly, other-worldish, overdone like when you try too hard to transform healthy 16 and 17 year-olds into decrepit people almost as old as God.

She drove a 4WD International Harvester Scout to school. How cool was that?

She always leaned to the left, but after four years at UT-Austin in the sixties she stopped leaning and stood resolutely to the left, a champion of the First Amendment, human rights, and civil rights.

Beneath the wry, mannered, and formal façade of her countenance, she is warm and generous, but that’s for her to know and lucky you if you find out.