Moyeboy-51

By Luis A. Jimenez

Moyeboy 51 is an autobiography about the Authors
family, his Education, his military career and his job
opportunities throughout the world during the past
seventy five years. He emphasizes the discipline, hard
work and self confidence that he used in achieving his
goals and dreams.
He was born and raised in the small west Texas town
of Presidio. His early formative years started at the age
of nine, when he was sent to Moye Military School in
Castroville, Texas, where he continued to be a Moye
cadet for the next five years until he graduated from
the eighth grade. His subsequent education through
high school and college led to being commissioned a
second Lieutenant in the AF and retired as a captain i n
1979. His military career enabled him to be hired by an
aerospace contracting company to work in Saudi Arabia
for six years in support of F-15 fighter aircraft.
He and his family returned to the states and in 1991
settled in San Antonio and became a public school teacher
and had several other short term job opportunities.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9781469154398

Luis A. Jimenez

Luis A. Jimenez was born January 9, 1937 in Presidio, Texas and during his early childhood years, World War II was on everyone’s mind. His dad went off to war while his mother stayed behind caring for his little brother, Jose Antonio. It was then that he started to have visions and dreams of someday becoming a soldier. After the war, his dad came home and bought his employer’s store and he and his mother operated it successfully for the next 30 years. At the age of 9, he was sent to Moye Military School in Castroville, Texas where he graduated from the 8thgrade. By then, he had his set of goal in completing high school and going to college to become an Air Force officer. Twenty years later, his goal and dreams came true. He graduated from high school at St. Edwards in Austin and then got his degree from Rollins College in Orlando, Florida. He joined the AF in 1957 and retired in 1979 as an AF Captain, which enabled him to be hired as a civilian by several international aircraft companies overseas. In 1990, his family decided to come and settle in San Antonio, and for the next 10 years, he did substitute teaching. He is now busy maintaining his rental properties and enjoying his two grandchildren.

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CONTENTS

Preface

Acknowledgments

Author’s Milestones

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Preface

On the eve of my birth, Presidio was just a small community of about five hundred residents living up and down the Rio Grande River bordering the larger Mexican township of Ojinaga, Chihuahua, Mexico with a population of at least two thousand. Both sides traded with each other and during the day the Mexicans would cross over the bridge and buy the hard to get quality items like groceries and dry goods and we in turn would go over in the evenings and enjoy the entertainment that was hard to come by in Presidio. Nightly dances in Ojinaga were very popular for it seemed that there was always an excellent reason for celebrating special occasions such as weddings, quiceanedras, despedidas, bienvenidas, tardearas, or commemorating the fiestas patrias. Restaurants, night clubs, and bars were plentiful with no shortage of music bands, mariachis, or conjuntos. Needless to say, that it was no secret that the acquisition of liquor and beer was never a problem for underage clients, so this enabled every one to enjoy the festivities without fearing any undue harassment by authorities. Also, any infractions regarding customs, immigration, or vehicular driving matters were usually settled in a very discrete manner due to the fact that everybody knew everybody and therefore issues like these were usually settled amicably without harm or ill will to no one. This was the existing environment that welcomed me into this world in Presidio, Texas.

Acknowledgments

Some books are carefully conceived, others are inspired, but this one has just evolved from nothing more than my life’s endeavors. In the last couple of years, I have become engrossed with the idea that I should document my accomplishments as passionately as I have experienced them. I could never have undertaken this task without the encouragement of my family and friends who throughout this trial have consistently been wishing me the best. I have also been very fortunate to have initiated, participated, and successfully undertook many challenges, which I give credit to my wife, Alma, my daughter, Melissa, and my son, Hector for supporting me on so many assignments that I chose to have in the past fifty years.

The two Saudi assignments, that included major and prolong family separations, could not have been possible if Melissa and Hector had not chosen to stay behind and live alone in El Paso while Alma and I lived over seas. Great credit must be given to them for facilitating these living arrangements for the benefit of our whole family. Their grandparents Alvaro and Librada Hernandez merit a substancial amount of credit for being there for them as well.

Belen Down, Melissa’s best friend, provided Melissa with a trusting friendship and support during our overseas tours. Belen helped arrange for Melissa’s wedding and provided her house for the ceremony. She was also Melissa’s maid of honor and photographer. They still remain great friends.

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My daughter

Melissa Jimenez Rocha

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My son

Hector Arturo Jimenez

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My daughter Melissa’s family: Noel, Frank, Diego, Melissa and Alexandra.

Author’s Milestones

In this autobiography, I tell my personal story of my family, my education, my military career and my civilian job opportunities through out my past seventy-five Years.

Moyeboy-51

During the early forties, World War II was on everyone’s mind. My dad went off to war in the Navy and my mother stayed behind caring for us. She used to dress my brother and me in army and navy uniforms and it was then that I started to have visions and dreams of some day becoming a soldier. After the war, my dad came home and opened his own grocery store and he and my mother successfully operated it for the next thirty years.

In 1946, at the age of nine, my parents sent me to Moye Military School in Castroville, Texas and for the next five years I roomed and boarded there until I graduated from the eighth grade. By then, I had set my goal of completing high school and going on to college and becoming an AF Officer. Twenty years later, my goal and dreams came true for in 1970, I was commissioned a second Lieutenant in the United States Air Force.

I enlisted in the USAF in July 1957 and for the next twenty-three years my family and I enjoyed life in the AF. The educational and travel opportunities that we experienced were great. In 1970, I graduated from Rollins College in Orlando, Florida and shortly thereafter was commissioned a second Lieutenant. Armed with an education, a commission, and being bilingual in Spanish and English, our life in the AF began to change beyond our wildest imaginations. Choice assignments of embassy duty in Latin America (Uruguay and Equador) in support of host country armed forces became very much a part of our life as did the travel that went with the job. However, after ten years of socializing with host country military leaders my commitment to the AF terminated and I retired in March 31, 1980, as a captain and moved on to other challenges.

On October 21,1961, I married my hometown sweetheart, from Presidio, Texas, Maria Alma Hernandez, daughter of Alvaro and Librada Sosa Hernandez, and we had two children: Melissa born on December 24, 1962, and Hector born on July 24, 1964. Melissa is an elementary school Teacher in the San Antonio ISD and is married to Francisco Rocha, who is a warehouse supervisor for Farmers Copper Ltd. They have two children: Alexandra age twelve and Diego age nine. Hector is single and works for Federal Express as Dangerous Goods Agent/Material Handler in San Antonio.

In February 1982, I accepted an offer from McDonnell-Douglas Aircraft Company to go to Taif, Saudi Arabia, in support of their F-15 Fighter Planes that King Fahad bought from the United States. This turned out to be another opportunity that my family and I could not ever have imagined, because it turned out to be very lucrative as well as satisfying. For seven years we traveled the world at company expense. Our children attended the finest international schools and each member of our family was allowed to travel twice a year to our home base in El Paso. In 1990, we all decided that seven years of constant family separations, it was time to come back home permanently to El Paso and enjoy what we had earned.

In 1993, we moved from El Paso to San Antonio and bought the house that we had always wanted and where we wanted to live. I also started substitute teaching soon after settling down, and soon after that, I found myself subbing mostly every school day. This went on for the next ten years until I decided that enough was enough; so in 2004 I stopped subbing completely.

Now, I find myself busy maintaining and updating my rental property and enjoying the company of our grandchildren, Alexandra and Diego. My wife Alma and I have become their official chauffeur. Oh god, please continue giving us health, money, and time to spend it.

Chapter One

My Parents and My Infancy

My dad’s marriage to my mother started to evolve in the mid-1930s to the point that on February 25, 1936, he wrote a letter of proposal to my mother-to-be, Emma Nieto, daughter of Miguel Nieto and Francisca Munoz, in which he told her that he was ready to marry her. He was twenty-nine and she was twenty-four. The following is a direct quote of that letter:

My Dearest Emma,

I am writing you this letter to let you know that I am ready now, more then ever to carry out our plans. I can pre-arrange everything for the night of March, the seventh, all you have to do is to let me know more or less at what time you can come out. I will be waiting from nine o’clock till . . . ? whatever hour you can come out, then we can go and see the judge for a minute. He will be ready and waiting for us, soon after that we can leave right out on our way to San Antonio.

Dear Emma, please don’t hesitate a bit, I am sure everything will be all right. I’m taking plenty of money with me, so as to enable us to have a real good time. You know I like to go to a good theater and I understand that San Antonio has some real good ones, just imagine… would I not be the happiest man in the world, if only I could attend some of the best shows there with the only girl that I really love, which is you, my dear.

You have told me time and time again that you love me truly, well why should we let those who don’t understand how much we love each other and allow them to enterfere with our future and deprive us of our happiness that life holds for us in store? They had theirs and we most certainly are entitled to ours. Don’t you think that those that want to deny us that privilege are acting rather selfish?

You have known me long enough to know that everything that I am saying or that I have said to you is the truth. I have been sincere about it. You can trust me, dear, and depend on me. I will take good care of you, because I really love you with all my heart.

Please answer me at your earliest convenience and let me know when and where and also if I can write you again.

Bueno Emma, asi es que espero conocer tu buena voluntad que no has de dudar de nuestra anhelada felicidad. Yo siempre he estado y estare dispuesto a satifacerte a ti por que te quiero y siempre tendras en este mundo un amigo que te comprenda un hombre que deveras te quiere y un ser que siempre sera tu fiel companero. Con un carinoso y cordial saludo. Tuyo, Lewie Jimenez.

They married on May 4, 1936, and he continued working for T. Ortega Grocery Store which in 1942 was sold to Mr. Fred Seggerman. On March 25, 1944, he was drafted into the Navy, but by that time the war was coming to an end and on May 8, 1944 he was honorably discharged and a few months later he bought the store from Mr. Seggerman. This was the beginning of a very successful business venture for my mom and dad, for my mom became a full time partner helping my dad run the store. I remember that business was very good, so they kept very busy.

My birth was free of any complications and thank God that I was a normal and healthy baby. Maria Galindo, a dear friend of my mother was the attending nurse. My mother’s diary includes just about every milestone that I experienced throughout my infancy. The first words that I uttered, my first step that I took, my first hair cut, and my first so and so and so… Father Elias Abricol baptized me and my uncle Edmundo Nieto and Graciela Spencer were my god parents. My Madrina Graciela prepared me for my first holy communion, which I received on December 8, 1944. As for my first birthday, my Aunt Delfa Nieto, made my cake and all the Nietos attended my party.

On May 24, 1941, my brother Jose Antonio, Bobby was born, so when my father bought his store in 1945, Bobby was three and I was eight, so mother in addition to going to help my father at the store, had to care for the two of us at home. This situation became part of the reason that I was probably sent off to boarding school at Moye Military School in Castroville, Texas. The other reason was that if I had stayed in Presidio, I would perhaps not have gotten the education and discipline that my mother wanted for me, so off I went to Moye for the school year 1946-1947. Little did I knew, that for the next five years I would be attending this school. I adjusted real well and I liked it very much, mainly because it was military and back then being military was cool. The tuition was about $400 per semester, which even back then it was pretty reasonable considering it included room and board. With me gone for nine months out of the year, my parents were able to dedicate more time to my little brother and the store. Business was good because the war had just ended and everyone had money especially ranchers, farmers, and stores who prospered during the war. The Ojinaga folks crossed the river and traded with our dad and I enjoyed listening to my dad talk to them in Spanish and English. Although, we talked Spanish at home all the time we still could easily speak English when we had to.

Most of the events that I relate in this book are the ones that my mother wrote in her diary regarding my first three years. After that, I can begin to recollect certain activities in conjunction with not only mom’s diary, but with her impressive collection of photographs taken by the famous brownie box camera of the forties and of course coupled by the town’s photographer, Pepe Galindo el fotografo. These remembrances are the ones that I have used in describing my infancy and childhood days. I thank my mom and dad for making it possible to remember my early adventures of my life. My mother and her sisters, Corina Rohana and Zulema, were the only three children born to Miguel Nieto’s first marriage to Francisca Spencer Munoz, who died in March 10, 1918 at the age of eighteen shortly after Corina was born. Zulema died in her infancy and my grandfather went on and married Maria Vasquez in July 17, 1918, and fathered four additional children, Eva, Delfa, Lucy, and Edmundo.

After my mother passed away, I came across a treasure trove of photographs and letters and among them, I found this small envelope addressed to me and I was surprised at who had sent me this little letter. The sender’s name was Alma Hernandez, whom I married twenty years later in 1961. The card inside the envelope read and I quote please come to my first birthday party on September 9, 1940, at 2:00 p.m. at my Grandma Bernarda’s house. I could not believe that my wife at her tender age of one was already trying to catch my attention. Well, obviously it was her mother, Librada, that wrote the invitation and actually, it was not a bad move, because we are still together after fifty years of marriage and counting.

I also found a letter that my Aunt Eleuteria Jimenez Tela had helped me write to my father while he was away in the Navy. She held my hand and guided it through a few sentences. One Christmas season, my cousin Edwardo Jimenez Lalo brought me a wooden toy jeep from Big Spring, Texas. This jeep in its original box was another relic that I found in one of the many boxes my mother had stored away. Back in the forties, Lalo’s parents Florencio Lencho and Tela and the entire family would go in early fall to Big Spring to work in the cotton fields in Tela’s brother ‘s El Guero farm and would come back just before Christmas. Every year when they came back Lalo would bring me a present. I have never forgotten how much fun we had playing with our jeeps for he also brought one for himself. The reason why this jeep was made out of wood was because there were few if any metal toys available due to the fact that all metals were being used for the war effort.

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Moye Military School Main Building

in Castroville, TX

Chapter Two

Childhood

1941-1946

During my childhood, my brother Jose Antonio Bobby and I Sonny were primarily