Literary El Paso

Robert Seltzer

113 Robert Seltzer Award-winning journalist Robert Seltzer was raised in El Paso. He has worked for the El Paso Times as a sports writer, feature writer, metro columnist, and writing coach. Seltzer has also worked at the Houston Chronicle, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, and the Philadelphia Inquirer.He has won state and national awards for his news and sports coverage,including two Texas Headliner awards and four Associated Press Managing Editors Association awards from three states: Pennsylvania,Texas, and New Mexico. In addition, Seltzer has won a national APME Journalism Excellence Award and The Nat Fleischer Award for excellence in boxing journalism. Currently, he works for the San Antonio Express-News and since 2004 has been a member of the editorial board.The following selection is from his manuscript in progress on the life of his father, Amado Muro. My Father, Amado Muro The teenager walked up the hill, and when he reached the crest,he was on top of the world,as close to eternity as he would ever get. It was breathtaking. And there, from the hilltop, he took it all in, the sky above, the lake below—a broad band of silver liquid, shimmering in the early morning sunlight. He had stood on this spot a hundred times before, and he would stand on this spot a hundred times after, but none of those experiences could rival this one moment, this one sliver of time frozen in his memory—and in his heart. And, each time he talked about that morning, he described it the same way—the morning he witnessed something beautiful, something sublime, something eternal. That teenager was my father, and the lake was Lake Erie. It was part of his city, part of his life. My father loved Cleveland. I could tell. He described it as though it were his Oz—magical but real. My father called himself “the old man,” a term he intended to be both endearing and self-deprecating. But there was some truth in it. He lived in 114 the past, reveled in its musty odor, its tenacious grip, for it refused to let go of him—and, yes, he refused to let go of it. When I was six years old, the old man started giving me impromptu quizzes on mythology and ancient civilizations every day. Who was Hector? Who was Hannibal? What was the Roman name for Zeus? How many labors did Hercules perform? Where did Achilles get pierced with an arrow? But it was the Cleveland stories I loved the most, the stories from his childhood. They were the real myths, the tales freighted with humor and drama and joy. And no matter which story he related, the best character was always the town itself—big and raw and majestic, the backdrop for all his youthful adventures. The family lived in a Tudor-style house in Shaker Heights, but his real neighborhood was the town itself, all of it, from one end to the other. Cleveland was not the center of his universe; Cleveland was his universe. He never expressed this thought, not directly, but he never had to. When he talked about his hometown, he was so passionate that I fantasized about my own life as a parent . Would El Paso—not Bakersfield—become my Cleveland when I became a father? Would I regale my children with stories from my youth? I hoped so. Before the old man became the old man, he loved to wander the streets of Cleveland, sometimes by foot, sometimes by streetcar. He saw wondrous things, and he saw horrible things.The most horrible came during the Great Depression, when mob figures were the most successful entrepreneurs in town. My father was a teenager. He stepped off the streetcar one afternoon, ready to roam the downtown he loved so much.Two men approached each other on a street corner; both wore black, double-breasted suits, one of them with a colorful handkerchief blossoming from his coat pocket. Mr. Handkerchief stuck his arm out, as if about to shake hands with the other man, but it was not a hand he was extending. It was a gun, and Mr. Handkerchief started firing.The other man collapsed to his knees, as if genuflecting; then his upper body crashed onto the sidewalk, his head twisting as it hit the concrete. Mr. Handkerchief walked away, briskly but casually. My father saw the murder, and he vomited, and years later, when he recounted the story, you...