Leroy, Part II by JR Hightower

     Leroy was born in Manitou, southwest Oklahoma, on January 24, 1918. He grew up in the area and went to school in Frederick. His dad, J. T. Hightower, known to the family as Pop, mother, Gertrude, and sons Harold and Leroy, lost the house they lived in early in the Depression. They all moved into an oil lease shack. It was built for a drilling crew when they were excavating for oil. The shed was deserted and rent-free. 

        Gertrude cleaned up the place, took rolled up newspaper to fill the cracks between the shrunken boards of the walls, then papered over the walls and rolled up chinking with more newsprint, a paintbrush and a paste of flour, salt and water. Harold and Leroy slept in one bed; some winter mornings they would wake up and find the bed covered with a dusting of snow that had blown in through the cracks in the shack walls where the newspaper didn’t hold. Pop said, “There was nothing between them and the North Pole but a barbed wire fence.”

    The Hightowers fared better than many of their neighbors because they had a milk cow so they had plenty of milk and butter. They also had a few domestic chickens so the family also had eggs. With a bag of beans, a sack of flour, and an occasional side of bacon, they could eat well on a pot of pinto beans, eggs, biscuits with butter, and all the milk they could drink. They also hunted to add protein to their diets.

    After the hard times in Oklahoma, Leroy would not eat rabbit. He said he ate so much rabbit during the Depression that he swore he would never go rabbiting again. At that time, a box of fifty 22 caliber short shells cost about a quarter. Pop’s rule was one shell, one critter. Leroy became an accurate sharp shooter.  Leroy’s oldest sibling was Mary. She was married to Gordon Herrell and had her own family. Leroy went to live with her and Gordon for a while and always spoke fondly of his time with “Sister.” 

    As the Great Depression raged on, Pop was happy to get a job working on a WPA (Works Progress Administration) project on a highway. The previous “powder monkey” died in an accidental explosion, leaving the job open. Pop wanted the job because even though it was dangerous, it paid twice as much as a regular laborer, twenty cents a day. He got the job.

    Harold was working in the fields around Manitou, so Leroy went with Pop and became the powder monkey’s “Mud Man.” Dynamite on the road crew was used mostly to break up big rocks and boulders, not to blow up whole mountains. 

    Pop and Leroy would be called over to a rock too big to be moved by manpower or mule. He would put a fuse in a stick of dynamite and set it on the rock, then Leroy would plop a shovelful of heavy mud on the dynamite to direct the charge at the rock. Pop would light the fuse and they would run for cover. If the dynamite was not covered with mud, the explosion would only result in a loud bang and would not break up the rock.

    Leroy complained about sometimes having to run “a long way away” to get mud. The consistency of the mud made a difference in how well the dynamite worked. If the mud was too thin or too sandy, it took more dynamite to break up the rock. If they did not use the correct amount of dynamite, they would have to blast it again using more dynamite and the job would be shut down while they had “fire in the hole.”

    Later, the WPA provided a wheelbarrow, and Pop was able to blow up rocks faster because Leroy could mix up a whole batch of good mud and wheel it along with them. 

    During this time, Leroy’s mother Gertrude was diagnosed with liver cancer. He nursed his mother as he watched her wither away. She went from a hearty, healthy woman to a 70-pound invalid over a miserable two years and died in 1935 when Leroy was seventeen. 

    The oldest brother in the family was C. T. Hightower. By the middle of the Depression, he had graduated from high school and went to college at the University of Texas in Austin. With what little help everyone in the family could give him, he managed to work his way through the University of Texas by waiting tables and working odd jobs while attending classes. He earned a degree and his teaching certificate. The certificate enabled him to get a job teaching school in Canadian, Texas. 

    The family was extremely proud of C. T. because he had a career that gave him security when job security was extremely rare. Several years later, C.T.  moved from Canadian to Liberal, Kansas where he gave up teaching and went to work for an oil company. He met and married a city girl, Jean. 

    It was a big deal when they came to visit; the Hightowers were a little intimidated by the sophisticated wife of C.T. who shopped in ready made stores in a big city and had not lived a hand-to-mouth, hard scrabble life like they had. There was some tension among the adults when she was coming to visit that she might judge their ways.

                                    Leroy working as a soda jerk

During his high school years, Leroy got a job in a drug store working behind the soda fountain counter as a soda jerk. This job was a life-changing event for him. He liked the work and especially all the local girls who frequented the short, spinning stools in front of him at the soda fountain.     

    Because Leroy had to work, he was one credit short to be able to graduate with his 1936 high school class and did not receive his diploma.  He  went to Canadian, Texas where his brother, C. T. was teaching school.

    Leroy got a job in the Rexall Drug Store as an “experienced” soda jerk. The affable young man came to know all the salesmen that sold and delivered candy to the drugstore. He learned that the candy salesmen from Whitman’s, King Candy, Mrs. Stover's Bungalow Candies (to become Russell Stover’s Candies in the early 1940's) made good money. 

    After working  at the soda fountain for a while, getting to know everyone, and garnering the adoration of the female population in Canadian, nineteen year old Leroy apparently got a little cocky. The druggist and operator of the Rexall Drugstore said, “Hightower, what you need is to be fired three times in a row, and I’m going to start with number one.”

    A friend of Leroy’s had a car and no job, so with another unemployed  friend, the three of them loaded up the car and drove west on Route 66 to Albuquerque, New Mexico. They found the local YMCA and checked in. Leroy was surprised and proud of the fact that in 1938, all three of them had a job before the sun went down on their first day in Albuquerque. They had arrived in “The Land of Enchantment.”

    Using his contacts from working in the drug stores in Oklahoma and Texas, Leroy contacted Mr. King of the King's Candy Company in Ft. Worth, Texas. In another of those life-changing coincidences, the western New Mexico/Arizona route man had recently died, and the route was open. The salesman that had befriended Leroy in Canadian, Texas vouched for Leroy and he got the job.

    He loved his new occupation where he had to be a fancy dresser and drive a nice car. He was a six-foot two-inch, good-looking kid with a big smile and a good head on his shoulders. He did very well in the candy sales business. Leroy bought a shiny new car with a big metal sun visor over the windshield, fog lights and a spotlight. He said the spotlight was, among other things, for the bootleggers when he went back home.

    In much of the west, absent mountains, rivers and other obstructions, the land had been surveyed, and the roads were laid out along the section lines running north and south and east and west. Leroy remembered back in Oklahoma, in the mornings, coming up on wrecks at the intersection of the section line roads. 

    The bootleggers would run with their lights off at night and sometimes would have collisions at the intersections. Because they could not afford to be caught with a car full of booze, they just took the booze, walked away and left the cars where they sat.

    On the dirt roads in Oklahoma at night, Leroy would turn on the spotlight shining it down the road and watch for a “dark wreck”. He could not use the spotlight on the main highways because the highway patrol would give you a ticket for blinding the oncoming traffic.

    After Prohibition, fewer bootleggers practiced their trade, but Oklahoma was a dry state, so gangsters continued to satisfy the law of supply and demand until Oklahoma finally voted to go “wet” in 1959.

    The coalition of those who benefited financially from Prohibition included preachers, bootleggers, cops, revenuers, judges and jailers, aka “the unholy alliance.”  The 1920 U.S. Constitutional 18th Amendment was preceded in 1907 by Oklahoma’s “new” Constitution which prohibited alcohol stronger than 3.2%. The “Sooner’s” Constitution defined every place indoors and outdoors where alcohol was not allowed to be consumed. There were no indoor bathrooms in Oklahoma at the time. 

    When the 21st Amendment was ratified legalizing alcohol again in 1933, Oklahoma stuck with their “new” Constitution and allowed 3.2% alcohol sales. The legislature had gone to great lengths to define all the places, indoors and outdoors, where drinking alcohol was prohibited; in 1907 there were no bathrooms in homes, so in1933,  Oklahomans joked that the only place they could legally drink in their homes were in their bathrooms, unless they were still using an outdoor outhouse. 

    In 1959, a law was passed in Oklahoma to sell 6 point beer that was not artificially refrigerated, and other alcohol could be sold at State Liquor Stores. In 1984, mixed drink sales were allowed in bars and restaurants in Oklahoma.  Mississippi was also a hold out state and didn’t ratify liquor sales until 1966.

    From 1938 thru 1941, Leroy traveled all over the southwest, either while working for King Candy Company and sightseeing. One of Leroy's favorite products of King Candy Company was the King's French Creams, all soft centers in milk and dark chocolate. 

    In his old travel photographs, Leroy always had a pretty girl on his arm or leaning on his shiny car. He went to the Grand Canyon, Pikes Peak and Denver,  Death Valley, Northern California to see the Giant Redwoods and to La Jolla, California where he met Cecilia O’Hagin.

    Cecilia had placed runner up in the 1939 Miss Arizona pageant, was singing with a local band at dances, church functions, local fiestas, and on local radio stations in Tucson. Someone she met at one of the radio stations told her she should go to Hollywood, California.

     Cecilia left Arizona and got a job singing and dancing at an upscale supper club, the famous Florentine Gardens in Hollywood; she was briefly under contract at Columbia Pictures. 

    O’Hagin shared an apartment with a couple of girls who also worked at the Florentine Gardens, one being Yvonne De Carlo. Yvonne and Cecilia looked alike and people often confused one for the other.   

    De Carlo was billed as a Brazilian bombshell, but actually was from Vancouver, Canada. Her big break came when she played Moses’ wife, Sephora, in “The Ten Commandments.” Afterwards, Yvonne  mostly starred in “B” westerns, married a cowboy actor/stuntman and had two children.  

 Yvonne de Carlo

    Before De Carlo married, she made the gossip columns quite regularly by dating Howard Hughes, Burt Lancaster, Robert Stack, and Prince Abdul Pahlavi of Saudi Arabia.  She ended her career with the part she is most known for, Lily Munster on the television series, The Munsters.    

    Cecilia had a few bit parts in movies; Columbia did not pay well, unless they used you in a starring role in a movie. She was successful at the supper club, but the singing and dancing job did not pay that well either; Hollywood was full of beautiful starlets and competition and wages were fierce. 

    The chef at the supper club was Foster Exline. He and his wife took a liking to Cecilia and Foster would feed her in the back of the kitchen because he thought she was too skinny. She was very grateful to him because the struggle of purchasing makeup, costumes, rent, food, and transportation stretched her budget to the limit.

    She met and fell in love with Leroy Hightower and he asked her to choose between a career in Hollywood or a future with an Okie. She chose the more reliable Okie and they went back to Tucson where her large family of brothers and sisters, parents, aunts and uncles attended their wedding. She  could now accompany him as he traveled his candy route. 

    America entered the war after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Leroy was drafted in January of 1942. King Candy Company appealed to the draft board and got Leroy a deferment to finish the candy season. Sales only ran from late September to April because chocolate did not hold up well in the heat of the southwest since there was no refrigeration in the shipping or the drug stores. 

    Leroy took his now pregnant wife to his father’s farm in Oklahoma, then went to El Paso, Texas and was inducted into the Army for his basic training at Fort Bliss; he prepared to fight in the Pacific war theatre. On the appointed day in May 1942, they loaded up his outfit and took them to the train station in El Paso. On the loading dock they were stopped. After a short wait, the sergeants ordered everybody to sound off by the number, one, two, three, four, etc. 

    Then the lieutenants ordered the men that were odd numbers to get on the train and the even numbers to take their gear and get back in the M35 series 6x6 cargo deuce and a half trucks. Leroy was an even number; he got on one of the two and a half ton trucks and was sent as part of a base activating unit to Alamogordo, New Mexico to help build Alamogordo Army Air Base. 

    The odd numbers were sent to the Philippines and became part of the units that took part in the Bataan Death March. Fred and Ted Roessler from Alamogordo were part of the group that was in the Death March. Fred carried his injured brother Ted much of the time because the Japanese would shoot those that could not walk on their own.  New Mexicans made up the majority of those on the march.  It was a brutal stab in the heart to lose so many soldiers from the Land of Enchantment.

    Upon arriving west of Alamogordo, there was little but desert, cactus, rattlesnakes, scorpions, tarantulas and caliche hardpan dirt. The Army Corps of Engineers surveyed and marked off the base. They scraped some roads and a runway, but that was just the beginning. The troops pitched and lived in tents. They dug latrines, graded roads, laid out a pierced steel planking runway, built an officer’s club and other military buildings. The soldier’s barracks were the last buildings to be constructed.

    Leroy told stories of Yankees in the outfit trying to cut down ocotillo with an ax. The tops would break off, fall and stick into the soldier’s back or whip around and stick in his buddy - the aptly nicknamed “Devil’s whip sticks” proved its point. 

Ocotillo  

  The mesquite bushes were huge and their roots seemed driven into the center of the earth. Mesquite wood is extremely hard and  difficult to cut with an ax and the soldiers did not have chain saws. The prickly pear cactus, like the ocotillo, has a bad habit of whipping back and sticking you. 

    The group of pilgrims finally got the base laid out and learned about caliche dirt, which when it is dry, if disturbed, turns into a super fine powder. The Yankee officers would order an inspection and before the troops could get to the parade ground walking through the two-inch thick talcum powder, their spit shined shoes would be unrecognizable and the bottoms of their khaki trousers would be white with the two-inch thick caliche dust. 

    The rain and the caliche made the slickest, gooiest, stickiest mud imaginable and when it dries, it turns hard as a rock until it is once again disturbed when the cycle starts all over again.

Alamogordo Army Air Base

    Leroy had made some friends in the outfit. His big smile and good nature paid off. A friend that worked as a clerk in headquarters ran up to him excitedly one day and said, “Do you want to make an extra seventy-five dollars a month?”

     “Sure! How?” he questioned doubtfully.

    “Well, the NCO club steward was shipped out. I looked up your records and your soda jerk experience in the drug stores qualifies you as having food and beverage experience and the Base Commander says that qualifies you to apply for the job.”

    Leroy applied for and got the job as steward of the Alamogordo Army Air Base Non-Commissioned Officers Club.

    Because he was a private, he depended on his senior grade non-com sergeants at arms to handle the senior non-commissioned officers to keep the wheels greased; he figured out how to work around his barriers.

    The first time the slot machine technician came by to service the machines after Leroy became NCO Club manager, Leroy found a bag of quarters on his desk. He thought the man had forgotten them and went running after him to return them.

    The man laughed at Leroy and told him, “No, those are yours for taking care of things.” Leroy felt naive about learning the system he was working under.    

He was a good food and beverage man. Unlike the Officers Club, the NCO Club served no hard liquor, only beer and soft drinks were allowed, but he sold cigarettes, cigars, candy, beer, Coca-Cola, other soft drinks, coffee and good food. That was where Leroy learned that the quality of the ingredients has a lot to do with the quality of the finished product. People talked about how good the fried chicken was at the NCO Club.

    New Mexico was a wild west gambling state until 1947, when Federal Revenuers came and took axes to the gaming tables, slot machines and untaxed liquor. When Leroy was at the NCO Club there was a poker game, dice tables, punchboards and slot machines. The Base being a military installation was exempt.

    The place was full of troops waiting to be shipped out to the war in the Pacific. They thought they might not come back and spent their money like there was no tomorrow.

    By late October, with his seventy-five dollar a month bonus, his gambling winnings and his quarters from the slots, Leroy “was flush” and he drove to Oklahoma, picked up his wife and baby and returned (on time) to his job and Alamogordo.

Leaving for Alamogordo, NM

    Alamogordo was a town of 4200 in the 1940 census. By October 1942, it was twice that. There were no new hotels or boarding houses. Everybody that had an extra room had it rented out. The town was full up. Leroy took Cecilia and baby Junior to Rousseau Hospital at 1209 Ohio Avenue and checked them in; it was only two dollars a day; they had room and board and had around the clock medical care.

He went back to the base until Mrs. Patty Patee, the hospital administrator, got them a one-room apartment around 700 or 800 block of Texas Avenue with her sister Betty. They moved in together and were a family. 

                                    Cecilia, JR with a boo-boo on his knee, Leroy

Leroy became good friends with most of the local pillars of the community. He played a lot of poker in the game over the Hermitage Pool Hall and in the basement of Henry’s bar, at the corner of 1st Street and Pennsylvania Avenue - later White Sands Blvd. Henry’s was on the south side of 1st Street making it outside the original Alamogordo town site. Leroy and Henry became  friends during the war when Leroy ran the NCO Club.

Junior would go to Henry’s with Leroy and Cecilia to visit with Henry and his wife. He liked to sip on a ginger ale with grenadine in it with a cherry and orange slice garnish and listen to the live music while the adults talked and It was especially fun for Junior when they sat in the raised alcove on the south end of the saloon overlooking the hugged together dancers, women twirling and dancing backward, boots scuffing along the floor and occasional jitterbugs with feet a-flying!

After the war, Henry’s would become The Jet Bar. In 1969, Leroy would buy it from his long time friend Red Burnett, and remodel it into The Backdoor Saloon and Supper Club.

 Leroy made a lot of friends with the town people while he managed the NCO club. During the war, sugar was rationed and sometimes hard to get, but in those days, a druggist mixed up prescriptions in the pharmacy and sugar was the filler in most prescriptions and a large part of the ingredients of prescriptions. It was a part of their inventory and druggists were exempt from the ration and could get all the sugar they wanted.

Mr. Loggains was having trouble-getting cigarettes for the Corner Drug Store, partly because the military had priority on cigarettes. Leroy could get all the cigarettes he wanted for the NCO Club.

Leroy talked to his friend, Mr. Felix Loggains, and they worked out a deal. Leroy took cases of cigarettes to the drug store and got a like value in sugar from Mr. Loggains. He took the sugar to the base and shared it with the Officers Club and the mess halls. He helped the base get sugar and the townspeople get cigarettes. Everyone won on that deal.

The Army being the Army, things never went smooth long. Leroy’s unit was ordered to ship out. Not wanting to lose his NCO manager that kept the non-commissioned officers happy, kept the violence to a minimum with the big senior NCO “sergeants at arms” and did not lose money hand over fist, the base commander transferred Leroy to another unit that was not scheduled to ship out. 

Every time Leroy’s unit was scheduled to ship out, that maneuver was repeated. It was repeated several more times before the end of the war. Leroy was promoted and busted several times, but the Base Commander never allowed him to be transferred from Alamogordo Army Air Base. He spent the whole Second World War at his first and only duty assignment in the Army.

After a time, Leroy really got the hang of managing the club but the General Accounting Office, the GAO, blew a gasket. The Alamogordo Army Air Base NCO Club had made so much money it had “too much money in the bank”. Leroy was called on the carpet where he was told, “The purpose of the NCO Clubs was to entertain the troops, give them a diversion and to improve their quality of life, not to make money.” Leroy was ordered to do something to draw down the money in the bank, and not to accumulate enough money to upset the GAO again.

Using a contact of Cecilia’s in California, Leroy contacted a booking agent for bands and entertainers. He found out the big bands and show acts needed a gig in the middle of the country so when they were traveling from coast to coast, they could make some expense money and try out new music and new musicians. Better than that, they performed at a bargain price.

It was a “no brainer”; Leroy started hosting free concerts, with acts like Count Basie, Jimmy Dorsey, Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman. He added free fried chicken dinners and free beer and Coca-Cola. In addition, the diplomat that he was, Leroy invited the Officers to attend at no charge to the Officers Club. I saw telegrams confirming the bookings and a regret from Lewis Armstrong due to a prior engagement.

            Count Basie                                Jimmy Dorsey

Those concerts were some of the rare times Cecilia was able to go to the NCO Club as “first lady” and mix with her friends from town. Some of her friends were Colonel Alderson’s wife, Lieutenant Frank Simpkins’ wife, Loma, (Loma Simpkins was the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Tinsley - Alamogordo’s biggest landlords - at the Tinsley’s trailer park) and Lieutenant Red O’Dell’s wife Dottie, (Dottie Odell was the druggist’s Felix Loggains' daughter).

A fearful event at the NCO happened in October 1943. The local suppliers were unable to get any beer because of all the rationing during the war. The base Commander called Leroy to his office and ordered him to go find some beer for the troops.

In some of the most unusual language in military orders ever, “Sgt. Leroy Hightower is ordered to proceed to Texas and points east, for the purpose of procuring beer for Alamogordo Army Air Base and to return when his mission is accomplished”. 

They struck out on finding beer in Dallas and Ft. Worth but struck gold getting tickets to the Oklahoma University vs. Texas University football game. The “Red River Rivalry” is always played in Dallas. That game was played at the Cotton Bowl at the Texas State fair in Dallas. After the game, they had a great time at the Texas State Fair (wearing civilian clothes of course). The Texas State Fair is where the corn dog was first introduced the year before.

They went to San Antonio to the Pearl Brewing Company where they had heard there might be beer available. Sure enough, the President of Pearl told them he had four train cars of Pearl beer loaded and on the siding.

It had been loaded to be sent to a base in Texas but all the troops shipped out to the Pacific and the base did not need it anymore. Leroy bought the beer, signed for it to be delivered to the NCO Club, and they left to get back to Alamogordo in time to meet the train. 

Leroy got one of his NCO Club board members that ran the motor pool to take all of his deuce and a half trucks to meet the train in Alamogordo. There was no railroad spur from Alamogordo to the base yet. They loaded the beer on the trucks and convoyed it to the base, sending the first trucks to the Officers Club of course. He was not busted for fraternizing with officers this time.

By 1944, the Hightowers had moved to an apartment at 507 16th Street owned by Lon French, the Firestone storeowner. It was a one-bedroom three-room apartment with hardwood floors which Cecilia did not enjoy keeping dusted and waxed.

Junior liked the big mysterious barn out back to play in (he wasn’t ‘spose to go in it) and apple and pear trees and fig bushes. Cecilia grew hollyhocks on the west side of the building next to the driveway. North of the French’s was open pastureland all the way to Indian Wells Road with big 50-year-old pecan trees on each corner of the blocks and smaller ones scattered throughout the area.

Cecilia’s sister, Jo O’Hagin, married Roger K. O’glesbee who was a test pilot at the air base. One night they were all having dinner at Helen and Harold’s, they were living in the original ranch house of Senator Aubrey Lyle  Dunn’s father, James C. Dunn. His place was on Indian Wells just east of Pecan Drive. Senator Aubrey Lyle Dunn, 1893-1959, was the father of Senator Aubrey Lee Dunn, Chairman of the New Mexico Senate Finance Committee in the 1960’s and 1970.

                                                Jo O’Hagin Oglesbee, U. S. Navy                                               

    They were all sitting outside when they heard a boom and saw a column of smoke out over the Air Base. Uncle Roger was piloting a test flight of the experimental jet airplane that later became the legendary F86 fighter jet. Jo sensed something was wrong and started crying. In a little while a car came rolling up to the house to tell her that Roger was alive and to take her to the base hospital. He survived, but always had some health problems after that.

    World War II ended and Leroy’s experiences from his early days as a soda jerk, to a candy salesman, to NCO manager, to the Plaza Cafe set his course in the food and beverage industry.  In 1968, Leroy asked Junior what he thought about selling the Plaza Cafe. He said that Amelia and Mike Musgrove wanted to buy the cafe and Junior agreed that they should sell it to them. 

 Junior adored Amelia since he was a little guy when she had waited tables in the Plaza; he’d sit at a table to eat by himself, and she’d take his order like he was an adult. She wouldn’t baby him when he had trouble cutting up his steak, and, he’d always thought she was so sweet and so pretty. 

 
    In late 1968 Leroy bought the Jet Bar from his old friend “Red” Burnett. The Jet Bar had been Henry’s in the 1940’s and 50’s. Unlike Henry’s, the classy nightclub, The Jet Bar had become a beer joint. It was located at the corner of First Street and White Sands Boulevard. Due to The Eddy brothers’ alcohol prohibition covenants in the original city limits of Alamogordo, the Jet Bar was on the south side of First Street, outside the original city.

Leroy purposely let the bar sit closed and dark for about three months hoping the beer joint image would evaporate some. Then he started the renovations in the late summer of 1969.  

 To be continued…

Democratic Party Meeting at the Plaza Cafe

Leroy by JR Hightower

 Plaza Café - Excerpt from "Leroy"

JR Hightower grew up in Alamogordo, New Mexico. 

He is a restauratuer , entrepreneur, and raconteur.  "Leroy"

(not yet published) will be JR's second book. His first book, 

"Alone on Pasture Ridge" is available on Amazon.

In 1946, Judge Howard Beacham who owned the Plaza Café, decided to retire from the restaurant business and work at just one job - being Magistrate Judge. 

Leroy took possession of the Plaza Café on Christmas Day, 1946. He had convinced his brother Harold to come to Alamogordo to help with painting and cleaning up the café during the week between Christmas and New Years; closing and cleaning the restaurant that week became a tradition for many years. The inside of the Plaza Café was presented with a new coat of paint every Christmas. 

The whole family scrubbed, cleaned and removed the mounted deer and antelope heads, Mexican sombreros and serapes from the walls.  Harold refinished the counter and the twenty-four swivel seats. The wooden counter was beautiful; the back bar behind the counter was a lighted pie case with sliding glass doors on the front and storage cabinets underneath. Small individual breakfast cereal boxes were stacked on top and a big mirror ran the length of the counter. 

Leroy Hightower re-opened the Plaza Café under new ownership on January 2, 1947. The dining room seated 86 people and another 75 would fit in the banquet room in the back- not big by today’s standards, but after World War II in Alamogordo, New Mexico in a town with a population of less than 7,000, it was impressive. The Plaza Bar, the only bar with a liquor license in the city limits, used the banquet room as a dance hall on weekend nights.  

The cafe’s lunch counter ran almost the length of the dining room. It turned and went to the east wall, leaving just enough room for a row of chairs by the front wall for guests waiting for a table. 

On the east wall, in the center of the mirror over the pie case that served as the back bar of the counter, there was always a big bouquet of fresh flowers, a nice touch in the desert. The counter and chair backs were crafted from durable oak. The same sturdy woodwork was still beautiful and in use when Leroy sold the Plaza Café twenty-five years later. 

A filling station was on the corner of the property at 10th and Pennsylvania Avenue (later named White Sands Boulevard).  The bar on the north side and the cafe on the east side formed an L  around the back side of the parking lot. 

The adobe buildings were covered in stucco in traditional Mexican style with vigas (large pine logs) serving as rafters for the roof. Vigas are often topped with latillas (sticks laid in patterns over the logs) to finish the ceiling, but the Plaza ceiling was more appropriate for a restaurant. (Latilla sticks can attract bugs, little critters, spider webs, and dust bunnies). The area between the vigas was stuccoed into a half-moon concave arch halfway up each side of the log to create a bright, clean look.  

The traditional New Mexico adobe building - made from mud and logs and sticks, served as the main architecture in southwest towns and villages. Filled with oak furniture and counters, the cafe looked especially inviting during the dark, desert evenings. The vigas outside the bar were encircled in neon; the roofline of the cafe and the filling station were outlined in the bright white light which cut through the dark. 

Noble neon gas ran through long tubes which had been twisted into shapes with a torch by a skilled glass bender. Internal electrodes were inset into the cylinders filled with neon and then hermetically sealed by clamping and melting the glass ends together.    

Each letter had its own transformer and when a bombardment of electric volts were applied to the electrodes, the gas ionized in the tubes causing it to emit brilliant liquid fire. The internal electrodes in the luminous tubes prevented degradation of the neon by sputtering and crackling. 

 The first sight travelers saw as they approached Alamogordo at night were two competing signs over the gas station edged in neon cutting through the darkness: one, a metal Mobil Oil sign with its Pegasus logo, and one a polished aluminum rocket about 20 feet long, outlined in blue and green neon with an exhaust tail of orange flashing neon. The rocket had Plaza Café written on both sides in red neon directing hungry customers to their future meal. 

                                    Plaza Cafe at Night    

V-2 rockets had recently been captured from Germany, and along with former Nazi scientists and engineers, who had rather come to work at the White Sands Proving Grounds instead of face punishment for their collusion with the former German government, had secretly arrived in the desert to help the Army begin experimenting with rockets.  

The military's effort to emulate Germany's rocketry had thus far proved disastrous.  The first rocket tumbled end over end and bounced off the mountain above Alamogordo.  The second ended up in Juarez, Mexico's graveyard - an appropriate ending.  "Operation Paperclip," was put in place by the federal government and deals were made to sneak the formerly fascist scientists and their families out of Germany and into the United States. 

When the program became successful, Alamogordo became known as “The Rocket City,” and Leroy joined the city's booster promotion with his highly identifiable, silver rocket gleaming in the sky above the Plaza parking lot. The German families slowly integrated into Otero County's acceptance. Their children enrolled in local schools, they joined local Catholic or Lutheran churches, moved into existing neighborhoods, and eventually the pain of the war quelled between former local soldiers and foreign "Hun" scientists until the former hatreds are practically unknown by their grandchildren and great-grandchildren today. 

Former Plaza owner Judge Howard Beacham agreed to stay on for a while to help Leroy in the kitchen. Leroy’s wife, Cecilia, who had flirted with a career in movies in Hollywood as a singer and dancer, got the contact information of her friend, Foster Exline, an executive chef at a supper club in California. Leroy talked him into moving to Alamogordo so the Plaza Café could have a bona fide chef.  

                                Cecilia O'Hagin Hightower

Foster settled right in and went to work about 3 a.m.  He began each day with a 5-gallon pot of Farmers Brothers brand coffee using city water that was plumbed into the coffee maker so he and early customers and staff could help themselves. 

The natural gas fired Bunn coffee maker had two 5 gallon coffee pots with site glass tubes to view the level of the coffee. Each side had a spigot at the bottom and was heated to 210 degrees; hot water was available on demand through a third spigot in the center between the two rectangular coffee containers. This water was used for hot tea and Sanka (the modern powdered decaf of the 1940’s and 50’s).  

A clean towel was tied over the spigot of the freshest coffee in order for the staff to know to use the other pot first. If there was no towel on either of them, they knew to watch the level of the only pot they had and brew a new pot before they ran out. The wait staff would fill their glass bubble-shaped pots from the 5-gallon dispenser, then set the coffee carafes on single burner hot plates in the wait stations. 

The combination of Alamogordo water and the Farmer Brothers brand created a robust coffee. A pungent, carmelly fragrance filled the cafe when the hot “rocket fuel” was brewed in the morning.

The coffee maker was enclosed so oxygen did not get to the coffee. This enabled it to stay fresh longer because the oil in coffee oxidizes quickly when it is exposed to air. Oxidation makes the oil in coffee beans rancid and causes the coffee to taste bitter and old. 

Ground coffee oxidizes when exposed to air, too, so it needs to be sealed in an airtight container after it is opened. Coffee companies vacuum the air out of coffee cans to remove oxygen - which is why a new can of coffee goes “swoosh” - sucking in air when the seal is broken.  

Foster would put twenty to thirty pounds of bacon to blanch in the oven and about as much link sausage and par cook it. All of Foster's delicacies were made from scratch. Sausage drippings were the secret ingredient in the waffle batter, giving a subtle hint of flavor to the puffy, crispy gridded cakes.  Bacon drippings were added into the pancake batter and to season the beans and vegetables. The par cooked bacon and sausage would later be browned to order on the 36-inch flat grill, along with individual orders of eggs, hash browns, toast, and pancakes.  

Two huge old waffle irons were set up every morning on the line that was converted into a steam table for lunch and dinner. Three 4-slice toastmasters were on the shelf where the bread was stored, over the table where finished orders were picked up by the wait staff.

The waitresses called out their orders to the cook, there was no ticket hung. When you were feeding 150 to 300 people breakfast, it would get intense and the cooks were incredible in organizing plates and other clues to remember all those orders. 

Leroy’s nephew, Tommie Carl Herrell, started washing dishes at the Plaza and worked his way up to cook. Tommie and his friend, Jimmie Randall, both cooked at the Plaza in their teen years; Jimmie also cooked at Holloman Air Base in one of the military club’s kitchens.

Foster put big pots of stock, one beef and one chicken, on to boil all day for soup and other ingredients. He started the lunch specials with “Boiled Beef” on Tuesdays. It was just cubed beef but the long stringy muscles of the shoulders were skillfully cut short so when they were boiled in the beef stock from the day before, the meat was melt-in-your-mouth tender.  

Boiled beef, spaghetti and meatballs, chicken potpie, and beef stew daily specials ran Monday through Friday. Meat specials were served in 8 ounce, oval green china ramekins in the entrée section of the plate so the juice would not run off. Other lunch specials were served on sectioned luncheon plates without the ramekins to eliminate washing more dishes. The special included an entrée, two sides, and endless hot, fresh, yeast rolls.  

Foster made rolls every day from scratch. The daily special cost around 65 cents. On Sunday, it might be turkey and dressing with all the trimmings, roast beef, or roast pork for 95 cents. The favorite after-church entree was turkey dinner. Five or six thirty-pound turkeys were cooked. If there was any meat left, it was used for open-faced hot turkey sandwiches or in the club sandwiches. 

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Foster made 12 to 24 pies three times a week and kept the big pie case full - or tried to; he just could not seem to bake enough pies. He bragged that he could whip up a baker’s dozen (13) egg whites and sugar into enough meringue to top 10 pies. 

The chef called the newspaper weekly, and told them the lunch and dinner specials so they could have the menu inserts printed and delivered in time to be placed in the lunch menus. Foster never seemed to be in a hurry or flustered because he was so organized and efficient. He cooked and baked the best food imaginable.  

The slight, balding chef wore a long sleeve, white dress shirt (instead of a chef jacket) with his checkered chef pants and a long white apron. He rolled the shirtsleeves up and somehow managed to stay clean. Foster stayed with Leroy until he sold the restaurant 25 years later and then stayed at the Plaza Bar with Amelia and Mike Musgrove after that.

The café was a success from the first day partly because of the location, an increasing military population stationed into the area, Leroy’s skill running a restaurant and his ability to put the right person in the right place at the right time, and moving out of the way to let his staff do their jobs.  

After the first year, Leroy paid his loan back early from Felix Loggains, bought his father, Pop, a ’47 Mercury, and bought himself another ’47 Packard. He became a part of the community even though he was a “come-to-town soldier” and not one of the “old guard” families of ranchers, farmers, or businessmen who had been there since the end of the last century.

The late 40’s and early 50’s were great economic times in Alamogordo; the town doubled its population in the 1940’s and doubled again in the 1950’s. Leroy’s sister, Mary, and brother-in-law, Gordon Herrell, arrived after their Oklahoma farm “blew out,” and they had a big auction sale and moved to Alamogordo in the Fall of 1950.  

Mary had severe arthritis and the dry climate of Alamogordo was said to be good for her and she did seem to get around much better than she did in the humid Oklahoma air. With all the building and construction going on in Alamogordo, Leroy’s brother, Harold, had shown up and done well with his paint contracting business; he welcomed his brother-in-law, Gordon, to help him. 

In 1954, Leroy allowed his son, Junior, to work in the restaurant operation of the Plaza Café and he began to report to Foster after school. Twice a week the Peyton Packing Company in El Paso brought swinging beef carcasses in a truck to Alamogordo and occasionally sent in special shipments because the cafe's walk-in refrigerator was not very big. 

Leroy thought it would be helpful for Junior’s football weight training to help with hoisting the carcasses. Foster would not allow Peyton Packing Company to unload any side of beef that weighed less than 400 pounds. That would insure that it came off a minimum 1,200-pound steer. The young bovines’ weight before butchering was one-third head, horns, hooves, hide and innards, one-third right side, and one third left side.  

When the Peyton truck came in, Foster would climb up into  the back, inspect and select his sides of beef from the swinging beef hanging on big hooks suspended from the rails on the ceiling of the truck. After Foster chose his beeves, the drivers could unload the meat and hang the beef quarters on hooks close to the cutting table in the back room of the kitchen. 

Even then there wasn’t much market for “prime” grade beef, a grade higher than choice. Prime beef is marbled (fattier), better tasting and from bigger beef cattle, making the meat to bone ratio better (i.e., a 300 pound side has almost as much bone in it as a 500 pound side), so it is more expensive per pound of meat. 

But sometimes Peyton had “prime” beef they would sell to the cafe at the “choice” price because they knew Leroy and Foster liked the best grade available and because the Plaza was such a steady customer. 

Leroy’s son, Junior, was a big ol’ kid and his new job was to help the chef “work up” the beef. With a couple of knives and a handsaw, Foster would cut up the beef quarters - he was a slight man but strong as a bull. Junior received an invaluable education, learning which cuts came from which parts of the steer.  

He learned how grocery stores sell beef “round,” a section of beef from the cow's hindquarters, as sirloin tips. The round is connected to the sirloin, but it has two big tendons (gristle) running the full width and length of it. It does not have enough fat to roast, will dry out before the gristle breaks down, and is too tough to cook quickly like steak. The best thing to do with it is to grind it up. 

Junior and Foster carried the large beef quarters to the walk-in and hung them up on the meat hooks. The chef would not let the boy unhook a whole quarter and carry it to the table alone because he said the youngster didn’t know how to lift that much weight yet. 

But the tough, slight man must have been strung with tendons and gristle running through him because he deftly handled 150 pound beef quarters on his back yelling for everyone to get out of the way as he wrangled the seven cubic feet of meat onto the cutting table. 

 Quality cuts of the side of beef needed a good deal of fat trimmed off; the fat would be thrown in a big stew pot and saved in the walk-in. A bull hindquarter would come in about once a week. Bulls do not have the fat steers do; they are almost all red meat which cooks up with great flavor but tastes tough and dry. The bull meat would be ground up with the fat in the walk-in to create a good grade of ground beef. (Bull meat can no longer be bought for human consumption because of added hormones and gene alteration. It is sold for pet food, though). 

The Plaza sold lots of hamburger during the lunch specials: stuffed bell peppers, spaghetti and meatballs, ground sirloin steak, and hundreds of hamburgers and cheeseburgers every week at lunch and dinner. There were also mock filets on the menu (a 12 or 14 ounce ground beef patty wrapped in bacon). 

Foster took the rounds, deboned them, and then used the eye (part of the round) and top rounds for chicken fried steak and the bottom rounds were used for roast beef. The trimmings went in the ground beef and the bones into the stockpot. New York steak and filet mignon were customer favorites and #109 bone-in ribs were used for prime rib on weekends.  

Occasionally, when they did not need all the #109s for prime rib, the rib bones were cut off and put in the rib pot and Delmonico steaks were cut from the lip of the rib eye. The beef ribs and short ribs would be used for evening specials. The chuck was used for boiled beef and roast beef, and the remaining forequarters were ground. Every part of the cow was used except the moo. 

One of the biggest sellers was the Plaza Club Steak. It was a 9-10 ounce top sirloin. The short loin was cut up for porterhouse and T-bone steaks. In addition, the loin strips became New York steaks and the tenders were cut into filet mignons. 

The porterhouse steaks were huge, about 35 to 40 ounces, with part of the tail left on that hung over the edge of the platter. The remaining bones and blubbery parts were put in Foster’s stockpots with onions, celery, carrots and whatever other fresh vegetable trimmings were around. 

    Vegetable beef soup was on the menu every day to help use up the beef stock the chef constantly boiled. The broth was made into gravy for hot beef open-faced sandwiches, and used in roast beef dinners. 

    Occasionally Foster would make French onion soup with toasty bread and cheese melted like lava on top of the comforting concoction. Chicken necks, giblets, tails, and other trimmings went into the chicken stockpot and ended up as cream of chicken soup, chicken noodle soup, chicken and rice soup or chicken and turkey gravy for hot turkey sandwiches, turkey and dressing and chicken potpie. 

    After the beef was cut, put away and the table cleaned, Foster went home and Junior became the pot washer. The bakery table was scrubbed with Clorox water and the top layer scrubbed off with a Chore Girl copper mesh pad, until it almost made a paste of water and wood. A dough cutter was used to scrape off the paste and water into a trash bucket so the table would not be contaminated; it was air dried and not wiped down with a possibly tainted cloth.  

    At closing time, the butcher-block table had to be done the same way. The cut marks from the knives were scraped off so the bacteria would not have a place to grow and the chlorine in the Clorox killed any bacteria on the table and sanitized the scraper. 

    On the weekdays when there were no meat deliveries, they baked pies. Junior rolled out pie crusts as quickly as possible, but Foster would get disgusted and roll out a crust or two himself in quick time just to show his rookie how it was done. On Sundays, Foster went home right after lunch. He worked a short day on Monday, too.  

    Leroy would not allow Junior to operate the big dishwasher; it was an automatic conveyor fed dish-washing machine which used 210-degree water to rinse. Leroy warned Junior that he might get his shirt tail caught in it and be pulled in, but he did wash glasses on the double sided glass washer with the center turned one way and the outside turned the other. An unfortunate lesson was learned about what happens if a finger nail gets caught by the whirling brushes, ripping the nail right off.  

    Added to the staff was a rotund, wizened cook that would sit on a 50-pound lard can next to the butcher block and smoke. If Junior had all the pots washed, the cook would let him make food orders. The growing boy had to be careful over the grill so he wouldn’t burn his belly because he was not yet quite tall enough to reach all the way across it. 

    The kitchen equipment included a large automatic potato peeler that held about 20 pounds of potatoes. It spun around and grated the skin off with friction, then the “eyes” needed to be cut out of the potatoes. Carrots and turnips could be peeled in it, too, but Foster did not like that new fangled contraption and preferred it be done the old-fashioned way. 

    

    The prep staff tended to leave the potatoes in the peeler for an extra amount of time so they did not have to “eye” them. The potatoes would come out almost perfectly round with about half their original weight when they were left in the peeler too long.  

    Junior would work up five or six, 5-gallon buckets of raw French fries every afternoon. The peeled and cut fresh French fries were soaked in water with a little “Tater White” (a chemical additive to keep potatoes from turning brown - now banned). Then, the five gallon buckets were put in the walk-in for the cooks to use on the night shift.  A bucket sat on the floor by the fryer that had a big strainer on top to drain the potatoes. If they were not drained before they were put in the fryer, the water would cause a fuss making the hot oil foam and pop.

  
    At first, Junior had a little trouble remembering all the orders without tickets and the cook would sometimes have to bail him out. He was ribbed about potentially burning his belly and when he did not dry the potatoes enough before letting them down into the grease, the grease would fly into his face like fireworks on the Fourth of July. 

    The cooks prepared and put the entrées and garnish on the plate, and then the waitress would get her own sides from the steam table. Fresh yeast rolls waited on a rack over the hotline to proof. Junior learned to estimate from the number of previous orders when another pan needed to go up to proof and to put the proofed ones in to cook, and to take them out and not burn them. A waitress would sometimes remind the cook when the rolls were getting low; everyone fussed if the endless, yeasty rolls ran out. 

    The Plaza’s competition was the Coronado Café across 10th Street on the Southeast corner of the intersection of Pennsylvania Avenue and 10th. It was owned and operated by a Mediterranean man who everyone called “the Greek.”  

 

 

    One-half block south of the Coronado was the Wagon Wheel Café. The Wagon Wheel was a lot smaller than the Plaza and the Coronado. It was run at that time by an energetic, saucy woman who looked a bit like country singer Patsy Cline. Lola Mae always wore a white starched hat held on with bobby pins and she was quick with a hearty greeting when a customer entered the door situated between two wagon  wheel windows.  

    The Alamogordo Hotel at 9th Street and New York Avenue also had a coffee shop.  In addition, there were three drug store soda fountains: Felix F. Loggains’ Corner Drug, on the southwest corner of 10th Street and New York Avenue; Walter Lafferty’s Alamo Drug, on the northwest corner of 10th and New York; and Johnny Rolland’s Rexall Drug a few doors south of the Corner Drug on New York Avenue. 
    All three had good soda fountains, sold sandwiches, and light faire in addition to sodas and ice cream items. However, nobody else had an executive chef like Foster Exline.

             

    Eber McKinley opened the Desert Aire in 1957 and leased the restaurant to Ramona and Bill Duncan. Ramona was one of Leroy’s former waitresses. Denny O’Hara opened the new Rocket dining room about the same time. A small café at Seventh and Pennsylvania later became Margo’s. There was the Mountain View Cafe just north of Indian Wells on the west side of Pennsylvania. (It stayed open all night and had a good pinball machine).

    Leroy said that when a new restaurant opens it won’t take all your business, it will take some of everybody's business. He said when new cafes opened, you had to do a better job than they do to compete. That’s why competition makes everybody better, or you don’t stay in business.

    In the 50’s came the Hi-D-Ho Drive-In on south Pennsylvania Avenue and the Red Rooster at 1500 North Pennsylvania, right across the street from the north end of the Alamo Courts that Leroy would eventually own.

jrhightower50@yahoo.com