Ybor City Chronicles, A Memoir.

Gainesville: University Press of Florida, (1994). Signed by the Author. Octavo, navy blue cloth (hardcover), gilt letters, xii + 301 pp. Bookplate “Selby Scholar Symposium”; otherwise, Fine in a Fine dust jacket. From dust jacket: With his gift for storytelling, Ferdie Pacheco stirs a gust of cigar smoke into the hot steam of cafe con leche and creates the magic of this lighthearted memoir. His stage is Ybor City, the colorful immigrant community on the edge of Tampa, and the time is 1935 - 45, the decade when Pacheco grew up and the community he loves outgrew its ethnic splendor. Pacheco’s respect for words began the day his story starts, when ten-year-old Ferdie climbs into a truck with Sweet Sam to deliver pharmaceuticals for La Economica, the family chemist shop. Along with prescription drugs, homeopathic nerve remedies, and laxatives, Sam totes a book of poetry and a dictionary, and before the day is out he prevails upon Ferdie to look up “procrastinate.” “Succulent” and “delectible” follow. Pacheco write with the sentimentality of a Latin lover and the instincts of a stand-up comic. At the hear of his story is the fabled Columbia Restaurant, where he worked a s a waiter for two summers -- a job with status in Ybor City equal to that of being a New York Yankee ballplayer, he says. Its glamorous doors opened fifteen hours a day to the community’s characters, and they become folk heroes under Pacheco’s affectionate scrutiny: Pepe Lu Babo, the idio savant of newspaper circulation; Chef Pijuan, who asked to have a menu buried with him when he died; Pan con Chinches (”Bread and Bedbugs”), who had once been a lector in a cigar factory; Don Victoriano Manteiga, the resident intellectual who founded La Gaceta, the trilingual newspaper published today by his son Roland; and Dr. Jose Avellanal, who experimented with cryogenics on stray cats and practiced law, plastic surgery, gynecology, the ministry, and higher education, all from his “office” in the hotel El Pasaje. Though Pacheco describes years spanning the Great Depression and World War II, his days then were blissfully contained by his Spanish/Cuban/Italian enclave. After school he visited his abuelita, the grandmother who fixed him cups of thick hot chocolate and reminded him that science was more important than art if he wanted to become a doctor. He went to western movies in splendid air-conditioned theaters on Saturday and, in his teen years, to tea dances at ethnic social clubs on Sunday. On fine days, the yellow trolley -- known as the “jewel of Tampa Electric” for its wicker seats and lacquered wood interior -- took him to picnics at nearby Sulpher Springs. With no excuses for the past, he recalls that his father, J. B., woke each morning to the sight of his wife standing by his bedside with his cup of Cuban coffee in her hand, ready to help him on with his shoes, and that J. B. ended every evening in the cool cellar of the Centro Asturiano club, smoking cigarettes, playing cards, drinking a last cup of expresso. Ybor City Chronicles includes vintage photographs and Pacheco’s own cartoons, sketches, and paintings, many never before published, and an epilogue by Ybor City historian Tony Pizzo, who describes the features that today make Ybor City a National Historical Monument.