I would like to pay tribute to a group of young men that won the 1949 baseball championship in Texas and overcame many, many obstacles and overcame the odds that at the time existed. When I read their story, you will appreciate their…
I would like to pay tribute to a group of young men that won the 1949 baseball championship in Texas and overcame many, many obstacles and overcame the odds that at the time existed. When I read their story, you will appreciate their accomplishment.
This is from a story written by Alexander Wolff from Sports Illustrated that appeared in the June 27, 2011, edition. It's entitled, ``The Barrio Boys.''
In 1949, El Paso's Bowie Bears, a team of poor Hispanic players who were too unworldly to be intimidated by their more affluent Anglo opponents, came from nowhere to win Texas' first high school baseball championship.
You'd saw off a broomstick for a bat. For a ball, you'd beg spools of thread from the textile plant, enough wrap to create a wad that you could seal with carpenter's tape. You'd go back to the factory for cloth remnants to sew together for a glove, which you'd stuff with cotton you picked at the ranch on the fringe of the barrio. That's what you did as a kid of Mexican blood in El Paso during the 1940s to play the game that, more than anything else, the traditional American game which would make you an American--baseball.
But to become a champion at that game, to beat all Anglo comers in a world that belonged to them, how could you possibly do that?
Borders are shape-shifting things--sometimes barriers, sometimes membranes, sometimes overlooks from
which one people take the measure of another. If you were to transport yourself to the El Paso of 1949 and take up a position as far south as possible by the north shore of the Rio Grande, in a nether land not wholly of the U.S. but not of Mexico either, you'd be a cutoff throw from Bowie High School, the only public secondary school in the U.S. then dedicated to educating Mexican Americans.
The people of south and east El Paso dealt every day with two kinds of borders. The geographical one at their backs reminded them of their Mesoamerican heritage. The aspirational border just to the north, which was an east-west highway through downtown, was a tantalizing gateway to their country of choice.
Andy Morales, a member of the 1949 Bowie High School baseball team, used to walk the eight blocks from his home up to Alameda Avenue, which was the local stretch of U.S. Highway 80, the artery that ran from San Diego, California, to the Georgia coast. Beyond the avenue lay the Anglos' turf, where a Mexican American would think twice before entering that space. Instead, they focused on the road. My friends and I, we'd compete counting out-of-State license plates on Alameda Avenue. Morales, says: I set the record one Saturday, counting 39 in a 2-hour period. Plate-spotting gave Morales and his buddies a chance to glimpse the energy of a country ready to burst after the end of World War II, a place where they gradually came to believe they belonged.
They would owe the awakening in large part to the game they loved. Bowie High School didn't field a baseball team until 1946, when a wiry, energetic man of not quite 5 feet, 6 inches tall arrived from San Antonio. He started the first team. Three years later, the Bowie team included: Morales, the wisecracking second baseman who never took a book home from school because there simply wasn't enough light to read in his home; Javier ``Lefty'' Holguin, the pitcher with a knuckleball that was so crazy that nobody would play catch with him; Jose ``Rocky'' Galarza, the smoky-eyed third baseman to whom Bowie coeds dedicated yearbook pages; and Ramon Camarillo, the catcher whose hunches came to him in his dreams.
Despite the poverty that made them scrounge for equipment and wonder if they'd ever have enough food to eat, and despite discrimination that subjected them to stinging slurs and other indignities from Anglos, these boys and the other 11 players on the 1949 Bowie Bears would win the first Texas high school baseball tournament ever staged.
Bowie High sat in El Paso's Second Ward, or Segundo Barrio, which was home to the city's leach field and sewage treatment plant. A smelting operation, stockyards, and a meatpacking company further fouled the air. Nowhere in the U.S. did more babies die of diarrhea. The barrio had no paved streets, much less sidewalks, streetlights, or parks, and 50,000 people packed themselves into less than 1 square mile in this part of El Paso. This is about twice the population density of New York City.
Those not living in adobe hovels were warehoused in presidios like the ones in which Camarillo and Bowie first baseman Tony Lara grew up in, where as many as 175 families--at least 700 people--were shoehorned into a single block of two-story tenement buildings with one communal cold-water commode serving each row of two-room apartments. Compared with Anglo El Paso, the Second Ward was, as Camarillo would say, ``like another country.''
One might have expected Bowie's '49ers to be cowed by their more affluent, better equipped Anglo opponents, but, Lara says, ``We were so dumb, we didn't know how to be intimidated.'' This obliviousness was carefully calculated. Bowie's baseball coach made sure his players didn't wallow in want and ethnic victimization, diverting them instead with such requirements as daily classroom attendance, executing the hit-and-run, and mastering the nuances of English by speaking nothing else around him.
``With Nemo, there were no heroes,'' says Gus Sambrano, a shortstop on the 1949 team. ``He was the leader. His message was, `You have leadership; follow.' We were the followers.''
William Carson ``Nemo'' Herrera was a fronterizo, a child of the borderland like his players, and he probably knew them better than their parents did. He was born in Brownsville, Texas, in 1900. His father, Rodolfo, had immigrated after losing his landholdings in the political unrest that would lead to the Mexican Revolution. And his mother, Carolina, had roots in the Canary Islands. The family moved to San Antonio when Nemo was 7, and by the age of 13, he had become the bat boy of the San Antonio Broncos of the Texas league. He steeped himself in the game. His speed and tenacity served him well in basketball as well as baseball while he attended Brackenridge High School. He would excel at both sports at Southwestern University in Georgetown and play semipro baseball during summers.
After graduating, he became the head basketball coach and assistant football coach at Beaumont, Texas High School. For a year, he worked as the coach before joining Gulf Oil's subsidiary in Tampico, Mexico. There, he progressed from pipeline work to payroll department while playing second base on the company team.
In July of 1927, during his fourth year in Tampico, Herrera was spiked during an industrial league game and wound up in the town's American hospital. Within a month, he had married the head nurse on the floor, Mary Leona Hatch, an Anglo who had been orphaned as a girl near Opelousas, Louisiana. A year later, Herrera took a job as baseball and basketball coach at Lanier High School in San Antonio's west side barrio, where he would spend 18 years, including all of the Depression.
His basketball teams rarely had much size, so much so that he introduced what later generations would recognize as a full-court press. ``Only we called it a man-to-man, all-over-the-court defense,'' one player would say later.
Herrera would say five times his teams reached the State final four, winning titles in 1943 and 1945. He acquired enough of a reputation for Texas A&M to offer him its basketball coaching job. However, he turned it down for the stability of public school work. And in 1946, Bowie High School came calling, offering a better salary and the benefits of a desert climate, which Mary Leona, who suffered from hay fever, and Bill, one of their two sons who also had asthma, benefited from.
Herrera's new high school belied the squalor of the Segundo barrio. When the city expanded the school in 1941 onto what had once been a slag heap, a complex of athletic fields girdled by cottonwoods and elms bloomed in the floodplain of the Rio Grande. Signs throughout the school warned students to speak only English, and special pronunciation classes walked them through phonemes and diphthongs. ``I once asked the girl sitting in front of me for a piece of paper in Spanish,'' Sabrano recalls. ``I got suspended, and my mom and dad said that was the first and last time that you will be guilty of speaking Spanish.''
La Bowie, as it was called, was a temple of assimilation. When President Franklin D. Roosevelt federalized the all-Hispanic Company E of the Texas National Guard's 141st Infantry Regiment late in 1940, half of the soldiers had been Bowie Bears. Forty former Bowie students gave their lives during World War II, most of them as members of Company E, whose ranks were steadily thinned through the Italian campaign, from Salerno to San Pietro to the slaughter at the Rapido River, where over 2 days in January of 1944 German soldiers killed, wounded, or captured virtually every GI not swept to his death by the current.
At the outset of the 1948-1949 school year, Bowie dedicated a memorial to its fallen 40 and an ROTC color guard concluded each day with a retreat ceremony, lowering the flag that flew above the school.
Herrera worked to make baseball one of Bowie's tools of Americanization. He set up a summer league in the barrio and placed kids on American Legion and commercially sponsored teams. Then he bird- dogged the games, nudging prospects he liked to go out for the Bowie varsity the following spring. A decade later, after Brown v. Board of Education forced El Paso to close all-black Douglas High School, Herrera enticed a bilingual African American kid
from the south side to enroll at Bowie. This was the future NCAA- champion basketball coach Nolan Richardson, who would also be a star for Nemo in hoops as well as in baseball.
El Paso was a military town, much as it is today, and eventually Nemo took his guys to play teams at Fort Bliss and Biggs Field, where they often outperformed their older, bigger, and stronger hosts. ``We went out there on the field against those base teams not knowing any better,'' says Morales, attributing many of Bowie's boys' victories to Herrera's enforced obliviousness. Always the Bears ate at the mess. And Morales remembers fondly, ``Those were the only days we'd get three square meals.''
The school newspaper, The Growler, could have taken its name from the sound in a Bowie student's stomach. Mary Leona Herrera would send her husband off to work each day with extra sandwiches and burritos, which he left in plain sight so they could be ``stolen'' by his famished boys. As their stomachs filled up, so did their heads. Molding his baseball team in the image of basketball squads, Herrera played small ball before it, too, had a name. ``We used to work on some plays for hours and hours,'' says Morales. ``We won games on details, not because we hit the ball out of the park.''
Herrera spent Saturday mornings chasing down truants. He'd say to me, ``I'm gonna kick their butts if they're not back in school on Monday,'' remembers Bill Herrera, who today is 77, and who would accompany his dad on those rounds. But back at Bowie, Nemo would just as doggedly plead the cases of those same kids to Principal Frank Pollitt.
The coach treated his baseball diamond like a drawing room carpet, picking stray pebbles off the infield. And he encouraged teasing for its democratizing effect. One day, first baseman Lorenzo Martinez showed up at practice with a new glove which he had bought across the river in Juarez. ``It smelled like a dead salmon,'' Morales recalls. ``Nemo said, `You paid for that?' The madder Martinez got, the more Nemo encouraged us to razz him because that made him a better player.''
``Nemo had a wide nose with huge nostrils, and when he got mad, he looked liked a raging bull. We used to joke that we should all get toreador capes.'' One day, as a few of the Bowie Bears nursed beers in a Juarez cantina, Herrera walked in. They literally, and figuratively reached for their capes. Nemo, in typical fashion, said, ``I'll tell you the truth boys; I'd rather see you guys drink beer than soda pop. Soda pop will ruin your health.''
If a Bear took only one thing from his coach it was a credo that became an incantation, and it read, ``It's not who you are or where you come from,'' Nemo would say, ``it's who you become.'' The last of those words synched with the striving of the postwar generation, with the American Dream, with all those cars whizzing east and west on Highway 80.
By the spring of 1949, the new coach's spadework had begun to pay off. A San Antonio sportswriter noted ``the wonderful spirit'' of the Bowie baseball team, ``the way the pitchers bear down, the sharp fielding and baserunning reminiscent of the old St. Louis Gashouse Gang.''
The Aztec, which was the Bowie yearbook, had already gone to press by the time the Bowie Bears edged El Paso High, which was the Anglo school on the North Side. There they won the district title. So beneath a team photo the editors of the Aztec had written, ``Good luck to you, team, and when these Aztecs reach you, may you have lived up to those early- season forecasts.''
When the Bears reached Lamesa, Texas, for the best-of-three bi- district playoffs against Lamesa High School, their appearance on the sidewalks caused gawkers to pour out of storefronts. ``You'd think that the circus had come to town,'' Sambrano recalls. Some people made cracks like, ``Why don't you speak English?'' And ``Remember the Alamo,'' while others called the players ``hot tamales'' and ``greasy Mexicans.''
Herrera found a restaurant that would serve the team, but not in its largely empty dining room. Tables and chairs were hastily set up in the kitchen. The Bears' coach rarely brought up the discrimination that his boys faced, for fear they might be tempted to use it as an excuse. Herrera regarded prejudice as the problem of the prejudiced, Sambrano says, best met with an even temper and devotion to the task at hand.
Bowie's Ruben Porras three-hit Lamesa to win the series opener 9-1. The next day, Trini Guillen scattered five hits in an 8-0 shutout that clinched the bi-district title. ``Those guys were big,'' Sambrano remembers, ``but we had what they didn't: speed.'' Against the Golden Tornados, the El Paso Herald-Post reported the Bears ``made a race track out of the diamond.'' In the first inning of each game, Bowie scored a run on a lone hit and either an error or a walk. By sweeping Lamesa, Bowie earned a trip to Austin for the single elimination quarterfinals of the state tournament. ``If memory serves me right,'' Lara recalls today, ``there were eight teams and we were rated 10th to win it all.'' Large odds by anybody's calculation.
Racial segregation still prevailed in Texas during the 1940s, but Mexican Americans confounded the easy dichotomies of black and white. In Lubbock, where the team made a rest stop on the way to Austin, a sign in one window read No Dogs or Mexicans. ``I remember seeing two drinking fountains, one marked Colored and the other marked White,'' Morales says. ``Me being brown, I didn't know which was for me. So I asked a husky Anglo guy which one I was supposed to use.'' Morales took the man's reply (``I don't give a `s--' '') as permission to use the white one.
In Austin, while most of the other visiting teams stayed in hotels, the Bowie Bears had to sleep on Army cots that were set up beneath the stands of Memorial Stadium, the football field on the Texas campus, and they had to make the long slog across the field to the Longhorns' field house to use the bathroom. But to Herrera's naive boys, the unusual accommodations only heightened their adventure. They lined the cots up like hurdles and ran races. When Hispanic businesses and social organizations back home sent telegrams of support, the Bears delighted in seeing the spectacle of a Western Union messenger driving his motorcycle up the stadium ramp for deliveries.
One day, four players ventured downtown to see a movie, and they were bewildered when they were told, ``Mexican have to sit upstairs.'' So what did they do? They waited for the usher to turn the corner, and then they scrambled into the seats of the orchestra in the dark. They recalled that they watched The Streets of Laredo with William Holden.
Facing Stephenville High in the quarterfinals, Bowie made another display of first-inning resourcefulness, scoring three runs on two hits. The press had expected Herrera to start his ace, Guillen, who was 7-0 for the season. One reporter wondered why the Bowie coach, instead, gambled with his number two pitcher.
In typical Herrera fashion, he said, ``Number one, number two, who can tell?'' leaving unsaid that Guillen had just spent 4 days in the hospital with strep throat. Porras, ``the dark-skinned right hander,'' as the American-Statesman described him, struck out six, while limiting Stephenville to two hits in the 5-1 victory.
The wisdom of using his ace sparingly became clear the next day in the semifinals against Waco High School. The game lasted three hours. Guillen held up until the fourth, when Waco touched him for two runs. And that's when Herrera brought in Porras as relief.
With the score tied at two in the sixth, Rodriguez stole third, then sprinted home on a long fly ball. ``I would have scored easily tagging up and that would have won us the game,'' Rodriguez remembers. ``But me, like a dummy, forgot that there was only one out. The ball was caught and I got doubled up. Nemo almost strangled me, he was so mad.'' He always reminded us, ``Keep your head in the game. Pay attention to details.''
The score remained tied at two until the 10th, when Waco loaded the bases with nobody out. Suddenly, Herrera yelled in Spanish, ``Watch the guy on third. He's gonna steal.'' Camarillo
called for a pitchout, and they picked the runner off. It was the only time that any '49er of the Bowie Bears can remember Herrera addressing his players in Spanish. Camarillo then cut down another runner trying to advance to third, and during the rundown, the next batter was caught trying to steal second.
In the following inning, Bowie center fielder Fernie Gomez, his back to home plate, preserved the tie by running down a long drive with a catch that his teammates would recognize later as Willie Mays' famous World Series play 5 years later.
But in the top of the 12th, Waco took a 3-2 lead on a double and Morales' two-base error. That might have doomed the Bowie Bears had Morales not delivered a reversal of fortune in the bottom of that inning. With Bears on second and third, Morales hit a grounder that eluded the Waco second baseman to tie the game. Then the fates squared accounts with Rodriguez, too: His quailing single dropped into short center field to send Gomez home for the game-winner.
Neither of El Paso's daily newspapers sent a reporter to the tournament, so people back home followed Bowie's progress through the collect calls that Herrera placed to the local radio station, KTSM. His boys, Herrera said in his call after the Waco game, ``just don't know when to quit. They're eating well and hitting that ball, and that wins ball games.'' Surely it's one of the few times that a coach has ever credited a victory to eating well.
In the final, Austin's Stephen F. Austin, had the tournament's number one seed. They enjoyed more than a home field advantage. The Maroons, as they were called, hadn't lost to a single high school all season, even beating the Longhorns' freshman team. They had swept Robstown in their bi-district series by a combined score of 36-1, and in the semifinals eliminated Denison 12-0. The Boston Braves would soon sign the Maroons' ace, right hander Jack Brinkley, to a $65,000 bonus. Brinkley had allowed only one hit in his quarterfinal start, a 2-0 win over Lubbock.
In the final, Herrera intended to counter Brinkley by pitching Guillen, but before game time he asked his catcher, Camarillo, for his thoughts. Camarillo nominated Lefty Holguin, arguing that the knuckleballer would keep the Maroons off balance. Camarillo later confessed that he volunteered Holguin because he had dreamed that the Bears could win the title with him on the mound.
Herrera agreed--Guillen could still barely speak--and Porras had pitched 15 innings in 2 days--with the proviso that Holguin would get the hook if he became wild. ``When you've got just one left,'' Herrera would say later, ``that's who you pitch.''
During Austin's half of the first inning, each Maroons hitter returned to the dugout with the same verdict: Holguin was ``just a good batting-practice pitcher,'' as one told his coach, according to the Austin American-Statesmen. They always said, ``we'll get him next inning.''
The next inning came, and the next, and the next, yet Austin couldn't muster a hit off Holguin. Meanwhile, Bowie seized a 1-0 lead in the usual fashion, jumping on a couple of first-inning errors. But after Holguin walked two Maroons in the fourth, Herrera was true to his word, lifting Lefty for Guillen. In the sixth inning, Bears right fielder Ernesto Guzman tripled, and two infield errors on a grounder by Lara allowed both Bears to cross, putting Bowie up 3-0.
In the last inning, Austin finally kindled to life. Brinkley, the pitcher, led off with a single hit and advanced to second on a walk. Guillen struck out the next man, but Brinkley scored after Galarza misplayed a slow roller, leaving runners on second and third. The next Austin hitter sent a single to right to knock in a second run, and as the Maroons' third base coach waved the tying run home, the favorites looked like they were going to seize their chance.
That's when all of Bowie's preparation--the harping on details, the numbing repetition, the many games against the military-base teams around El Paso--paid its biggest dividend. From right, Guzman sent the ball on a line. Morales, the cutoff man, let it go through to Camarillo, who fixed a tag on the Maroons' base runner for the second out.
On the play at the plate, another Maroon, also representing the tying run, made his way to second base. An infield hit edged him to third, whereupon the next Austin hitter slapped a sharp ground ball.
At least some of the 2,700 fans there that night must have wondered what the Bowie shortstop was thinking, dropping to one knee. He simply explained, ``I was ready to block it, just in case,'' Rodriguez says. ``I said, `This damn ball's not going through me.' '' He caught the ball cleanly, stood up and whipped it across the diamond. Cradled safely in Lara's borrowed glove, the ball made the urchins of El Paso lords of all of Texas.
True to form, there was no celebration when it was over, Morales recalls. ``We took it as part of how Nemo raised us. We just picked up our belongings and walked out of there.''
The Bowie players don't recall ever shaking hands with their opponents. Their opponents simply walked away from them. And though the Bears received a trophy--``I mean, it must be about 3 feet high,'' Herrera marveled in his collect call that night--there was no formal presentation or other official act recognizing Bowie for having won Texas' inaugural baseball championship. The Bears had scratched out nothing but unearned runs to win the final, and to a typical Texan of that time, it must have seemed that an alien team had seized the title by alien means. The Austin American-Statesman reacted as if Pancho Villa had just led a raid over the border: ``Amigo, the Bowie Bears have come and gone. And they have taken with them the State baseball championship. They took it Wednesday night through a weird assortment of hits, errors, jinxes and other sundry items which ultimately meant Bowie 3, Austin 2.''
After the Bears had packed up for the ride home, much to their surprise, a few rocks hit their bus. ``There were two cops there who didn't do anything,'' Rodriguez recalls. When a restaurant near Fort Stockton, which was 240 miles away from home, wouldn't serve the Bowie party, Herrera ferried food from the restaurant to the bus.
Around noon the following day, as the team rumbled along Highway 80 over the El Paso County line, a sheriff's deputy on a motorcycle flashed his lights to pull the bus over. One player wondered if they'd hit somebody. When the officer stepped aboard, it was to inform the driver and the students that Bowie students were affixing a State champ's banner to the side of the bus and that he'd be providing a police escort to the terminal. ``As the bus approached downtown, there were people lining both sides of the street,'' Latta recalls. Remarkably, ``a lot of Anglos were cheering for us as well.''
Later, the minor league team El Paso Texans threw a Bowie Night that weekend, and the Bears were feted with several banquets the following week. ``We can't give them anything,'' one city official told the local paper, ``but we can sure feed them.
Still, the Bears sensed that even in their hometown, they were given a second-class celebration. Instead of the mayor meeting them at the bus station, as had been announced, an alderman did the honors. ``At the depot, some guy came up to Nemo and gave him a box with a shirt in it,'' Morales remembers. ``When El Paso's Austin High won the district in football, their coach got a brand new car.''
None of the players stopped by the terminal's baggage room to claim luggage. ``We all carried paper bags with our stuff off the bus,'' Morales says. ``I walked a mile, hopped the streetcar, then walked the eight blocks home.''
The night before the team had left for Austin, students in a Bowie home economics class stayed up late preparing hard-boiled eggs for the players to eat on the trip. The Bears had won, one of those coeds would say at a Bowie reunion years later, ``porque jugaron con huevos.'' Because they played with eggs--that is, with balls.
Sixty years would pass before another team from El Paso County claimed a state baseball title. In 2009, Socorro High, a school with a Hispanic enrollment of more than 95 percent, ventured to the Austin suburb of Round Rock to beat Austin Westlake and Lufkin for the Class 5A crown. Early in the semifinal a knot of Westlake supporters unfurled a Confederate flag, chanted ``We speak English!'' and waved their ID's. ``If we can have something like that
in our day and age,'' says Jesus Chavez, Bowie's current principal and a former Socorro administrator, ``I can't even imagine what they went through in 1949.''
A month after their victory the Socorro players visited Bowie to present championship rings--not awarded in 1949--to the eight surviving Bears. A new Bowie High sits on an old melon field that in '49 was part of Mexico but in 1963 passed into the U.S. as part of the Chamizal Settlement between the two countries.
If the borderland remains its protean self, in one respect it's as hard as a barrier can be: While Juarez becomes an ever more Hobbesian hell of drug violence, in which more than 8,000 people have been murdered over the past three years, El Paso remains virtually immune. Bowie nonetheless serves the second-poorest zip code in the U.S. The annual median income in the Segundo Barrio languishes below $20,000, and 68.8 percent of the children in Bowie's catchment area are considered at risk. Chavez says, ``This school is about facing adversity, moving forward and beating the odds.''
The 1949 Bears and their young counterparts from Socorro gathered near the commemorative display in Bowie's Fine Arts Building, where a visitor can punch up audio of Nemo Herrera's collect calls back to KTSM Radio. The 400 people on hand included Peter Contreras, assistant athletic director of the state's University Interscholastic League, the high school sanctioning body that hadn't seen fit to properly lodge or honor the Bears 60 years earlier. That Contreras is Hispanic is only one of uncountable examples of how times have changed. As for the old slights, the '49ers were ``always very restrained how they responded,'' says Reyes Mata, the South Side native who helped organize the event. ``They always maintained their dignity.''
What did they become, Nemo Herrera's barrio boys from El Paso and San Antonio? Judges and produce barons and big-city postmasters. Mechanics and firefighters and civil servants. Opticians and claims adjusters and veterans, many of them decorated. An outsized number chose Nemoesque professions: teaching, educational administration, coaching.
Rocky Galarza, the old third baseman, put an open-air boxing ring behind his South Side tavern. He plucked kids off the streets, and if the streets pulled them back, as they briefly did eventual WBF lightweight champ Juan (Ernie) Lazcano, Galarza would simply wait until they returned, wiser, to the sanctuary of his ring. The best ones ultimately made their way to L.A. or Dallas or Houston, where someone else cashed in on them; Galarza, in cowboy boots and jeans, his black hair flowing as he worked a guy out, simply turned to the next kid to save. One night in 1997 one of Galarza's barmaids shot and killed him in his sleep. Seven years later, on the eve of a title fight in Las Vegas, Lazcano told Bill Knight of the El Paso Times, ``Sometimes, when I'm asleep, I still see him, still hear him. He's telling me, `Come on, Champ, don't give up. Feint. Don't just stand there. Move your feet.' It's nice to know, isn't it, that if you do something special for people the way Rocky did, that you live on through them?''
Andy Morales, the license-plate-spotting second baseman, also ``went Nemo,'' as the old Bears put it. After winning a football scholarship to New Mexico and serving in Korea with the Navy, he became baseball coach at El Paso's Austin High. There, in the early '70s, he taught the game to an Anglo kid named Chris Forbes, who grew up to coach Socorro to that 2009 state title. Morales followed the Bulldogs as they made a familiar way east through the draw, to Midland and greater Austin, as excited as he had been as a Bowie Bear. He was amazed that a dozen spirit buses would make the trip from El Paso for the final.
As for Herrera himself, he remained at Bowie until 1960. ``The [Bowie] boys knew little of fundamentals,'' he said upon leaving, ``and I was told I couldn't teach them. But I did.'' He took a post at another barrio high school, Edgewood of San Antonio. After one year Herrera--by now known as el viejo, the old man--returned to El Paso to coach baseball at Coronado High, a new, largely Anglo school on the outskirts of town. ``I couldn't get those guys to do a damn thing,'' he would say. ``They had a car in the parking lot and a gal on their arm.''
Upon reaching the mandatory retirement age of 70, he returned one last time to San Antonio, working as director of civilian recreation at Kelly Air Force Base for 10 years before retiring again. He died in 1984. Herrera remains the only Texas high school coach to have won state titles in two sports, and his name can be found throughout the barrios of the two cities: on a scholarship fund, an elementary school and a baseball field in El Paso; and on a scholarship fund, a basketball court and the Kelly Air Force Base civilian rec center in San Antonio. ``It's almost a competition between the two cities to see who can honor Nemo the most,'' says his son Charles, 75.
Of the eight members of the 1949 Bowie Bears still living, the five in El Paso gather for breakfast every few months at a Mexican restaurant on the East Side. Listen in, and you'll hear the sounds of baseball: chatter, needling, kibitzing, stories that reach across the years and often involve their old coach. Not that it matters particularly, but the banter is much more likely to be in English than in Spanish. And just so you know, Morales says, ``For 60 years we've never lost a conversation.''
I know my time is up, Mr. Speaker.
I wanted to read the story of the 1949 Bowie Bears into the Record to celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month. This is the end of Hispanic Heritage Month, and I thought that would be an appropriate way to end the month.
I thank you for your indulgence.