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8 EI Paso HoOIS B ACK ON THE INTERSTATE, next stop: EI Paso. My mind flashes back to my visit there six months ago. EI Paso is the place where my grandfather grew up, attended high school, became a family man, then left until he returned to retire. He had visited most of the world by then, walked the streets of Paris, Tokyo, Jerusalem, Johannesburg , Saigon, and New York, but he could not shake EI Paso's hold on his soul. EI Paso, he emphasized, was "the only city I ever loved." Maybe I would have loved the EI Paso my grandfather remembered so fondly, that rough-and-tumble frontier town where the Wild West lingered and possibilities road the breeze. But I find it difficult to love the EI Paso of today, where Texas and the Rockies end in barren hills, discount cowboy boot outlets, burrito dens, a monstrous metal smelter, an Army post named Fort Bliss, and a meandering canal of muddy water called the Rio Grande. Just across the river is Juarez, Mexico, teeming with a million people, more than double the number in EI Paso, and hauntingly poor, almost a Third World outpost, the main reason why EI Paso has some of the foulest air of any city in the United States. My first research trip to EI Paso had passed in grueling routine, long days locked in a library, long nights in a town where I seemed to be going weird. Dinner one evening was six greasy pieces of fastfood chicken, accompanied only by beer. Another night, I sat amidst the hooting hordes in a sleazy club where nude dancers were grinding away on the patrons' laps; I saw my image reflected in a smoky mirror , this stranger with a vacant look on his face. 48 EL PASO ROOTS 49 El Paso was part of the reason for my behavior, this town where I knew no one, and so different from Seattle. But the pressures of library work may have been more responsible for the way I was act' ing. I was new to the peculiar tortures of archival research, which, I soon learned, combines tiresome page,turning and nagging eyestrain with a guilty fascination that comes from reading someone's most private thoughts. And no matter how exhausted a researcher is, the archival materials beckon with their siren song suggesting that it may be only a few more pages until paydirt-some wondrous document certain to shed new light on history. I knew little of this when I first took the elevator to the top floor of the mammoth new library at the University of Texas at El Paso. I passed under brass letters which proclaim "5. L. A. Marshall Military History Collection" and entered a room as quiet as a tomb. I scanned shiny wood floors, long library tables, bookcases made of teak, an oriental carpet, four easy chairs covered with leather, plus a few photos and mementos I immediately recognized. Gathered here were the five thousand volumes which my grandfather collected in his life,long love affair with books, one of his traits that I do share. There was much more than just my grandfather's books. Stored out of public view, open only to library personnel, were other mate' rials related to S. L. A. Marshall, all collected in gray cardboard boxes that consume more than seventy feet of shelf space. There were papers (both official and personal), scrapbooks, correspon, dence, photographs, certificates, transcripts, passports, contracts, newspaper clippings, radio and TV commentaries, plus aU the as' sorted flotsam and jetsam of a confirmed pack rat who lived nearly eight decades and threw out almost nothing. Not even his 1927 mem, bership card to the Cloudcroft, New Mexico, golf course ("Highest In The World, 9,000 Feet Above The Sea"). This great mass of material had only been broken down into the most general of categories ("Military Orders," "Financial Records," "Mementos"), so I had to rely on the guide duty of Thomas F. Bur, dett, a retired Army sergeant who serves as the half,time curator of the Marshall collection. Burdett turned out to be a cordial, but pe, rennially harried chap with faintly British airs, the clipped mustache, the tweedy sportcoats, the formal manners, the distinct tendency to hoist his pants so high that his belt seemed to encircle his chest. 50 RECONCILlATION ROAD Burdett still wore his standard-issue service shoes, those black "low quarters" that remind veterans of great...

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