Rio Hondo and Its Once Wild Side
Norman Rozeff
January 2010
The name Nelson Algren is not exactly a household word to most Valleyites. In
fact, unless you might be an English major or a cinema aficionado in your 70s,
you may never have heard of this neglected yet relatively famous author. He has
a strange, little known connection with Rio Hondo and that is the story I shall
relate.
His full name was Nelson Ahgren Abraham. Born in Detroit in 1909, the youngest of three siblings, his early years were spent with his parents in the poor immigrant Polish working-class neighborhood of South Side Chicago. His father, Gerson Abraham, was a garage mechanic and his mother, Goldie, was a candy store owner. His paternal grandfather was of Swedish Lutheran stock but with a strange religious twist had converted to Judaism and married a Jewess. Nelson's family were non-practicing Jews. By the time Nelson was graduated from high school in 1928 the family had moved to a more affluent Chicago neighborhood. Majoring in sociology Nelson received his degree from the University of Illinois in 1931.
The Great Depression was gaining strength and an unemployed Algren, apparently with a touch of wanderlust, took off for warmer climes. In 1933 unemployment levels averaged over 25% for the country. Traveling to New Orleans and later points west, he worked at odd jobs including carnival worker, salesman, migratory farm worker, and gas station attendant. It was near Rio Hondo in 1933 that his experiences led to the writing of his first short story. This was titled "So Help Me" and was published in Story magazine of August 1933. It went on to win him a 1935 O. Henry Award. The story is told by a hobo who has become a murder suspect. Pleading his case for leniency to a district attorney, the hobo subtly tries to shift the blame for the murder of a Jew on a boxcar to an associate.
We know a little about Algren's residence near Rio Hondo. He and a buddy had ridden the freight cars from Louisiana to East Texas, then San Antonio, and finally the Southern Pacific to the Rio Grande Valley. Writer Robert McCullough says Algren camped in an abandoned Sinclair gas station between Rio Hondo and Harlingen. Another source characterizes the site as part gas station and part vegetable stand. McCullough goes on to relate that for a time Algren had the company of Luther. This Florida shyster, that Algren had befriended in New Orleans, was the buyer of produce for the stand. It was said that Algren tied to renovate the station while earning the pittance of 75 cents a day as a fruit picker. He had made a deal to fix up the station in return for using it as shelter. Business at the station was practically non-existent. Only two to three gallons of gasoline were sold each day. Food was slim pickings for Nelson and his buddies, who now included Ben Curtis, a mechanic friend who had come south from Chicago at Nelson's invitation. Algren biographer, Bettina Drew, offers one description of the sustenance situation. "It was tomato season, and through Luther's grace, their diet consisted mainly of tomatoes. We ate 'em raw, we ate 'em cooked, we ate 'em boiled, we ate 'ern chopped,"
Famed Texas writer Larry McMurty takes note of the circumstances is his 1968 book In a Narrow Grave: Essays on Texas. He recalls "making a pilgrimage to Rio Hondo hoping to find the filling station where Nelson Algren once spent so much time shelling blackeyed peas. I had in mind asking the Texas Institute of Letters to make it a literary shrine." He never found the stand.
Biographer Drew relates "…it all began with Luther and a huge load of black-eyed peas. "This Luther went to a Mexican and bought all his black-eyed peas," Ben recalled. "I don't remember the exact figures, but . . . let us say that the stores in town were selling them for $0.16 a pound. Luther went and sold [the peas] to them for $.012 a pound and he promised the poor farmers $0.20 a pound. He didn't care what he promised them because he wasn't going to pay them. The stores were glad to buy them because they were cheaper than they could buy them elsewhere." And, as Nelson remembered packing the peas into Mason jars, what was on Luther's mind was to keep the money and move on. "I'm packing black-eyed peas until I'm blind and this guy don't show up," goes Nelson's account. "Then I hear a car drive up in the middle of the night . . . It was [Luther] . . . he had come up in another car which he'd promoted from somebody else, and then he had figured we had all this gas at the station -- we had two tanks with about ninety gallons in each out there -- and now he wants to get out of this station deal . . . so he's going to leave me there, you know, picking and packing black-eyed peas." And waiting for a posse of poor angry Mexican farmers who'd be looking for their money."
That's when Ben suggested that they leave town before there were unpleasant repercussions. While Ben headed home, Algren left the Valley for El Paso and West Texas.
While in Alpine he used the typewriters available at Sul Ross State College and became somewhat of a "character" to students on campus. He then got into deep trouble by stealing a typewriter from the school, packing it, and attempting to ship it to Chicago. A skeptical freight clerk contacted the sheriff who arrested Algren. His subsequent trial took place after 3 ˝ weeks incarceration. During this period Nelson really got to experience the realities of lowdown life, as if he hadn't already done so elsewhere. The public defender, a white-haired gentleman who went by the name "Judge" Wigfall Van Sickle, was obviously sympathetic. He entered a plead of "not guilty" although Algren had signed a confession detailing the incident. He asked the jury to consider mercy in the case comparing the thief to that of Jean Valjean in Les Miserables. After the all-white jury heard the defendant called a "militant, defiant man" by the prosecuting attorney, Algren was found guilty and sentenced to two years punishment in prison but with the proviso that he could serve the sentence wherever he wanted, in short this meant, "Get out of Texas!"
His first novel (1935), Somebody in Boots, sold 757 copies in the US and one in Canada. Its poor reviews and girlfriend troubles led him to an attempted suicide. Time in a mental health institution straightened him out. In the1930s he co-edited a Communist Party magazine. He didn't necessarily believe in a communist politics or government but was sympathetic to social justice issues. Later in the decade he joined the Federal Writers Project. This afforded him the opportunity to write full time. As a journalist he reported on the victims of poverty and crime. He served as a medical corpsman in WWII but despite his college background was not officer material, likely due to his leftist background. The FBI under Herbert Hoover compiled a dossier of over 500 pages on Algren.
After the war Algren came into his own, first with the 1947 novel The Neon Wilderness and then in 1949 The Man with the Golden Arm. Both depicted the underside of American society and emphasized social concerns. He made no friends in Chicago with his 1951 tome Chicago: City on the Make. It was a "scathing indictment of the venalities of Chicago's politics and the banality of its culture." In 1956 his A Walk on the Wild Side captured seedy images of the Crescent City—New Orleans. A later film of this novel was said to be a woeful distortion of the original. Otto Preminger's film The Man with the Golden Arm starring Frank Sinatra also emphasized the sensational over the human story Algren had told in his book.
Algren was unsuccessfully married, twice to one woman and once to another. While one of his books was being translated into French he became a lover of the early feminist Simon de Beauvier. Seemingly soul mates they parted when she left him for writer Jean-Paul Sartre.
Algren's stark depictions of poverty, drug addiction, violence, oppression, and lack of social justice brought him many criticisms. One was the "eternal misfit of 20th Century American letter." Another of his sobriquets was "poet of the underworld." Ernest Hemingway, Carl Sandburg, and Richard Wright, however, were among other notable American authors who lauded Algren's contributions to American literature.
Algren died of a heart attack in his Sag Harbor, Long Island home on May 9, 1981. He had just learned that he had been accepted in the prestigious American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and so excited was he of this honor that he didn't want to seek immediate hospital treatment. The honor was in part a vindication of his life's work.
Times were tough in Rio Hondo, the Valley, and the Nation during the 1930s. It was Algren's experiences locally that were to inspire him to set down in graphic but fictional terms the situations that would forever document the hard times of the period.