Beatrice Pinales

Beatrice Pinales gave me this picture ini 1954 when she was 11 years old.  It was her school picture that year.

The Pinales family lived down the street from us on College Ave. in Comanche.  Their father worked as a bootmaker with Dan Trujillo in his custom boot shop.  Beatrice was the eldest of five children.

She was in a Brownie Scout troop that year. I was a Junior camp leader and taught the girls songs.  We had a lot of fun.

Eventually the Pinales family moved to Fort Worth and I went off to college.  Once in a while I would get a letter from Beatrice during the year before I married.

About ten or twelve years ago Beatrice sent a letter to me from San Antonio by way of Comanche. Some one in Comanche knew my Fort Worth address and forwarded it to me.  In it Beatrice told me she had fifteen children, and that her youngest daughter was named Patsy after me.

I tried to get in touch with Beatrice in San Antonio where the letter was from.  But I never found her.
If you are out there, Beatrice, let me hear from you.

Honeymoon in Mexico

The going-away was hilarious.  Blocks had been put under the car and so when we tried to drive away it just would not move.

We drove to San Antonio where my dad had made reservations for us for the first night of our trip.  We had borrowed his Country Sedan station wagon and bought Mexican insurance through Joe Waring, who had also made arrangements for a state-approved guide during our stay in Monterrey.  His name was Rudy.  He had worked many times for the Warings and their friends from Comanche.

After all the wedding hubbub I was exhausted so of course I got turista right away.  Our hotel was the Ancira, which Pancho Villa had made famous by riding his horse into the bar once upon a time.  It was a beautiful old hotel with a lovely restaurant which I only enjoyed the first meal we had there.

The second night and a good deal of the next day I was suffering, and Hayne called on the hotel doctor, who prescribed a bottle of strange pills from the farmacia plus soda water and crackers.  Pretty soon I had recovered enough to start out again, and we went to the Carta Blanca brewery and also to Horseshoe Falls.  We visited a mine where the mine train in and out was still in use for the tourists.

Here are a couple of shots from the brewery.  Someday I will find the rest of the photos and post them here (I hope.)