Of nostalgia, Dan Clouse writes in the introduction of Laredo Stories, A Boyhood on the Río Grande, “Nostalgia always looks back at something lost. What my imagined Laredo readers and I look back on is not just our long-gone youth, but to a Laredo that has vanished. What we grew up loving, the small town mileu and the easy going back and forth between Laredo and Nuevo Laredo, disappeared beneath the grinding millstones of drug trafficking, NAFTA, and uncontrolled immigration.”
He was born in Laredo on September 6, 1949, the son of Katherine and Lester Clouse.
Clouse characterizes himself after graduation from Nixon High School in 1967 as “a poorly prepared college student” at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. “If I couldn’t talk about James Joyce, Sartre, and Brecht the way other boys could, I could talk about Laredo,” regaling them and mesmerizing them, he said, with stories “which they believed were exotic tales from a distant land.”
Many and most of the stories in this volume were published in LareDOS [Redux] online from 2017 to 2022.
Page 4 of the collection, “Incident of the Cows in the Nighttime,” is a favorite of mine and likely that, too, of readers of LareDOS when it appeared online March 29, 2017.
Cows that escaped from a dairy farm near Three Points moved north to feast on the verdant lawns of neighborhoods, including the Clouse home on Garfield Street. His narrative captures the surreal image of four neighborhood patriarchs in their pajamas, one wearing a cowboy hat, moving the cattle on down the street, three of them “jumping around in the bright moonlight like lunatics.” He noted the gentleman in the cowboy hat, Scotty Pegues, a ranch manager, knew to stare down the cows to get them off his lawn.
While some of Clouse’s stories are carried on mirth and wry humor, to wit, “View of Bathsheba on Garfield Street” and “Danger at the Parsonage,” others, including those in the chapter called “In Memoriam” are tender, elegiac despedidas to his lifelong friends Chiqui Torres, Dick Ellis, Fred Dickey, and Johnny (”Espejo”) Snyder, as well as those written about his father, Lester Clouse, and science and physics teacher Humberto Segovia, who taught at Lamar Junior High and Nixon High School.
Ellis and Snyder were Clouse’s Yankee teammates in the then-newly formed American Little League — Clouse at first base, Ellis at third, and Snyder, an All Star pitcher and the prolific homerun hitter who took the Yankees to the League championship in 1960.
Clouse’s homage to Snyder is particularly poignant, and so are the photographs of a beautiful golden-haired boy poised to reap the incredible potential of his brilliant intellect.
It is here that Clouse does what he does so well as a writer. He circles back to the underlying theme of this collection of stories: that Laredo of the 50s and 60s with downtown as the heart of the City was in its glory days. He calls our nostalgia for that Laredo, its downtown, now a boarded-up ruin in decline, “the classic re-run we call Laredo.”
He writes:
“Remember to enjoy today’s performance as we look back smiling; no matter how many cries of ‘Bravo!’ we hear in the theater of our minds, the show will only return for encores for as long as we have memory left to conjure up 14-year-old Johnny Snyder and the Laredo of old.
“We’ve missed you both for a long time, beloved friend and homeland.
“Welcome back to the world we carry around in our heads, you’re looking great.”
“Dan and I grew up in Laredo during the 60s in the Heights, in the Barrio El Ghost Town. Dan was the one with the car, so we all just jumped in and rode along for the story.
“Firing bottle rockets, or tooling down Convent (oh, the irony) Avenue toward the International Bridge in his 40’s Plymouth ‘Bomba,’ Dan with his head out the window screeching like an eagle, we were on our way to an adventure in Nuevo Laredo, bar hopping from the Cadillac Bar, to the Latino Bar, and yes, on rare occasions to Boys Town (aka La Zona), for the bars, of course.
“All the while Dan was creating his Laredo Stories like so much dust roiling up behind his car as he drove it through the unpaved streets of our old Laredo neighborhoods. I believe Dan loved the Laredo that he couldn't wait to leave. Thanks for remembering Laredo, Dan.”
-Rolando L. García, Architect Emeritus FAIA
NHS, Class of 1967
Some of the photographs in Laredo Stories transport the reader spot-on back to those growing up days that Clouse characterizes as from “6 to 16” — school photos, photos of Boy Scout Troop 131, photos of Coach Fidel Hale’s Yankees team, and on page 90, the photo of Lamar Junior High School students in mock United Nations Day mode on October 20, 1962, featuring Dan Clouse as Fidel Castro, Johnny Snyder as Che Guevara, and Roger Nichols as Raul Castro with glued-on beards, military fatigues, boots, and hats. They have been chewing cigars and are bordered by protesters, including classmates Spencer Oldham and Patricia Belter.
Clouse asks, “Can you imagine a schoolteacher nowadays giving cigars to seventh and eighth grade students? Many things have changed, and not just the faces that surprise us in the mirror.”
He recalls that Nichols reacted physically to the gooey end of the cigar, but that he and Snyder did not suffer that dilemma. “We already had years of experience smoking cigars in the backyard and in the vacant lot down the street at the corner of Martin and Garfield.”
The photo didn’t run in The Laredo Times the next day, but it did two days later when the Cuban Missile Crisis became the news that terrified us all. The Associated Press picked up the photo, and it appeared on the front pages of newspapers across the state.
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•••
At mid-book, Clouse’s writing turns to a chapter called “Some Episodes in Laredo’s History,” writings that evince his love of language, well-researched stories, and his honed skills for narratives that effortlessly draw readers into his stories.
Among these are the chronicles of the almost arrest in Laredo of 1920’s heavyweight champion Jack Johnson; Frida Kahlo’s day in Laredo in August 1932 in a rush to the bedside of her dying mother in Mexico City, a trip sidelined momentarily by the flooding of the Río Grande; and the March 1966 trial of Dr. Timothy Leary for possession of marijuana.
The final episode in this chapter reveals the travails of Mexican artist José Clemente Orozco, who left Mexico City and crossed the international bridge in Laredo in 1917 for a new life in San Francisco, bringing with him a hundred pieces of his art.
U.S. Customs detained the artist with Carranzista leanings and examined his artwork to determine if the works were immoral in substance. Sixty pieces so deemed were smashed to pieces.
•••
“Dan’s stories transport readers to a magical time in our beloved hometown, putting us beside him on the sandlot baseball field; peyote growers, harvesters, and vendors; and familiar hangouts.
“He names names, and we wish we had been among them. Lyrical writing and evocative memories.”
-Wanda Garner Cash; NHS Class of 1967;
Author: Pancho Villa’s Saddle at the Cadillac Bar;
Journalist; Instructor and Associate Director,
UT-Austin School of Journalism, retired.
•••
The chapter called “The Laredo Peyote Chronicles” documents the history of the cactus and peyote trade in Laredo. Clouse writes of the adventurous plantswoman Anna B. Nickels, owner of the Arcadia Gardens at 918 Matamoros (at San Agustin Ave.) who between 1885 and 1905 discovered new species of cacti in Mexico and South Texas, some that would be named after her.
Clouse calls her “a horticultural rock star” who at 61 supervised the loading of a box car with 300 species of plants bound for the 1893 Columbian World Exposition in Chicago via the IGNC Railway. The award-winning exhibit brought Nickels much deserved acclaim and national attention to Laredo that drew tourists, succulent and cactus collectors, and horticulturalists. Scientists and botanists were regular visitors at the Arcadia Gardens that housed a botanical ecosystem of 10,000 species of plants that included fruit trees, shade trees, caladiums, honeysuckle, and decorative plants.
Nickels grew peyote as a rooted plant for collectors, but now and again sold individual buttons for five-cents to locals who used it in a water solution for headaches or as a pulp applied to sores.
Clouse’s assiduous research on Nickels brings to life an accomplished Laredo woman for whom no one alive today has recall, lore, or data — a woman unfettered by age or gender to walk with a convoy of sluggish burros and ayudantes across the wilds of the Mexican deserts and mountains to harvest species of cactus and agaves yet unknown, yet to be named.
He writes, too, of the kind and trusted Amada Cardenas, a native of Los Ojuelos, who for decades supplied members of the Native American Church with her annual harvest of peyote buds carefully cut so that all but the buttontop was left in the caliche of the Bordas Escarpment to ensure that the plant would continue to grow.
He tells the story of Laredo businessmen Leopoldo Villegas and Ferdinand Wormser who were in possession of barrels of peyote buds from Los Ojuelos for future sales as “Japanese Buttons.” The two were in the sights of William E. “Pussyfoot” Johnson, a Prohibitionist and an agent for the Bureau of Indian Affairs who sought to halt the sale of peyote to Native Americans. In 1909, he threatened the two Laredoans with imprisonment, and with their promise never ever to sell peyote again, he agreed to pay them $443 for their stock of buttons, which he incinerated.
Clouse includes notes of a Laredo nursery on the San Antonio Highway called Moore’s Orchids. Its proprietor, Elsie S. Moore, shipped a box of 100 peyote buttons to Miami labeled “Orchid Plants – Perishable.” Clouse includes in this story the FDA’s wrangle with Moore for mislabeling her boxes, not providing the correct name and the quantity of the substance in the box, and omitting “Warning-may be habit forming.” Moore moved her business to Florida in the mid-1960s, far from the peyote gardens of Webb, Jim Hogg, and Starr counties
•••
There is more to read, but I pump the brakes here, dear reader, not because my unwavering enthusiasm for Dan Clouse’s writing wanes, but because I’m understanding I have pushed this story to more than 1,500 words of praise that modest and unassuming Dan might find embarrassing. And I wearied of calling my friend “Clouse” throughout this story and not Dan.
Dan and I were not childhood friends, but we knew each other because our fathers and other World War II veterans undertook the transformation of a few blocks of dirt and monte in southeast Laredo into the original American Little League baseball park. Go, Yankees!
Receiving Dan’s stories one at a time over the years for publication in LareDOS was a literary experience that engendered one of the most valuable friendships I am fortunate to claim. To read the stories all at once again in this volume is yet another gift.
•••
Dan Clouse, who lives in Lakebay, Washington — about 2,200 miles from Laredo — speaks impeccably correct Spanish. He and his wife Adèle Lund Clouse are the parents of Katherine E. Clouse and twins, Adele M. Pozutto and George Clouse, and the grandparents of Jack, Charlie, and Arthur (Arturito).
Dan earned a Bachelor of Arts with Distinction in Spanish at Dartmouth College in 1971. He completed a Masters in Spanish Literature at the University of Texas-Austin in 1975; major field, Spanish Literature; thesis “The Garcineid: Latin text and English translation;” minor field: Latin.
He completed doctoral studies (all but dissertation) at UT-Austin in 1977 with a major field in Spanish literature, 16th century poetry and prose; Renaissance poet Cristóbal de Castillejo. His minor was Applied Linguistics, French Literature.
While at Dartmouth, Dan was an apprentice teacher, and later a teaching assistant at Johns Hopkins University and the University of Texas. He has taught Spanish at the University of Puget Sound, University of Washington, and Seattle Pacific University.
Hank Sames to Dan Clouse
February, 9, 2026
Dan,
This is Hank Sames. I just finished your book, Laredo Stories, and it brought back so many memories. While reading it, I felt like I was right there experiencing it with you. The Laredo that we grew up in, the Laredo that no longer exists, is memorialized in the pages of Laredo Stories.
I am a few years younger than you, born in 1952, but my boyhood experience was very similar to yours. I went to United Day School and had my mouth washed out with soap by Dalziel Cobb. Me and my buddies, Mike Jackson, Edmund Palacios, Richard "Sparky" Miller, and Carlos Castillon were part of the Lane Street gang. There were so many kids up and down the street, and we had the best time. We were unsupervised by our parents and were out on our bikes all day, exploring Chacon creek and more. We rode the bus to the movies downtown and then walked over to JC Twiss to peruse the Army surplus merchandise until Mr. Twiss ordered us out.
In 5th Grade, I transferred to Ryan Elementary so I could be with my friends. Mike and I took guitar lessons that year with Josette Palacios, and that started a lifelong love of music. We went to Lamar and started a band called the “8 Balls.” We played at Noon Dancing and many junior high school parties. I was studious through Lamar and served as Student Council president in 9th grade. When I went to Nixon, I decided that school was not cool, and I languished, skipping school and smoking pot. We hung out in Nuevo Laredo on weekends, drinking bolas at Munich’s and stuffing ourselves with flautas at La Unica, across from the train station. A plate of flautas was one dollar! My friends and I did well enough to get into UT, but we were not prepared for college. The only reason I did not flunk out was my 18 hours of credit in Spanish. It wasn't until my junior year that I straightened out and started making grades, graduating in 1975 with a BBA in Finance.
I came back to Laredo to work in the car business, got married and had kids here. Laredo grew up since then and, it is not the town of our youth. We still have our memories of that special time, and I still love Laredo, warts and all.
Mike Jackson is still a professional musician in Austin. Mike, Sparky, and I formed a band a few years ago called “Gringo Barrio” as a tribute to our hometown. We wrote enough songs for two albums and played live a few times in Laredo and Austin. It was a labor of love. You can find a few examples on Youtube if you search Gringo Barrio.
Gringo Barrio
Well I'm right at home, in my Gringo Barrio
And there is no place that I would rather be
The living is good, right here in my barrio
This barrio will always be home to me
Down on the border, in old Laredo
Mariachi music and gritos fill the air
The smell of cabrito, drifts in the breeze
A senorita's smile, as pretty as you please
Now you know this place, it's not for everyone
If you don't like the culture, it might not be that fun
But as for me, it's downright charming
So I hung my hat, and here I'll stay till my time is done
St Augustine plaza, and old La Posada
And all the friendly faces at the Cadillac Bar
Time for a bootshine, on the sidewalks of Guerrero
A handful of pesos, will take you real far
The sun burns hot, in my gringo barrio
The few streets with asphalt will burn your feet
100 degrees, sitting here in the shade
Pop a cool one, it sure goes down real sweet
Not everyone, is from the same fabric
And you may not culturally agree
But as for me, all the botas and huaraches
There's no place that I would rather be
There's no place that I would rather be.
Dan, you cast a beautiful light on our hometown Laredo. Lots of people say that their town is different. I don't think that any town was as different as Laredo back in the day. We hit a home run being born here.
Regards,
Hank
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