When Raul Besteiro died, his casket was carried aboard a two-engine convoy of locomotives that belonged to the Brownsville Rio Grande Railway that has its depot at the Port of Brownsville.
Local wags say the engines labored with their load.
"Mr. B," a big railroad guy, was hired as port director partly because of his love for Lionel model trains and the intricate toy railroad he kept in his playroom. He was once featured in a Sunday front-page article in the Brownsville Herald playing with his trains just before he was named port director after he had retired as the superintendent of the Brownsville Independent School District. He even had a traditional striped train engineer's cap on while he played.
Apparently, the port trustees were so impressed with the deft skills he exhibited with the toy track that he was the natural choice to run the shipping port with its Brownsville Rio Grande Railroad. Go figure.
Just after he and Solomon Ortiz were pictured on the front page of the New York Times tallying votes and pushing for the North America Free Trade Agreement in Washington, the Bridge to Nowhere $21 million scandal broke out and Mr. B's fortunes dropped like the money did into Dannenbaum's Engineering in Houston pockets through transfers to money exchange houses in Mexico.
Anyway, after his death, the linear park on the old abandoned railroad right-of-way was established and a red caboose with the lettering "In Memory of Mr. B, Raul Besteiro" was placed next to the Brownsville Museum of Art.
For years, the wicked and idle tongues in and around the city have been wagging saying to anyone within earshot that Mr. B is buried in a mausoleum inside the red caboose.
A friend of mine and I were speaking to the point on one of those Farmers' Market days (a Saturday morning) and a passerby overheard us. It turned out that the guy eavesdropping on our idle chatter was none other than a training engineer at the port who disabused us of the idea that Raul was entombed in the little red caboose.
Well, now that the caboose has been sandblasted and painted anew, the reference to Mr. B is no longer stenciled on the side of the wagon. It's been close to a month that the caboose was sand blasted and painted, and still no reference to the former port director.
Is the memorial to the former BISD superintendent and port director now a thing of the past or has it just slipped through the cracks?
3 comments:
instead of applying his memoriam in stencil, he will be honored with a plaque in the near future.
Honored? For playing with trains? My brother played with trains before Raul did and he did not run scared from his job like Raul did when his friends stabbed him in his back at BISD. He should have turned the cronies in who were way back stealing by buying oil from friends at 4 times the cost. But who said anything about that then? Only us that were around when this happened still remember that even when we took biology with him at the old BHS, all we did was play with the garden snake while he flirted with the cheerleaders. Yes, let's honor him with a plaque.
What experience does the current K-A has that impressed the board? Big lips?
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