The Passport - Stories from the family tree

 Barb's grandfather, Ray Mordella Brown, or perhaps Mordella Ray Brown (there is official documentation for either sequence; for that matter, his name sometimes appears spelled Mordello instead of  Mordella), a gentleman who was living when I married into the family, had a secret.

Well, I'm sure some in the immediate family knew, but of all the stories told by and about grandaddy Brown - and there were a lot of stories - neither Barb nor her brother nor her sister ever heard that as a young man Ray left his family behind in Texas and hopped a ship to live in Guatemala for a year. Or did he?

I came upon this mystery while engaged in a favorite pastime, digging through ancestral records on the Internet. A few weeks ago, I found a passport application that Ray Brown filed in late August, 1920 at the New Orleans Passport Office. The stated purpose of the document was to allow Ray passage to Guatemala for a period of a year, where he was to be employed by the Standard Fruit Company as a railroad engineer.

In August, 1920, Ray is three months short of his 29th birthday. He has a wife and two boys, ages 8 and 3 1/2 back in Pleasanton, Texas and in less than 6 months his wife will give birth to Walter Allen, my wife's father. So the first question is, why on earth is Ray headed to Central America?

WWI had ended just a few years earlier, and by 1920 and 1921 the country was in what most termed a depression. Ray had been driving trains for the San Antonio, Uvalde and Gulf Railroad, based out of Pleasanton, The S.A.U. & G. had fallen on hard times and in 1917 had filed for bankruptcy. Like every other US railroad, the S.A.U. & G. was taken over by the federal government on January 1, 1918. It was returned to the bankruptcy receiver in February of 1920, still broke and now without government subsidy. Ray was in all probability out of a job.

Since Ray couldn't come up with a birth certificate, it was necessary for him to go up to San Antonio early in August and get his father, George T. Brown, also a railroad man, to prepare a sworn statement that Ray was born in the US of A, in 1891. He also got two other individuals, John Starr and  J. L. Ginn to vouch for him, swearing that Ray "...is a loyal American citizen and worthy of consideration." Affidavits in hand, he set out for New Orleans.

In addition to the statements vetting Ray, there is a letter in the file from the Assistant to the Vice President of the Standard Fruit Company addressed to the Secretary of State of the United States, the Hon. Bainbridge Colby, urging quick action, as a Mr. M. R. Keller, General Superintendent of Railway Lines in Guatemala,  had already hired Ray to drive locomotives for their company, and they needed him to set sail to Puerto Barrios, Guatemala as soon as he could! The passport was to be hand delivered to the New Orleans offices of Standard Fruit, in order to expedite things.

Standard Fruit (which became Standard Fruit and Steamship Company, which became Dole Food Company) apparently had some clout; Ray made application August 21 and the passport was issued August 25th. Try that today.

But did Ray actually set sail to Puerto Barrios? That's the big question. No one in this branch of the family has ever heard a whisper that he spent a year in Guatemala. We know he lived in Mexico as a boy. We know he began a 50-year career in railroading as a fireman for the National Lines of Mexico at age 15. We heard the stories about having to carry a rifle in the cab during those days to prevent the likes of Pancho Villa and his banditos from stopping and bording the train. We know he famously rejected all things General Motors when diesel locomotives made by that company replaced his beloved steam engines and displaced his firemen co-workers (no one ever told him that his new Frigidaire was made by a GM subsidiary).

But there are no stories from a year spent in Guatemala. There is a lengthy article from the Zavala County newspaper, published upon his retirement in 1957, describing his long and varied career, mentioning many of the lines he worked for and places he lived. Guatemala is not mentioned,

Did he go and find the situation so intolerable that, like some war veterans, he never spoke again of the experience? Standard Fruit and its larger competitor, United Fruit, were notorious at the time for mistreating and endangering native workers, often aided and abetted by the greedy dictators of the various countries they did business in.

 Did he not go? Maybe he got cold feet after hearing that US troops had just been sent to Guatemala to protect American interests while various local factions were engaged in the National Sport of all Banana Republics - guerrilla warfare? Or maybe he decided that he couldn't take a week of sea-sickness?

Or perhaps on August 22, he got a telegram from Pleasanton that said:

COME HOME AT ONCE -STOP- 

MISSOURI PACIFIC HIRING -STOP-

You pick the ending you like. Chances are, we'll never know for sure.