Concrete ties to the past

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September 11, 2010 - 12:00 AM

“I wouldn’t say it was primitive,” living in houses Monarch Cement Company built for Mexican workers first recruited toward the end of World War I, Lola Perez said Friday in a break from greeting visitors to a pictorial display of those who lived there. The photos are on display again today, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., in St. Joseph Catholic Church Parish Hall.
“We were poor,” and the houses, four rooms with cold running water, no natural gas at the start and a privy out back, were on what today would be the edge of subsistence, “but we never lacked for anything to eat — those who came from Mexico brought their agrarian skills — and we flourished on Cement Road.”
To fill the table three times a day, vegetables overflowed from gardens, nut trees were common in nearby woods and Coal Creek was filled with fish.
The houses, 12 total, were built by Monarch to house the immigrant workers, who leaped at a chance for a job and social stability with Mexico a war-torn country still staggering from its 1910 revolution.
The Ramirez, Garcia and Sanchez families were the first to arrive in Humboldt and spent a few months living in shanties next to Coal Creek, which meanders along the south side of the Monarch plant complex.
“They were all here by 1917,” said Perez, who is writwriting a book about experiences of those who lived in the company housing.
At about the same time, Santa Fe and Missouri-Kansas-Texas (Katy) railroads also were encouraging Mexicans eager for jobs to come north of the border. Some lived in boxcars provided by Katy and others settled into row houses Santa Fe built south of the Humboldt depot. Over the years, some of the railroad workers moved to Monarch.
The houses remained little changed until the early 1950s when Monarch added a kitchen to the back of each and another bedroom. Front porches also were screened in, although Perez’s mother declined the porch improvement, preferring “to sit on the porch and be able to see cars going by.”
The Perezes heated with
a coal-fired pot belly stove, even after natural gas became available, and, to the best of her memory, cooking was done on a wood-burning range, “white with skinny legs,” until gas lines were laid.
While she and others didn’t notice what they never had had, Perez allowed daily living “probably was a little rough” when she was young. “With nothing but cold (running) water, it had to be heated to bathe and wash clothes.”

PEREZ WAS born Aug. 10, 1939, while, her mother told her often, “Hitler was marching across Europe.”
Most babies born in the Cement Road houses came into the world with the assistance of a midwife. Perez’s debut was aided by two local doctors because her mother, a little old at that time for having a first baby at 31, had complications.
Perez was an only child, but having no sibling in the house, was hardly noticed. Forty or more kids of all ages scrambled from one house to another and had the biggest back yard in Humboldt to play all kinds of games.
“We’d be outdoors from the time we woke up in the morning until dinner,” Perez said. “The boys would swim in the creek,” and the girls engaged in all sorts of play. “When you got hungry or thirsty, you’d go to the closest house and ask for something. No one ever locked a door. It was a beautiful experience, everyone helped everyone.”
When she was old enough to start her formal education, Perez was the only Mexican-American girl in her first-grade class at Washington Grade School, but it was an experience she still recalls fondly because of her teacher.
Mary Nelson, who later became a nun, “was kind and caring and thought it clearly important to give a child a good encounter with education,” Perez said. “I was out of my cultural context and Miss Nelson’s love and respect helped a lot.”
In later years, Perez’s career was in education, as a teacher, counselor and
college administrator. She never forgot “how important a teacher is to a young child.”
Many who grew up along Cement Road went to St. Joseph Catholic School, an adjunct that didn’t occur to Perez’s parents. They attended a Baptist Church in Chanute, where “I really honed my bilingual skills in the choir and reading Bible verses.”
By the time she reached Humboldt High, Perez still was one of few Mexican kids in school. Others, she said, had dropped out to get married or go to work.
It was at HHS where Perez met her first husband, Saloman Flores, the first Mexican-American to teach at the school when he arrived in 1956, her senior year.
Their marriage led Perez to earn a bachelor’s degree at the University of Missouri at Kansas City and a master’s degree from Ohio State. She also did some
doctoral degree work at the University of Maryland. After Flores died, she married Juan Cruz, now also dead.

PEREZ LIVES in a suburb of Milwaukee today, but makes frequent trips to Humboldt to work on a book, “Lola’s Memoirs,” about those who lived and prospered in the little houses along Cement Road.
“I’m working on the final chapter,” she said.
A person who came Friday to see the photo exhibit, “Life under the Shadow of a Smokestack,” at the parish hall, proposed she have a book signing in Humboldt. Good idea, she said, “but I don’t even have a publisher yet.”

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