Notes on the Boys of Autumn

They gather in Rosemead’s Legg Park every Thursday and mingle among themselves like old rhinos grazing in the sunlight.

They’re the last of what they were, best friends from a misty past who went their separate ways, some to business, some to prison, and then got together again.

A few were gang members once and others just kids kicking around the streets of Boyle Heights, but they all knew each other and they swore their friendship would last forever.

It almost has.

Now in their 70s and 80s, the boys of summer approach the winter of their years talking over old times around picnic tables strewn with ancient photographs of kids in jeans, burning with energy and ready to run.

There’s Freddie Montenegro and Tom Nakashima and Benny Jordan and Bud Simon and Bob Ryan and Frankie Bertelli. One worked for RAND, one went to Notre Dame, one ran a fish market, one went to Leavenworth.

There were Irish and Greeks and blacks and Chinese and Turks and Jews and Italians in the ‘hood in those days, before Boyle Heights became mostly Latino, and they’re all there in the yellowed photos, arms around each other’s shoulders, best buddies.

“We’ve had a circle of friends for years,” one of the old men told me as he sat in the hazy sunlight amid acres of lawn and trees. “There were a lot more of us once.”

He looked around at the dozen or so gray and wrinkled pals who hunched over pictures or talked quietly to each other and said in the kind of tone that recognizes eternity, “The circle is getting smaller all the time.”

*

Sal Sandoval asked me to drop by the park because he wants everyone to know that even gang members can make something of themselves, and he chose me to be the instrument of relaying that message.

At 70, he’s the youngest of those who assemble every Thursday and a kind of golden example of what he’s talking about.

He was a member of the Maravilla gang in the days when they settled their grievances with fistfights, before the bullets of automatic weapons spattered the barrios with blood.

Zip guns and Saturday night specials appeared occasionally and there were some drugs on the street like peyote and marijuana, but it wasn’t the big business it is today.

“We stole cars and held up little stores,” Sandoval says with a twinge of regret, “but then one day I said to myself that I was stealing from my own people, my neighbors, and I couldn’t do that anymore.”

He went into the Army during the Second World War and was doing OK until a first lieutenant hauled him up before his whole battalion for a reason Sandoval can’t even remember and called him a Mexican son-of-a-bitch.

Sandoval busted him in the face and spent the next five years at Leavenworth.

Anger still darkens his eyes as he talks about the incident. He’s refused all these years to have his dishonorable discharge changed to honorable, because it’s a symbol of the kind of racism he feels has shaped him.

He’s one Mexican s.o.b. who can flaunt his life with pride and dignity in the face of every bigot who ever lived and walk away smiling.

*

After Leavenworth, Sandoval worked for Continental Can Co. until 1980, then, at his wife’s urging, went on to get his bachelor’s degree at Cal State L.A. He was 63.

The kid who swaggered through his teen-age years as a gangbanger, dropped out of school in the seventh grade and did five years’ hard time in a federal slammer ended up teaching at Alhambra High as a living example of what a guy can do if he really wants to.

Now the days grow short for Sandoval and for all of the other old rhinos in the park. Age and illness weigh heavily upon their numbers, twin burdens that bend them beneath an awesome weight. Sandoval has colon cancer--the worst kind, he calls it--and his future is uncertain. Chemotherapy keeps him going.

I heard a lot of stories that Thursday in Rosemead, about kids in and out of trouble who went their separate ways but never forgot each other, and who are old men now trying to figure out their pasts.

Sandoval winces at the machismo that fired his passions back then, but says, even so, he’s atoned for all that and has made something of himself.

The message he asked me to carry is for the kids in the barrios who are still raising hell. He wants them to ponder his life, a dichotomy of rage and achievement, and to realize that death in the streets doesn’t have to be their destiny.

“Look at me,” he says by way of affirmation. I did just that one Thursday in the park and wondered at the strength of character it must have taken for an angry man to survive himself all those hard and glowing years.