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254 Pasquale’s Hot Tamales As told to Amy Evans by Joe St. Columbia My name is Joe St. Columbia. I was born October 30, 1938. It all began with my grandfather, Peter St. Columbia, coming to America in 1892, and leaving my father, who was a newborn baby—leaving his wife and baby in Sicily. He stayed in New Orleans maybe a few months, cutting sugarcane down there to make some money. Daddy said Grandpa earned fifty cents a day cutting sugarcane, and he earned passage on a riverboat coming up the Mississippi River. And he came as far as Helena, Arkansas, and decided to get off the boat. Daddy said Grandpa’s money ran out, and that’s why he chose Helena. He was here five years, and he earned enough money for my grandmother, Maria St. Columbia, to come and bring my father, and they came in 1897. My father was five years old in 1897, and he could not speak the English language very well at all, and the kids would laugh at him and make fun of him when he tried to go to school. So he played a lot of hooky and hung out among business people in the community. As a teenager, growing up in the early years of the 1900s, he learned the ways of the business world—“the school of hard knocks,” as we call it today. In those early days, daddy could speak a Sicilian dialect to some of the Mexicans that came here—there were Mexicans doing farm labor. He learned from them about tamales. My father liked the taste of the tamales. He made friends with them, and they taught him how to make tamales. The Mexicans would get with my family and say, “OK, here’s the way we did it in Mexico.” So as the years went on, my daddy would make tamales at home with his father. And they formulated their way of doing it. Grandpa and Daddy would go to the farms and the sawmill companies along the levees and take sandwiches, salami, tamales, different homemade 255 pasquale’s hot tamales foods—and they would feed the workers out on the farms and at the sawmill so they didn’t have to go to lunch. Daddy and Grandpa would pull up there and they had everything for the people. They would buy from them like they do with my food trailer today. It was a thing they could carry—it was hot, fresh, and tasty. They would just hold it in their hand and eat it and suck on the shucks, and it was real juicy. They didn’t have to stop their work. And the owners of those businesses liked that, because their workers would not have to leave and spend an hour or two eating lunch. A young black couple, Maggie and Eugene Brown, came to my father right before the Depression. My father had built a building downtown, and they wanted to rent a space in it, but they didn’t have any money. They wanted to open a restaurant and sell soul food. So my father formed a business arrangement with these people. He told them, “Well, if you sell my tamales in there, we’ll form a partnership. I’ll show you how to make them, I’ll buy all the equipment, and you make them. And we’ll share the profits of the business.” So they did. They formed a business relation, and the black family did well. In fact, they did so well that they educated their children and sent them to college away from here. They got jobs in Detroit and never came back. So it survived the Depression; it survived the war. World War II came on, and the business continued making money for both my family and their family. My father helped this man build a little cart, and they would put the pots on it, with a little burner underneath. During the war, they would push it down Walnut Street and Elm Street at night, especially on Friday night, Saturday night. And people would buy it right off the street. My father could neither read nor write, but he was very smart when it came to business and it came to people. He was very strong in his Catholic religion and believed that if you go to church on Sunday and see God first, then you can go out and work all day...

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