Love of Missions Caps a Songwriter’s Career

One of Aaron Gonzalez’s earliest memories--he says he was about 7 at the time--is about disobeying his grandmother’s order not to go into the kitchen of his grandfather’s hotel in El Paso, Tex. In the kitchen, sound asleep on the floor, was Mexico’s tough revolutionary leader Pancho Villa, a pair of pistols at ready at his side.

Nearly 70 years later, Gonzalez suppresses a shudder. “Think what could have happened had Villa been startled awake. He could have shot me. He was a rough man,” he told me.

Over lunch the other day, Gonzalez and I were chatting about his musical career and about that which had brought us together--our mutual affection for the Roman Catholic missions of Baja and Alta California.

Love of California missions seems to be an ecumenical affair of the heart. Gonzalez is a Methodist, although as a baby his maternal grandmother, a native of Mexico, saw to it that he was baptized in the Catholic Church. I was christened in the Methodist Church and later became a Unitarian. Curiously, visits to the mission churches somehow stimulate in both of us a powerful reverence not always felt as deeply in churches of other denominations.

But to return to Villa. What was he doing in his grandfather’s hotel kitchen? Well, that’s where Villa chose to sleep when he secretly visited his friend Charles H. Lawrence, Gonzalez’s grandfather. Lawrence had another business, which later earned him a sobriquet, the Sugar King of Texas. He sold flour, sugar, tobacco and molasses by the barrel to Villa. Then Lawrence turned around and sold similar supplies to Major General John J. Pershing of the American forces fighting Villa.

Incidentally, says Gonzalez, Villa’s favorite food was Mexican beans, lavished with great dollops of molasses. Villa had a sweet tooth.

Gonzalez’s father, a Spaniard and a Methodist, brought his family from El Paso to Pasadena in 1918. Young Aaron become interested in music. He learned to play the piano. In 1930, the Gonzalezes were living in Anaheim. Aaron had been studying music at USC. The prize fighter Jack Dempsey needed a college-type orchestra to play at the Playa Ensenada Hotel in Baja. Aaron won the audition. His career as a songwriter and orchestra leader was launched.

Engagements at Catalina Island’s St. Catherine Hotel and 14 years at the Beverly Hills Hotel with his orchestra and at the Coconut Grove, Trocadero, Ciro’s and Mocambo, composing scores for movies are a few of the highlights of his career, along with writing dozens of songs such as, “Catalina,” the radio theme song for Wrigley’s Catalina commercials, “El Marranito,” which sold 250,000 records, and “Two Shadows in the Moonlight.”

But, I get the impression that Gonzalez, now in retirement in Buena Park, is most pleased with his songs he has written and donated to the sister city programs of San Juan Capistrano and San Clemente. His composition, “Petra, My Petra,” a bolero, was composed for the Sister City Assn. of San Juan Capistrano. It commemorates San Juan’s sister city of Petra on Isla Majorca, Spain, birthplace of Fray Junipero Serra, founder of nine of Alta California’s missions.

The ties between San Juan Capistrano (Serra founded the mission here in 1776) and Petra have been strengthened by the City of San Juan’s ownership of Serra’s stone house in Petra in 1984. Funds for the purchase were raised by the San Juan Capistrano Rotary Club.

San Juan has another sister city, Goya in Argentina, and a song “Goya,” a tango by Gonzalez. San Clemente’s sister cities, San Clemente del Tuyu, Argentina, and Isla San Andres, Columbia, also have official songs by Gonzalez--a tango and a bolero, respectively, and appropriately titled.

Because of San Juan mission’s strong appeal to Gonzalez, he has recently completed a new song, titled “San Juan, San Juan, San Juan,” that I’m anxious to hear.

This fruitful lifetime of musical accomplishment might have been made possible, it seems, because he was spared by a quirk of fate in his grandfather’s El Paso kitchen.

Pancho Villa didn’t wake up startled.