NO ONE KNOWS THE DAY AND HOUR WHEN THINGS WILL HAPPEN...

By Juan Montoya

Readers of this blog know that I like to rummage through thrift shops and garage sales in search of collectables, mainly old or rare books.

Once in a great while I have run into some priceless – to me –finds. I remember finding a hard copy of Jose de la Luz Saenz dairy of a World War I Mexican-American soldier and learned that he had ben in trench warfare in France and after he was honorably discharged Saenz had gone on to become an educator co-founder of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC). https://rrunrrun.blogspot.com/2014/06/world-war-i-hispanic-veteran-kept-diary.html 

I donated it to the John Hunter Room collection of rare books at Texas Southmost College where it served as a research source for students there. Later, the book – which was written in Spanish – was translated into English by Dr. Emilio Zamora and is now available for English speakers. I found that book in a trash pile behind the home of the late Ricardo Molina, at one time the acting city engineer for the City of Brownsville and an activist for La Raza Unida.

Similarly, on a trip to Boca Chica beach, a friend and I drove toward the Rio Grande on Palmetto Hill  Road to relieve ourselves and came across the ruins of the Orive homestead. There, among the detritus, I came  cross a copy of En Defensa de Mi Raza, a book written by Alonso Perales, a Mexican-American attorney who went on to become a U.S. diplomat and – along with Saenz – founded LULAC.

Much later, as I perused through the offerings of a second-hand store across 11th Street from the late Ben Neece and George Ramirez's Crescent Moon, I stumbled into a 12-book set of Mark Twain collection of stories published in the late 1800s and early 1900s, the latest copyright dated1913, to be exact.

Some of the pages were still uncut, indicating that some of  the books hadn't been read. The couple who ran the store sold me the set at 50 cents per volume. Inside one of the tomes, I found a receipt issued for a hotel room in Guadalajara to Jesse Sloss, a former City of Brownsville manager and civic leader. His wife Tencha served as city secretary for decades.

And just last week I stopped at the thrift shop where the old Auto Zone car parts store used to be on Elizabeth Street across from Sams Stadium and I saw a copy of Mike Putegnat's novel titled Laguna, which I had never read.

I opened it and to my surprise there was Putegnat's handwritten dedication to his friend and Texas legislator Rene Oliveira, who died earlier this year. To me, who knew Rene and engaged with him in various political races, pro and con, it was a poignant moment.

Putegnat wished him "a long happy life." If the book was newly published when Putegnat wrote his note to Rene in 2006, he didn't know that Rene's life would end in January 2024, another 18 years later, when Oliveira was already out of office.

It is somewhat humbling to see what happens to a person's belongings after he or she is gone. It makes me think of what will happen to mine when the end comes. Will they be found in some shelf of a segunda like Rene's or Jessie Sloss', or maybe in a trash pile like Ricardo Molina's?