My Way: A South Texas Rancher in the Diplomatic Service of the United States

By Ernesto Uribe

I was encouraged by several foreign service colleagues and my children, as well as my older grandchildren. They all prodded me to write a memoir.

I entered the foreign service by pure luck. It was only because I was at the right place at the right time and was the right age to fill a need discovered by Robert Kennedy shortly after his brother was elected president in 1961. The problem was that no one in the state department was doing anything about reaching out to the youth of the word. Under a new program the Kennedys created, I was invited to enter the foreign service of the US information Agency (USIA) as a student affairs grantee because I could be shipped overseas immediately to help fill this gap. I was selected because I had an advanced degree in sociology, I was athletically inclined, and most importantly, I was bilingual in Spanish.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 3, 2015
• ISBN: 9781503584549

Ernesto Uribe

Ernesto Uribe entered the USIA Foreign Service at age of twenty-four in 1962. He had graduated from Texas A&M College, where he earned two undergraduate degrees and a master’s degree. He started his career with USIA as a student affairs grantee in the foreign service for thirty-three years, serving full tours in seven different Latin America countries. He rose in the ranks of the foreign service, coming from a lowly hired-hand grantee to being a minister counselor in the senior foreign service.

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Copyright © 2015 by Ernesto Uribe.

ISBN:      Hardcover         978-1-5035-8453-2

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Rev. date: 09/14/2015

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This book is dedicated to my dear wife Sarah Meade Uribe, that beautiful blond, blue-eyed girl who took a huge risk marrying me and who has been my constant companion for fifty-seven years.

From the very beginning, Sarah has always been my guiding light. She always backed me when we had tough decisions to make and supported me fully once we decided what our next step would be. We have always had faith in each other to make the right choices, and we always felt that together we could always make tough decisions when it came to our career moves in the diplomatic service.

In the old Foreign Service, the success or failure of an officer always depended on the support given by his/her spouse. Sarah always gave me her full support and was always much better then I at being the perfect diplomat when it came to representing our country overseas. I could not have had a better partner to help me carry out my official duties, and on top of all that, Sarah could not have been a better mother to our children, nor a more loving wife.

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

ERNESTO URIBE CAREER SUMMARY

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I owe special thanks to my editor and friend Charles S. Spencer Jr. who was also my colleague and co-worker in the U.S. Information Agency Office of Research back in the early 1980s. Charlie deserves special mention for making excellent suggestions during the revision process and taking on the tedious task of line-editing the entire manuscript of MY WAY. I also would like to thank an old Foreign Service colleague and my good friend James H. De Cou who preferred to be called Jazz, for urging me to write these memoirs. I am only sorry that Jazz did not live to see the published work. He died in France in 2014. A very special mention also goes to my good friend Olga Sanz who read and edited the very first version of this tome. I knew Olga when she headed the Spanish Language Branch of the Voice of America.

My guiding light was Fernando H. Ramirez for not only doing his magic on the graphics for the cover design of MY WAY but also in always giving me great suggestions in all publishing matters including the text of the book. I am forever in debt to Fernando’s special assistance and graphic arts expertise and advice.

I also would like to thank all my supervisors who put up with my impatience and sometimes impossible requests and who at the same time guided me into becoming a better than average Foreign Service officer.

My wife Sarah and I will always be especially grateful to our first PAO Fred Shaffer and his wonderful wife Muriel in Guayaquil back in 1962. They took on two green kids from Laredo, Texas under their wing and taught us how to survive in the diplomatic service.

Then there were the great Latin American Area Directors in USIA Washington who helped me succeed in my early assignments as a Public Affairs Officer. These were the officers who saw potential and ignored my beginner mistakes; I owe a lot to these caring officers who really helped me. I would have perished without the help and support of great USIA Senior Foreign Service officers like Bob Chatten, Steve Dachi, Dorothy Dillon, Vick Olason, and a few others.

Another very special person in my career was Walter M. Bastian who was my Public Affairs Officer in Bogota, Colombia. Walter pulled me out of the Student Affairs Officer business and appointed me Bi-National Center Director first in Barranquilla and a year later transferred me to direct the Bogota BNC, one of the best bi-national centers in all Latin America.

I also would like to mention Dan Oleksiw who was the USIA Inspector General and he took me on his staff as one of his inspectors in the mid-1970s. My tour as an inspector gave me an opportunity to observe what our Agency was doing around the world. This global perspective was the terrific learning experience that prepared me for senior management positions.

A very special remembrance to the unsung heroes in the Department of Journalism at Texas A&M College who prepared me in all aspects of the trade starting with writing, newspaper composition, photography, and radio and TV broadcasting that prepared me for becoming a Public Affairs Officer overseas. My journalism professors were D.D. Burchard, H.O. Miller, J. R. Redden and especially professor W.D. Calvert.

And last but not least are the many Foreign Service National employees, our faithful and hard working national employees in every country that were the backbone of all USIA overseas operations. They were the continuity that made all overseas USIS posts so great. It is important that I recognize all the local cultural assistants, media specialists, bi-national center and information center assistants and most important the post administrative assistants who took care of the budget and kept our posts running smoothly.

Chapter 1

Hebbronville, Texas (1937-1939)

A brilliant sun was setting behind the sleepy little town of Hebbronville that is located in the South Texas brush country. There was not a cloud in the sky and the time was 6:07 in the evening when I entered the world. The date was August 14, 1937.

I was born in a brand-new starter home my father, Amador Heberto Uribe had built for his bride, my mother Maria Jesus Ortiz that was completed shortly before they married so they could move right in after the wedding.

The Great Depression had kept them from being able to marry for several years, so in the meantime, my father bought two lots in downtown Hebbronville, hired a contractor and constructed a typical wooden frame house with a shaded front porch, a living-dining room combination, a small kitchen, two bedrooms, and a bathroom with indoor plumbing.

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Hebbronville, TX --House where I was born.

I was an expensive baby. I cost double for my delivery and my father was glad to pay it. He made a bet with Doctor Thomas Stetson that if I were a boy he would pay double the fee; and if I were a girl, the delivery would have been free.

According to my mother, who was 24 years old when I was born, my father, who was 30 years old, had big plans that he wanted to carry out as soon as the economy improved. At that time he was the office manager for the Laredo Central Power & Light Company office in Hebbronville. He had elaborate plans to build a large brick factory out in the chaparral where he had discovered excellent clays and planned to use the plentiful natural gas from wells that were on ranch land that belonged to his uncle Don Fernando Cuellar. He had already made several batches of bricks with the help of a professional brick maker in small kilns for testing before investing in the construction of industrial size kilns to get his brick factory going.

Unfortunately, my father was already a very sick man. He had serious kidney problems that eventually led to complete kidney failure and he died in Laredo when he was 31 years old.

Right before I was born, my grandfather Ernesto Uribe (the real Ernesto Uribe) died of unknown complications but my grandmother, Jovita Cuellar Uribe always blamed the stress caused by the financial losses that our family suffered during the great depression. The real Ernesto Uribe lost everything he had in savings and investments when the bank in Laredo that held all his financial assets folded.

In those depression years the Uribe family still had considerable ranch properties but no cash. Basically, they were land rich and money poor. This could have easily led to the loss of everything my Uribe grandparents owned. Had it not been for Mama Jovita, my grandmother, prohibiting the sale of any land, they probably would have lost everything. There were some in the family that believed that it had been this financial devastation that precipitated my grandfather Ernesto’s decline and early death. He was 63 years old.

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This is the only baby picture of me with my father and mother where we all appear together. His dog was Popeye.

I was eight months old when my father Heberto Uribe died. My mother was left with a screaming kid, no formal education, no money and possessing only the house my father had built and her homemaking skills.

So it was determined that my mother and I were to leave our little house in Hebbronville and move in with my grandmother Jovita Uribe who lived on 519 Houston Street in downtown Laredo.

Although I have no memory of those early years, I must assume that there was a lot of sorrow and turmoil in the Uribe family with both my grandfather Ernesto and my father Heberto dying within ten months of each other.

My mother was not to marry again while I was growing up. She always said she did not want to put me in the hands of a step-father. The loss of her husband affected my mother greatly. She had to move from her little house that she loved, she had to give away my father’s dog Popeye, and move in with her mother-in-law. I am certain this had a terrible impact on her. I have no way of knowing what she was like before my father died but I am certain that my very strong negative attitude towards everything was formed by growing up next to a resentful mother who felt that everything had been taken from her when her husband died.

To this day, my glass is always half empty, never half full. This attitude has given me the ability to survive under the worst of circumstances. I learned early not to trust anyone and always be prepared for the worst. My wife Sarah always asks how I can live with such a negative attitude, and my answer has always been that this way I am never disappointed when things don’t work out.

My first memory that I can still remember is weird. I have no idea how old I was, but I remember playing with a toy under a big quilt that to me seemed like a big tent directly over my head. The quilt was stretched on a wooden frame and looking up I could only see hands underneath the quilt and fingers reaching for needles that were poking through and pulling threads down. As soon as the thread tightened the hands would push the needle back up into the quilt using shiny silver thimbles. The quilt makers were my grandmother Jovita, my mother and some of my grandmother’s friends, all chatting and laughing at the same time. This quilt making tradition had been brought to Laredo from Guerrero, Tamaulipas in Mexico where my father’s family came from. After the quilting session, they would fold up the wooden frame and go to the kitchen table for coffee and pan dulce. I was allowed to sit with them and was given sweet pastries and hot chocolate in my little cup.

During those early years living in my grandmother Jovita’s house were my mother and I; three of my father’s brothers, my uncles Celso, Ernesto and Pepe (Jose Maria), and his two sisters, my aunts Anita and Raquel. It was a two story stuccoed brick house and the boys had the entire second floor which was a single room that my grandfather Ernesto had set up almost like a military barrack with five beds against the walls. I still remember which bed belonged to each of the boys, including my father’s and my uncle Rogelio’s that was also empty after he had married and moved to Zapata County to manage the Uribe family ranch properties.

I was always awed when I went up to the second floor where deer heads with pointed antlers were hanging on the walls and deer hide rugs covered the wooden floor. There was a stuffed hawk with spread out wings on a shelf that had belonged to my father that I always wanted to take, but I didn’t dare touch it. . The bathroom upstairs always smelled of Lifebuoy soap and Old Spice aftershave lotion. It was an all-male world up there.

My mother and I slept in the same bed downstairs. My Uncle Rogelio was already living in Zapata and Uncle Ernesto was running the Los Angeles ranch the family owned in Webb County close to Bruni where he owned and managed a Humble (Esso) filling station. Uncle Celso lived in my grandmother Jovita’s house in Laredo and owned a Sinclair filling station on San Bernardo Street. Uncle Pepe who was the youngest of the boys also lived with us and worked for Celso at the Sinclair station.

I became attached to Pepe because he was the one who gave me the most attention and was always playful. I would go with Pepe to Celso’s station almost every day and I would go with him on errands to the bank, or to buy auto parts for the mechanics and followed him like a puppy wherever he went. They even bought me little overalls with the Sinclair dinosaur logo to ‘wear to work’. This was really great for me. They would give me pennies to put in the peanut machine and I could grab a Royal Crown Cola or a Nehi orange pop out of the cooler any time I wanted.

The mechanics taught me to put peanuts into a soda bottle and let them soak; I really felt I was a big guy when they let me wipe the windshields on customer cars that in those days, along with checking the water in the radiator and the air in the tires was part of the service when any car drove up for gasoline.

My vocabulary improved tremendously, I could cuss up a storm just like the mechanics and grease monkeys… all in Spanish, of course. My mother and grandmother Jovita were not impressed. They tried prohibiting me from going to the gas station with Pepe but I raised such a ruckus that they had to give in. I also learned a valuable lesson when Pepe told me that if I wanted to go with him to work I had to watch my language around women, especially at home.

It soon became obvious that my mother could not afford to keep my father’s car and she had to sell it. Fortunately, it was just a short walk from my grandmother Jovita’s house to downtown Laredo. My mother and I would walk to town every Saturday to the Royal Theater for the double feature matinee, usually to see western movies and I always got a small bag of popcorn, and on the way home we stopped at Cardenas newsstand where I was allowed to pick out one ten-cent comic book.

My mother and I regularly visited with her parents, my Ortiz grandparents; sometimes we went several times during the week. We would always take the city bus that ran frequently in those days and the fare was only five cents.

There were just as many aunts and uncles at the Ortiz house as there were in the Uribe household. There were my uncles Carlos, Richard and Meme (Manuel) and my aunts Olivia, Trini and Hilda. My aunt Lile and my uncle Nele (Lionel) had already married and moved away.

My grandfather Carlos was a building contractor and had his own small construction company. He always had several jobs that ranged from building a new home or commercial building to remodeling existing structures. My grandmother Trini was a home body. She rarely left the house and when she was not in the kitchen, she was always knitting baby booties in her rocking chair that was in their bedroom.

I liked going to my Ortiz grandparents house because I could go into the boys room and read their comic books and because they had a huge yard with orange, grapefruit and tangerine trees. In the summertime the trees gave a solid shade and my grandmother always had the water hose turned on watering her trees. This was a great place to play in the red dirt and dig little canals to run water from tree to tree.

Back at my grandmother Uribe’s house, my mother was not very happy with the way I was allowed to do whatever I pleased, nor the way Mama Jovita was spoiling me. Whenever my mother tried to discipline me I would run over to Mama Jovita and she would not allow my mother to discipline me. She also did not like my going to the filling station with Pepe where I drank too many sodas and ate candy and peanuts all day. I was getting terrible cavities in what fortunately were my baby teeth.

The Sinclair service station was also not a very wholesome environment with Celso’s and Pepe’s friends there all the time. In those years, they were all bullfight aficionados and would go to the bullring in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico that was across the Rio Grande from Laredo, Texas. All their friends were heavy smokers and drinkers. There was always a bottle of tequila or mescal on the counter, and there was a beer joint right next to the filling station. These men liked me because I cussed like a sailor and was a loud-mouthed little wiseass they enjoyed teasing.

I was between three and five years old and don’t really remember much. Years later, Pepe told me about those days and the day I lost the tips of my middle and index fingers on my right hand that I had stuck into an air-compressor and they had to rush me to Mercy Hospital that was only a few blocks away.

The most important thing was that my mother was losing control and my grandmother and Pepe were spoiling me rotten.

Chapter 2

Laredo, Texas – The early years (1940 -1952)

I was four years old when World War II broke out. On December 7, 1941, my mother and I were at my Ortiz grandparent’s house and it was early evening. Everyone was listening to a large standing radio that was broadcasting from Nuevo Laredo, Mexico in Spanish announcing that the United States had been attacked. At the time, the attack meant nothing to me. I had no idea what war was… all I remember was the somber expression on my grandfather and grandmother’s faces as they listened to the radio.

Shortly after the war started, my uncle Ernesto joined the Army and my uncle Pepe went into the Army Air Corps. My Uncle Carlos Ortiz Jr. had just graduated from high school and went into the Navy, and my uncle Richard soon followed his brother into the Navy. My uncle Rogelio Uribe stayed in Zapata and was not drafted, so he ran the ranch properties in Zapata and Webb counties while two of his brothers were off to war.

On the Ortiz side, my uncle Lionel was also not drafted and worked with my grandfather Carlos Ortiz in his construction company all during the war.

I cannot remember exactly when, but something happened between my mother and my grandmother Jovita when I was about five years old. I have no idea what happened and I never asked my mother. All I know is that one day we packed and went to live with my Ortiz grandparents.

I immediately experienced a drastic change. My mother was again in charge because I no longer had Mama Jovita’s skirts to hide behind. I was finally getting the discipline I needed. My grandmother Trini Ortiz, Mama Grande was always kind and loving to me and was always caring, be it to heat a flour tortilla for me or letting me get a slice out of the half watermelon on the kitchen counter that she would cut and was exclusively for herself and she would pick at it with a knife and did not like to share with anyone.

Discovering that my grandfather Carlos Ortiz, Papa Grande’s gruff manners were no threat took me a little longer. I also quickly learned that neither Papa Grande nor Mama Grande would interfere when my mother disciplined me, which was very often in my case. I soon learned that I would avoid a lot of spankings if I just obeyed my mother.

World War II was in full swing when I turned five years old and I was enrolled in the First Grade in Montrose Elementary School. My mother and I were already living in the Ortiz house and I was able to walk to school by myself because it was just two blocks from my grandparent’s house.

For some reason, The Laredo Independent School District paid little attention to the quality of education they were providing for their children. This was especially true in the poorer neighborhoods, like El Chacon where we lived.

When I entered Montrose Elementary, the First Grade classes were only for half day. There was a batch of kids who had classes in the morning from eight until noon, and another group had afternoon classes from one to four. Most, if not all the students could not speak English and a four hour school day, five days a week was not going to cut it.

As it turned out, at the end of my first year in Montrose Elementary I was still not able to understand or speak English. Fortunately, both my Uribe aunts Anita and Raquel were high school math teachers and tested me. When they discovered that I had learned absolutely nothing, they decided that the Uribe family was going to invest in my getting a private school education.

So I repeated the First Grade in St. Peter’s School in downtown Laredo. That put me back a year but it was the best thing that ever happened to me. My limited exposure to English at Montrose helped me learn the language much faster the second time and it helped that most of my classmates in St. Peter’s were already fluent in the language.

That summer, between Montrose and repeating the First Grade in St. Peter’s I met the kid who would be my best friend throughout my school years in Laredo. Dickey Foster and I were exactly the same age. I was born just two days ahead of him and we met at El Field the empty lots that had been cleared by the neighborhood boys themselves for playing mostly baseball in the summer and sandlot tackle football in the fall. There was a chicken-wire backstop behind home plate and the bases were short pieces of wood or a brick. Home plate was a piece of plywood. My Ortiz uncles who were by then already in the Navy had played there and my uncle Meme still played there when I was in First Grade.

Unknown to Dickey and me, we had both been in the same First Grade at Montrose, but he was going for his half day session in the morning and I was going in the afternoon. We were roughly the same size as we approached each other in The Field and Dickey challenged me to a foot race. I had never raced anyone before but not wanting him to think that I was afraid of him, I accepted the challenge and I beat him. That earned me his instant respect.

We became close friends and together we started hanging out with the other boys our age in the neighborhood. We started playing baseball in The Field in the summer and football in the fall and into the winter. That was where we developed our athletic skills that would serve us to be able to participate in middle and high school sports.

Our other activity was going to the creek. The Chacon Creek was where we spent a good part of our time the year round. We would go there to play cowboys and Indians; fish with homemade nets made from gunny sacks and with small fishhooks, and in the summertime we would go swimming in the creek. There were three swimmable holes that we used… one was on the other side of the bridge on the road to Zapata that was called El Tule and it was said that a kid had drowned there some years before. Then the swim hole that was closest to our neighborhood was The Step-off. It was treacherous for the non-swimmers because it was shallow when you entered the swim hole and a few feet away from shore you would suddenly step off the edge of an underwater rock formation and be in water that was over your head. That was where I learned to swim. It still surprises me to this day that no one in our gang drowned.