I was born September 8, 1923, in Chamal, Tamaulipas, Mexico. The house, or better yet, the shack I was born in was little more than a bundle of boards arranged into the living quarters. The house where I was born was about one half of a mile from a small hill that had a palm tree growing right on top of it. It was called the "Mesa de la Palma." Just beyond this was a dormant volcano.
Times were very hard so my dad had to go to Panuco to work in the oil fields so we could survive. Panuco was close to Tampico. The trip from Chamal to Tampico was about 140 miles therefore dad was gone from home for weeks at a time. This was a difficult time for my mom. She had to look after my brother Homer and me. He was 6 years older than me.
During this time the place had to be looked after also. We were miles from the other families. During this time there was a person that would come over and check on the family. In due process of time an attraction took place with this person and my mom. When this became evident to my dad a move needed to be made.
Mother loaded up all she could and the two boys which were two years and eight years old and got all of this to a railroad about 40 miles away which was called Xicotencatl. The three of us moved to McAllen, Texas, into a house that my dad had built during the Mexican revolution while Poncho Villa was on a rampage across Mexico and a lot of Americans came out of Mexico. That is why my brother was born in McAllen in 1917.
(Wayne's family would spend the next few years in the states before deciding to return to Chamal.)
RETURNING TO MEXICO
About the first of December 1935, or maybe in November, Dad had bought and old 1927 Graham Bro's Truck. He began loading everything we had on the truck and when the truck was loaded there wasn't enough room for me and my brother and our big German Shepard dog. Dad took strap scrape iron and added about four feet to the back of the truck and put two chairs there with a nice pallet between them for the dog, (Rover). Dad decided we could not take the 1925 Chevy so he sold it.
We pulled out of Stockton with a heavy load so we did not travel very fast. Here we go again back across the deserts of California, Arizona and New Mexico and West Texas. Homer and I spent at least three weeks looking at where we had been. Every night we would pull off to the side of the road somewhere and mama would heat up some can goods on the little camp stove and then we would bed down for the night. It must have taken three weeks to get to Laredo, Texas.
When we got to Laredo dad drove up to the bridge as though we were just going to cross over to Mexico. The Mexican authorities would not let us go across. So dad turned around and went back out on the highway and found a cheap cabin that we could stay in. Dad would go back to the bridge every day and argue with them about getting across the border. After three days dad made some kind of arrangement with them. (Probably money changed hands) About noon that day we all loaded up again and went into Mexico. We drove about seventy-five miles into Mexico, and it was way into the night and we were in the mountains. We pulled over and got off of the road and slept that night. The next day we made it to somewhere south of Monterrey, Mexico and spent the night again. The next day we drove to a river about forty miles south of Victoria, Mexico and drove off of the road and went down by the river and spent the night. The last leg of the trip to Chamal was about fifty miles.
When we turned off the main highway and headed west for the last twenty miles we began having trouble. There had been a lot of rain and the roads were muddy and we had a wide river to cross and a mountain to cross over. We got over the mountain and down into the valley but the floods had washed out the bridges so we had to ford the creeks. On the last creek to ford we got stuck and in trying to get out the spring on the truck broke and the whole load sat down on the tire so that stopped us.
At this point we were only two miles from Uncle Childress's house so dad walked on and got Uncle Childress to come with the team of mules and the wagon. They unloaded some of the furniture into the wagon then the two men cut a long limb and used it as a pry bar and got the truck bed up off of the tire then put a block of wood between the bed of the truck and the axle. Then they put a rope from the truck to the wagon and were able to pull the truck out of the creek. Dad drove the truck on to Uncle Childress's house.
Uncle Childress had a small log house just a kitchen and two rooms. He also had a wife and five children. Ramon, Ruth, Nellie, Norman and Wade.
Can you imagine your traveling for a month to get somewhere and we didn't have a place to live. The four of us and our big Shepard just moved in with Uncle Childress. That is the way it was for about six months. My stepmother grew to hate Mexico with a passion. It never got any better. Her favorite expression was, "You drug me down here to this place."
Well dad found that a man by the name of Vernie Medlin had some lumber and dad talked him into selling it to him so dad built a small house for us. We built about one quarter of a mile up a creek and on the other side from Uncle Childress. Dad's land and Uncle Childress joined because it was inherited from Grandpa Belshe. The land had been neglected for several years. and the brush and cockleburs were higher than your head. We did not have anything to try to get the land cleared so dad cut down a tree and tied a big log behind the old truck and ran back and forth across the field until it was all leveled.
I wish I could impress on you just how bad things were. Dad went down the creek about one half mile and bought a mule from Mr. Crabtree and he went somewhere else and bought a horse. These two became a team to pull a turning plow that he borrowed from Uncle Childress. After clearing the land we put in a corn crop. While the corn was growing we planted seed beds of oranges, which were later transplanted into a nursery and were budded. After the buds grew and were strong enough, we planted the trees out into the field. We had some very lean years, but then, we had already had several lean years..." Looking back from this time in 2010, I do not see how we ever got through the great depression. Looking back from this time in 2010, I do not see how we ever got through the great depression.
When we left Stockton, CA I was in the fifth grade. Chamal had what was called the American school and was taught by women at Chamal. The school was from the first grade to the eighth grade. Sometimes there were two. All eight grades were in one room. When I finally got through the eighth grade I went back to the first grade in the Mexican school.
There are many stories about the deer hunting such as you could just walk a quarter of a mile from the back door of the house we lived in, and you would be in deer hunting country. You could go almost any direction in the valley, and you could hunt turkey. The valley had at least five kinds of cats that we hunted. There were the mountain lions, the jaguar, the lion cat, the ocelot and another that we called tigris. This one was like a bobcat except it had a long tail.
We could go up in the edge of the mountains and hunt pheasant. There were different kinds of monkeys up in the higher elevations. There were many kinds of parrots and macaws.
I spent many hours of my childhood roaming over the valley. We would go into the canyons and explore caves in the walls of the canyons. We would even disturb the big cats that lived in the caves and they would roar to let us know we were invading their territory. The western canyon where the river came through from another valley was called the Boquilla Canyon. I am jumping over a lot of things that happened through the years while in Mexico, but I am just catching the outstanding things of my childhood.
LEAVING MEXICO AGAIN
Since I was born in Mexico, I had to declare whether I was going to stay in Mexico or move out to the U.S.A. When I turned eighteen I needed to be in the U.S. or sign up for military duty in Mexico. I did however have to go to the so called country seat and get a birth certificate and some other papers so that I could travel back and forth across the border any time.
A few days before I turned eighteen I put a change of clothes in a sack and hitch hiked to McAllen, Texas. As I came across the bridge to the American side the immigration officers took me in a room and questioned me about why I was coming out of Mexico and questioned me about why I had no money and no baggage. They finally let me go on.
My brother, Homer, had already come up to McAllen one year earlier, and he had moved into the old house that belonged to my mother. The house was vacant because mother had remarried, and she was living in Colorado. The house was hers from the divorce settlement in 1926. The house had an old iron bed in it and an old kerosene cook stove. My brother had a little job at a water-bottling place and his job was to deliver water to homes.
The first thing I did was to go to the high school and register for the ninth grade. Farther back in the story I mentioned that I had been to the eighth grade in Chamal, Mexico. Now that I was ready to go to school I needed to see how I was going to survive.
Click here to see images of the Belshe family.
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