As one of the state’s pre-eminent journalists, native Laredoan Wanda Garner Cash has held every position on the editorial side of a newspaper – reporter, editor, and publisher. She also taught journalism at the University of Texas-Austin and served as associate director of the University’s School of Journalism.
The author of Pancho Villa’s Saddle at the Cadillac Bar begins the restaurant’s timeline about a quarter century before she first sat atop Pancho Villa’s saddle in grandfather Mayo Bessan’s legendary eatery in Nuevo Laredo.
She recounts that her grandfather Achille Mehault “Mayo” Bessan of New Iberia, Louisiana, traveling on his 1923 honeymoon trip with his bride, Odette Savoie Bessan, left her in the care of a San Antonio cousin, and took the train south to Nuevo Laredo to scout for the location of the Cadillac Bar.
He returned for Odette, and they rented a small apartment next to Sara and Octavio Longoria in Nuevo Laredo. Odette set up the household, and Mayo established the bar on Avenida Guerrero.
“It was Prohibition that brought my grandfather to the border. He was a gambler who used his nest egg to come here,” Garner Cash noted.
The original Cadillac Bar, a cantina with a dirt floor, became Nuevo Laredo’s top-drawer restaurant when the establishment moved on July 4, 1929 to Belden and Ocampo, half a block west of Avenida Guerrero. “Mayo recruited some of his Louisiana friends to staff the kitchen. They thought it was exciting to be on the border,” she recounted, adding that the staff would grow to 40 full- and part-time employees, most of them from Nuevo Laredo.
“Mayo asked my father Porter Garner Jr. to work at the Cadillac in 1947. He was Mayo’s right hand until Mayo retired in 1960 at 75 to enjoy hunting, fishing, and cards,” Garner Cash said.
“The Cadillac Bar had a legion of loyal employees, some who worked there 30 years. Porfirio Robles, a prince of a man, was the mayordomo, the captain. My sister Clay and I knew all the waiters and bartenders. They watched us grow up,” she said, “as my grandfather had watched their children grow up and helped them with school and college expenses.”
The author writes with tenderness of her father, a World War II veteran injured so severely in combat that it was thought his wounds would leave him unable walk again. Walk he did, however, marrying his high school sweetheart, Wanda Mae Bessan, in 1946. His would be the kind, amiable face that welcomed thousands of local and out of town diners to the beloved landmark Mayo Bessan had established two decades earlier. Porter’s ability to remember names and his drive carried the enterprise well into the late 1970s. The Cadillac Bar had survived the ravages of the Flood of 1954 and peso devaluations.
What the enterprise did not survive was the ever-changing taxation policies of the Mexican government.
“The day after Thanksgiving was always the Cadillac’s best day. In the mid-1970s the Mexican government began to assess the Cadillac’s taxes on that day rather than on a yearly average of sales. The increased corruption of the tax structure eventually made it untenable to operate, and my father gave the restaurant to the employees decades later. He signed documents transferring ownership and handed them the keys,” Garner Cash recalled.
She writes tenderly, too, of grandparents Mayo and Odette and her mother who would be called Big Wanda to differentiate daughter from mother.
“Mayo was courtly, formal, and self-disciplined, giving attention to living each day to the fullest, enjoying a meal without rushing off, sitting and savoring it. He paid great attention to how he prepared for the day, what he wore, the cufflinks he chose, that the crease of his trousers aligned with his shoelaces. I may have inherited from him how he prepared for the day,” she said, adding, “I’m not a casual partaker of life. I, too, want to be dressed for the occasion.”
She called Odette “an intuitive cook who had an easy way around the kitchen.” Odette consulted no recipes and never measured ingredients. “She taught me to cook. We were very close. She doted upon us. The South Louisiana traditions of her childhood never left her. She always deferred to Mayo as her protector and provider,” she said.
Garner Cash recalled the friendship between Odette and first neighbor Sara Theroit Longoria, who spoke French. “My grandmother spoke no Spanish, but she did speak French. Mrs. Longoria adopted Odette as her protégé, took her to the grocery store, and made her feel less alone in this new place,” she said.
She described her mother’s part in the workings of the Cadillac as “the interior decorator,” the purveyor of white table linens, drapes, lamps, chairs, and tables. “She also held down the fort in Laredo in the typical role of housewives of the fifties and sixties, raising us while also maintaining a very active civic and social life. Her work at home allowed my father to grow a very successful business,” she said.
Garner Cash reflected on the process of writing Pancho Villa’s Saddle at the Cadillac Bar. “It was rewarding to gather up the memories, photos, and recipes. It brought me to an intimate introspection into feelings, places, family, and my own personal life. It was overwhelming at times,” she said, recalling a childhood memory of being on the streets of downtown Nuevo Laredo with the children of other Nuevo Laredo businesses owners. “It was a remarkable time in our lives when Laredo and Nuevo Laredo were one place on the map, and safe.”
She said that as a child she was oblivious to the Cadillac’s fame. “It was where we celebrated birthdays. It was not a big deal to us, but in the lives of others it was a place where good memories were made. I hoped the book would be a touchstone that would evoke who they were with at the Cadillac and what they were celebrating, what it looked like, how the food tasted, how it smelled, how agreeable the chilled temperature was if they had been shopping in the summer heat that day.”
She said the place that is most evocative of those who made and carried the history of the Cadillac Bar is her home on a hill near Hunt where she lives with her husband Richard Cash. “It is the home of my heart, a place that was purchased by my grandparents in 1949 two months before I was born. This place harkens the sum of the best times of my life. We spent so much time on this hill and on the Guadalupe River below. My house is adjacent to the house my parents built as a summer home and where they lived when they left Laredo in 1979.”
Pancho Villa’s Saddle at the Cadillac Bar is no thin, tame recuerdo. Garner Cash has written with rich, deep detail of Mayo Bessan’s choices for ingredients and how the Cadillac Bar’s signature favorites appeared so effortlessly on the cloth-topped tables of the dining rooms.
There is an intimacy to her writing – that of the grandchild who was part of and witness to the workings of so legendary a restaurant and that of the gifted wordsmith who has deftly crafted a family story inside the history of the frontera, Prohibition, Los Dos Laredos, the devastating Flood of 1954, and international trade.
About Wanda Garner Cash
The daughter of Wanda Mae and Porter Garner Jr., Wanda Jean grew up on Malinche Street in the Montrose neighborhood near Chacon Creek. She is a 1967 graduate of Nixon High School and a graduate of the University of Texas-Austin. She was an academic standout known for her wit, brilliance, and intellect.
A truth-telling journalist for decades, she was much admired and recognized for her courage and ethics.
The former president of the Texas Press Association and Fellow of the F. Griffin Singer Professorship in Journalism at the University of Texas, she was the 2016 recipient of the James Madison Award presented by the Freedom of Information Foundation.
