Pedro Escovedo, 96; Plumber Was Patriarch of Musical Family

Pedro Escovedo, a plumber and amateur musician who became the patriarch of a musical family that includes two former members of the band Santana and a pop soloist, Sheila E, died Thursday, according to his son, Mario. He was 96.

Escovedo had been in declining health for the last year and lived at the Brighton Place nursing home in La Mesa, a San Diego suburb. He died of natural causes, according to his son.

Born in Saltillo, Mexico, Escovedo was left with his grandparents when his parents moved to Texas looking for work.

“They told my father they would come back for him, but they never did,” Mario said.

At 12, Escovedo ran away from home, crossed the border alone and found his parents in San Antonio.

“My grandfather was a severe man. It was a hard life for my father,” Mario said in an interview Thursday with The Times.

Escovedo worked as a cotton picker, among other jobs. At 15, he hopped trains to San Francisco, and from there he went to Alaska, where he worked in a tuna factory for $3 a day.

After a year, he returned to the Bay Area, learned steam fitting and plumbing and did repair work on warships at the end of World War II.

He sang from the time he was a child, first with mariachi groups and at parties, later with a big band in Oakland.

“My first love is music,” he told the San Diego Union in 1986. “I could hear a song once and pick it up.”

He married Anita Valenzuela, and they had six children before they divorced. With his second wife, Cleo Renteria, he had five children. The couple lived in San Antonio.

“My parents loved music,” said songwriter Alejandro Escovedo, a son from the second marriage, in an interview with a Texas newspaper in 2002. When he was a child in San Antonio, he said, “they’d throw us kids in the car, drive out to some nightclub and go inside and party while we slept in the car.”

The family moved to Santa Ana in the late 1950s, and as much as possible Escovedo kept all of his children together.

“Music was always part of our life,” Mario Escovedo said. At family parties his father sang his signature number, “Solamente Una Vez” (Only Once).

Among Escovedo’s musical children, Pete and Thomas “Coke” formed a jazz band, Azteca, after playing with Carlos Santana’s legendary group. Both Alejandro and his brother Javier created punk rock groups -- Zero and the Nuns -- in the 1970s. Alejandro went on to lead his own jazz orchestra. Mario plays guitar with the San Diego based-band the Dragons.

Pedro Escovedo’s grandchildren include drummer and singer Sheila Escovedo (Sheila E) -- who played percussion with Prince and released her own album in 1984 -- as well as Peter Michael, musical director for “The Wayne Brady Show,” a nationally televised talk show.

Despite his passion for music, the patriarch never made a career change.

He attended the Steamfitters and Plumbers Union meetings in Orange County on Wednesday nights for 35 years, son Mario said, adding: “He was very proud of that. He wore his union pin to his grave.”

Escovedo is survived by his wife, Cleo; six sons; three daughters; 41 grandchildren; 50 great-grandchildren; and 19 great-great-grandchildren.