For Him, Zoot Suits Are More Than Memories

All year long, hundreds of people pass through El Pachuco’s Deco-style doors, looking for an offbeat Halloween costume or a hipster’s answer to black-tie affairs.

They are likely to find what they’re looking for in the rows of zoot suits -- long coats with impossibly wide shoulders in vibrant flashes of color: purple, red, orange and more. The matching pants start just below the chest and balloon around the legs before pegging shut at the ankles.

But a more interesting find sits in a chair by the entrance, quietly working on gold and silver chains, the signature accessory of zoot suits.

He is Bert Duran, the oldest of three generations working in the family-owned business in Fullerton.

And he has a story if you care to ask.

Duran is 83, old enough to have seen zoot suits when they first appeared in Southern California, hanging on the shoulders of young Latinos who took their fashion cue from 1920s jazz musicians.

“The first time I saw one was in 1938, right here in Fullerton,” Duran says, looking out onto Harbor Boulevard. “I looked up to them because they wore nice clothes.”

But Duran could not afford one of the suits on the $19 a week he was earning picking oranges at 5 cents a crate. And more than style, he wanted a car: a 1931 Ford Model A. He still keeps a picture of it -- actually an ad for a miniature model of the car -- under the counter.

“I finally bought it in 1939,” he says with a proud, beaming smile that adds more creases to his friendly face.

Duran was born in Placentia, the oldest of eight children. His parents met in Orange County after their families moved here a century ago to escape the Mexican Revolution. His mother, now 101, still lives in Fullerton.

“She cooks, she irons, she argues with me,” Duran says.

He attended segregated schools, and when he was old enough to strike out on his own, he joined the Army. He was 21.

World War II was raging in Europe and Asia. Duran, like other young Americans, sensed that U.S. involvement was imminent. He wanted to see the world. He also wanted to know if he had what it takes.

“I wanted to see Paris, London,” he says. “Around here was oranges, oranges everywhere.”

An estimated 500,000 Latinos enlisted or were drafted during World War II, about half the entire Latino male population in the country at the time. While Duran prepared to fight for his country in a training camp in Texas, long-brewing ethnic tensions broke out in Los Angeles.

In the summer of 1942, just months after Pearl Harbor, police found the body of a young Mexican man near Sleepy Lagoon, a swimming hole by the Los Angeles River used by Mexican Americans who were barred from the city’s segregated public pools.

The night before, there had been a party and a fight at a nearby ranch. Police quickly rounded up 600 Latino youths. Eventually, 24 pachucos -- as young Latinos who wore zoot suits were known back then -- were indicted. Of those, 12 were convicted of first-degree murder.

Zoot suits were branded gangster garb. Local newspapers began a campaign against the zoot suit-wearing Latinos.

The convictions were overturned on appeal more than a year later, but the incident gave rise to the notorious Zoot Suit Riots of 1943, when large fights broke out between pachucos and sailors on shore leave in Long Beach.

Historical accounts say police simply watched as thousands of uniformed servicemen armed with clubs and bottles beat zoot-suited pachucos, sheared their heads and stripped them.

“They were just kids,” says Duran of his contemporaries.

But Duran never gave too much thought to the social unrest, he says. “I missed all that. I was busy worrying about Hitler.”

Shortly before the Zoot Suit Riots, Duran married his girlfriend, Helen, and after the riots he was off to the war.

He served in military hospitals in Africa and Europe, processing wounded soldiers.

“They came by the busloads, trainloads, airplane loads -- guys with no arms, no legs.... I saw it all,” Duran says. “I would write on cards the name, the blood type, religion, and send them off to the doctors.”

But Duran, a boxer in training, had not come to war to write cards. He wanted to fight. He volunteered for a paratrooper division toward the end of the war and took part in the Battle of the Bulge.

“Yes, it was scary, but I volunteered on my own,” he says. “You can’t complain when you volunteered.”

By a river in Germany, Duran’s troop came under heavy enemy fire. A mortar shell exploded nearby.

“I was in so much pain I thought they had blown my legs off,” he says. “I knew right there the war was over for me.”

He crawled overnight, using his arms, to the back of the lines and was rescued. At the field hospital, a “Mexican boy from Texas,” who was doing the same job Duran had done just months earlier, tagged Duran with his vital information and noticed that he had almost no pulse. He alerted the doctors.

“He probably saved my life,” Duran says, tears welling up in his eyes. He has used a cane ever since.

Duran was taken to Paris and then flown to London -- “the first plane I never jumped off of,” he says, regaining his humor -- then to New York and finally home to Fullerton, where Helen and the daughter he had not yet seen, Phyllis, awaited him.

The couple had four more children, 13 grandchildren and four, maybe five great-grandchildren.

He’s not sure?

“Hey, some days I don’t even remember my name,” he says with a hearty laugh.

His wife passed away a little more than a year ago, May 16, he says. “It was a Thursday.... I sure miss her.”

And the sadness returns.

Daughter Phyllis is the owner of El Pachuco. When she and her husband, Ray Estrella, watched Luis Valdez’s 1978 musical “Zoot Suit,” she fell in love with the clothes.

Phyllis Estrella started the business with her father’s help. The store, which opened in 1985, has thrived by renting and selling zoot suits as well as accessories and memorabilia.

“We get orders from all of the world,” says Estrella, whose son Ray Jr. also works in the store.

One of the store’s best customers is Duran, who had never worn a zoot suit as a youngster. But now, Estrella says, “he wears it to every special occasion.... He looks so handsome.”