“Yes? How may I help you?” The way Jose Cruz answers his phone should give you some small idea about his personality. Affirmative, friendly, helpful. Been friends for over four decades. He’s given me far more than he’s gotten back.
When I met him, shortly thereafter maybe, he had his kitchen remodeled. Cost an amazing sum. Or so it seemed to Jose at the time. Money to be made, he soon became a home remodeler and general contractor. He’s the guy who hand-built and painted the super-fast wooden track used at the Portland Indoor in the early Eighties. Good husband, good father, good friend.
He is a runner in his heart and soul. The best kind of people.
This is his birthday, this is his story.
My mother, who met my father around 1934, did become a U.S. citizen.
I was born in Los Angeles in 1937 and raised in Orange County, California, with my four sisters. We were poor. My dad worked as a common laborer, picking oranges, lemons, any work he could get. There wasn’t any steady income.
My father had dyslexia, I discovered I have the same problem, I still have the same problem, I have to read many times over before I understand. That was one of the reasons it took me so long to go to school. Numbers I can handle.
More than once that I can remember, we spent the summer picking plums, apricots, and walnuts. In later years, our mother would tell her friends “we took the kiddies on vacation.”
In El Modena, the educational system was segregated. The white kids went to the new school, Roosevelt, while we went to the old school, Lincoln. Our teachers were great. We learned the basic courses, but we were not allowed to speak Spanish anywhere on school grounds.
But in the colony, everyone spoke Spanish. We went to movie shows in Spanish. The stores, everyone spoke Spanish. We only spoke English when our teacher asked us a question.
In the seventh grade, they started to allow the top kids in our school to be in the white classes.
I was not one of them.
That year we moved to a white neighborhood in the city of Orange a few miles from the colony. My parents wanted us to graduate with the kids we grew up with, so they made arrangements to have one of the teachers take us to school every morning.
There were about thirty students in my graduating class. Only five of us went to high school. None of the girls.
Funny thing happened in my freshman year. My former classmates would not associate with us because we had moved away to the white neighborhood. Of course, we had yet to be accepted by our new white neighbors.
My Aunt Lupe was the first person in our family to have a steady job, in a small grocery store. She got me a job as a box boy after school my freshman year, but I was let go because I was too small. Only five-feet-three-inches.
The box boy who replaced me was a friend of the store’s owner. But he did not know how to work. So, I was hired back. I am my father’s son and so I have always known how to work hard. I worked every day after school and all day Saturday.
On Sundays I worked on a farm, cleaning up after the animals.
I remember as a freshman in high school, first thing that happens, I had to have an appendectomy. My mother would not let me do anything for the next two months. On top of that, they discovered I had an asthmatic condition.
In the sixth grade, I began to play the trumpet. I played in the high school band. The summer before our senior year, the band went to a camp in the Arrowhead Lake Mountains. On the way, the bus broke down a few miles from our destination. Two of our drummers, two brothers, were on the cross-country team. They asked me to race them to the camp. It was about two miles uphill but I said I’d give it a try. I beat them both. I had never run before so I was in shock. I decided right then to go out for cross-country the next season. Which was coming right up.
I had to get a new job that would allow me to work on Saturday and Sunday, because I now had practice in the afternoon after school.
Running became a goal in my life. The first goal I ever had. And running was perfect for me. I could run by myself at any time I wanted. I could be alone and I could enjoy the freedom of my time. Time to think, time to plan.
Speaking of time, I don’t recall mine for the mile, something around 5:10. Not fast. But I did believe if I could train more, I could be a good runner.
I went to a small college across the street from our home in Orange. Had fun there, but my running showed little improvement. I discovered I was not ready for college. My grades were bad and I did not even know why. I would study for hours but I was unable to perform in class.
And there was no work for the summer. I knew I had to take the next step. I joined the Marine Corps. In the Marine Corps, I learned to love this country. First time that I thought about it, given it any thought at all, to be honest. I’d been too busy with my own life to understand – truly – how great this country really is.
Being a Marine taught me, if you fail to achieve your goal, you learn from that. Then you try again until you get where you reach your goal. Then you continue.
In boot camp, you only had two books to read: The Marine Corps Manual and the Bible. Those two only.
Following boot camp, I guess I could see this coming, I was assigned to the USMC Drum & Bugle School. I did not want to be a bugler. After two months, I asked for a transfer.
They put me in Headquarters (HQ) Company where I cooked twelve hours a day.
I was cooking one day and a Navy Lieutenant came walking by. Like he was inspecting or something, checking out the kitchen. Of course, a private in the Corps does not ask a Navy Lieutenant, ‘what are you looking at?’
He said they were planning to build a new restaurant for the enlisted men. I asked him, “Do you need a draftsman?” I took drafting in school for four years and was not too bad. “Yes,” he said. “Come to my office after work.”
Within two weeks I was officially a draftsman for the Navy. And that’s where I spent my remaining time in the Corps.
One of my supervisors was the wife of a naval officer who was planning to retire in three years.
She taught me to have good manners at the dinner table. She taught me good manners generally. She died three years later.
After leaving active duty in the Corps, I enrolled at a junior college. Just to run.. That’s it. No goals, just be a good runner.
I was walking down the street, headed to school one day, and I looked into an office window and saw a few drafting tables, so I went in and asked for a job.
Of course, they checked out my skills, tested my printing. It was not an architecture office, it was an engineering office. That’s different. They did planning for land developers, sub-divisions, street designs, water and sewer designs, etc. I realized right away, I would have set some new goals real fast. I started taking math classes, working my way up from basic to calculus. I did that in two years while also studying land surveying.
A friend from high school was awarded a scholarship to run at Oregon State, so I went to Corvallis with him. The track coach was Sam Bell. I wasn’t a good enough runner to merit an athletic scholarship, so Coach arranged a job for me as a draftsman for CH2M, a top-quality engineering company nor far from campus.
I worked after school and on weekends. In the summer, I returned to California for a higher-paying position. One summer, my first boss I had at the engineering company told me, “If I ever quit school to work for him, he would fire me.” I will never forget Mr. Hugh Halderman.
Now a twenty-five-year-old junior at Oregon State, I had not forgotten my goal. I did my utmost to be a good runner. I would run an average of one-hundred-and-twenty to one-hundred-fifty miles weekly. 120-150 miles per week. A lot.
We would run ten miles in the morning and hit the track hard in the afternoon. I weighed one-hundred-and-forty (140) pounds.
I did not make the team.
In the early 1960s, the OSU track & field squad was one of the top five in the country. More than once, my teammates would tell me, “Jose, you leave your race on the practice field.” I would be in front of the pack at the eight-mile mark and then completely fall apart in the latter stages of the run.
Later in life, I learned I had been on the wrong diet. Nutritional science has come a long way. I was running long distances on one meat protein after another. I wouldn’t drink any water two hours before a practice or race.
I believed water would cause me to gain weight. Made sense to me at the time.
But I kept running and running and running. Never did get fast.
I was twenty-seven years old when I got married. My daughter Maria was born the same year.
Having a family of my own changed my direction in life. Until now, my major had been whatever it took to stay eligible for the track team. A wife and child gave me the focus I needed to concentrate on my studies.
In 1968, armed with a Bachelor of Science degree, I returned to California to begin my career. My son, Todd, was born. Goals had to be bigger.
I decided to go to the University of Oregon in Eugene for a Masters degree in urban planning. I taught drafting classes at Cottage Grove High School in the morning one year of the program. The second year, I worked for a developer, planning and designing tract houses.
I received my Masters degree in 1973 and immediately became planning director for a large engineering firm in Portland. Where I designed sub-divisions for housing, battled over zone changes and offered sage advice at public hearings.
That’s how I got started in life. Still wish I’d been a faster runner.
Jose now resides in Sedona.
First time I’ve been off-roading in a Cadillac.
