Pancho’s Spread : Preservation: A Carlsbad woman, remembering when the Cisco Kid and his sidekick, Pancho, entertained her children on TV, has made the restoration of actor Leo Carrillo’s hacienda her crusade.

Once a week, the Kindle kids tumbled into place before the family’s clunky black-and-white Muntz television set, waiting for the man with saucer-wide eyes and the trim, bent-nail mustache.

Within moments came the words that seemed to stretch all the way around the block, the very words that always catapulted the four little viewers into laughter and goofy imitation.

“Ohhhhhhh CEEEEEskohhh,” said Pancho.

“Ohhhhhhh PAAAAnchohhh,” replied Cisco.

“You could have given my kids banana splits and they wouldn’t have come away from that TV show,” Joan Kindle recalled of those days back in the ‘50s, when they lived out East and when Leo Carrillo and Duncan Renaldo thrilled children across America in “The Cisco Kid.”

The Kindles especially liked Carrillo as Pancho, whose mirth, malaprops and other inventive mutilations of the language (“Leh’s went!” for “Let’s go!”) could not disguise his simple dignity and a winding, backhanded wit.

The series rode off into the sunset in 1956 after 176 largely nonviolent episodes, and it took destiny about another 30 years to bring the Kindles and Carrillo back together again.

When Kindle and husband Alan retired to Carlsbad five years ago, they peered from their home’s upstairs window toward El Camino Real and Palomar Airport Road and wondered about the cleft of land amid the area’s burgeoning subdivisions.

They learned the property was the 10-acre remainder of Carrillo’s once-sprawling Rancho of the Spanish Daggers, where the famous Broadway stage actor, Hollywood star and proud descendant of a pioneer family entertained Gable, Lombard and countless others, and kept the past alive.

Kindle wangled a tour of the rancho’s hacienda complex, some of it looking worn and vaguely soon-to-tumble, and was hooked.

Carrillo was gone, having died of stomach cancer at age 81 in 1961. But Kindle was driven by the recollection of a kindly actor who gave her children joy, and in time dedicated herself to the restoration of the authentic early California hacienda that Carrillo built in 1937.

Kindle’s interest, which infected her husband, led them to visit other places where Carrillo had lived, devour books and articles about him and conduct research in newspaper morgues, public libraries, and through historical societies.

“Leo wanted that place as a memorial to his family, but it never happened,” said Kindle. “The man is dead and his dream put in a closet.”

Well, not quite.

The 10-acre site now belongs to Carlsbad, donated under the city’s parkland dedication requirement by developers who in recent years bought much of the surrounding rancho to build new homes.

This year, the city won a $490,000 state preservation grant, but it will take more like $2 million to restore the adobe, tile-roof hacienda and turn it, along with the surrounding land, into a public park, which is exactly what the city and Kindle have in mind.

Kindle’s academic fascination with Carrillo grew into a new-found cause when she learned that a proposed nearby road extension would have cut across the grave of Conquistador, Carrillo’s palomino.

Hearing her protests, the city agreed to change the road realignment, and, “from that point on, I began to sit in on (Carlsbad) Historical Preservation Commission meetings.”

Her zeal for Carrillo and the rancho eventually got her named the city’s volunteer curator of the Carrillo Ranch Archives, but she’s not alone in her love for the place Carrillo designed by pacing off yards and pronouncing where he wanted rooms built.

After the city took control of the land, Keith Beverly became the resident caretaker, spending six years living in Carrillo’s home and wandering the quiet, remote grounds, among the old cantina, the carriage house and other places once noisily alive with animals and throngs of Carrillo’s guests.

“It was the experience of a lifetime. I wouldn’t trade it for anything,” said Beverly, now a senior management analyst for the city and involved in planning the rancho’s future as a park.

Starting in 1992, the city plans to begin turning the 10-acre property into a park and hopes to buy another 5 to 8 acres to enlarge it.

But, for the time being, “we have no strict development plans for the ranch,” said Beverly, and the hacienda’s seclusion and minimal access have kept it a virtual secret from much of San Diego County.

It’s not completely forgotten, as workers early next year will begin reinforcing the old structures to make them earthquake safe, an eight-month project expected to cost $360,000.

It will take a lot of time, money and effort to preserve something built by a man whom most people under 40 never heard of, a man who, if anything, is rather remembered is an oafish footnote to entertainment history--sort of a Latino flip side of Gracie Allen.

Yet there was far more to Carrillo than that.

And, as for his beloved rancho, although it was built in this century, it is considered a finely-constructed reminder of the young California developed by Carrillo’s ancestors, who belonged to an original Spanish land-grant family.

His great-great-grandfather, Jose Raimundo Carrillo, rode from Baja to San Diego in 1769 with Father Junipero Serra. Pio Pico, the last Mexican governor of California, was another relative.

“He was creating his own heritage,” said San Diego architect Wayne Donaldson, who is overseeing the project to strengthen the hacienda complex. “He was trying to impose the essence and warmth of early California living.”

Born in Los Angeles in 1880, Carrillo’s perambulations led him to become a cartoonist for the San Francisco Examiner, where he would cover events, then recount them for the newsroom in uproarious Chinese, Italian or other dialects.

He was a well-known stage actor in New York and a vaudeville veteran before comfortably settling into the glamour age of Hollywood, being featured in 100 films, including Viva Villa and Phantom of the Opera.

Carrillo’s most endearing and enduring role was sidekick Pancho in “The Cisco Kid” series, a character he was chosen to play at age 75. The Cisco Kid first appeared in literature as a murderous Anglo in a short story by O. Henry.

Hollywood perpetuated the Cisco Kid in various movie incarnations, but what finally evolved was a gun-loving Latino cavorting about the Old West. The Pancho role was played as a stereotypically slow and dim-bulb character, an offensive interpretation that drew diplomatic protests from Latin American nations.

By the time Renaldo and Carrillo brought their Cisco and Pancho to television, the duo portrayed Latinos who were poised and amiably committed to thinking their way out of trouble and using humor as a foil.

Renaldo and Carrillo often appeared publicly before children, and Carrillo furthered his celebrity by riding in Rose Bowl parades and speaking always of California’s proud Spanish history.

His refuge from the world was in Carlsbad, where he bought 1,700 acres in 1937, then added 3,000 acres to constitute his Ranch of the Spanish Daggers. Carrillo also had a little spread in Santa Monica, but Carlsbad was a working rancho, with hundreds of cattle and horses.

The buildings included the “Deedie House” where Carrillo’s wife, Edith, could steal away to work alone on her pottery and painting.

Waxing eloquent in his autobiography, “Now, here on the Rancho of the Spanish Daggers, the past, the present and the future flash their many-prismed mirrors before my eyes. The ever-lasting hills are my proscenium. The vaulted sky is my roof. The stars lean down to pronounce their benediction.”

Very poetic, but the hacienda also was one helluva party house, where Carrillo’s friends, including Renaldo, enjoyed legendary barbecues, music and demonstrations of Carrillo’s horsemanship.

But all that ended with Carrillo’s death, and his only child, an adopted daughter, Antoinette, eventually sold the rancho by the piece before she died in 1978 at age 60.

Now, there remains just the 10 acres, the hacienda complex and the determination not to let them crumble away.

Kindle and others will see to that.

As a transplanted New Yorker, Kindle still gets emotional about visiting the ranch.

“It’s like a religious experience. There is a feeling there. He left so much of himself and old California history. For someone from outside California--you just don’t realize.” Her most challenging task as curator of the Carrillo archives is to relocate the furnishings, possessions and memorabilia that vanished largely through the family’s estate sales.

She put the word out and has received hundreds of phone calls, including one from a struggling artist who had come into possession of many original photographs of Carrillo and the rancho.

Kindle is asking for help to obtain more Carrillo artifacts, hoping for donations to the nonprofit Carrillo Ranch Trust Fund. The items would establish a park museum, and Kindle also envisions showings of Carrillo’s movies. She has contacted studios and other owners of the movie rights, so far tentatively securing permission to use seven films.

“I think Leo would be honored,” she said.