Miscellany

On March 25, 1974, Steve and a friend named Ronnie Inascore watched a man rob someone on the street in Austin, and followed him. They flagged down Officer Wolsch, directed him to 703 East Sixth Street, gave him a description of the man, and warned him the subject was armed with a knife. The offender was identified, arrested and charged, and the money was recovered and returned to the victim.

A week later the Chief of Police wrote to him about it.

Dear Mr. Walker:

… As the results of your interest and action the offender was identified, arrested and charged and the money that he had taken was recovered and returned to the victim.

You are to be commended for your cooperation and assistance and you are being awarded a Certificate of Appreciation for your actions.

Sincerely,
R. A. Miles, Chief of Police

Two things make the letter worth keeping. It is addressed to Mr. John Walker, which was his legal first name and one most people never knew. And years later, when he handed the letter to a friend named Barry, he wrote across the bottom of it in his own hand:

“Barry, just a little something to let the man know I’ve changed my wicked ways.”

Steve kept a mule ranch at Zaragoza, in Nuevo León, and ran as many as a hundred head. In the 1980s that business led somewhere unlikely. He told The Brownsville Herald that the mule connection put him in the position of supplying mules to the United States government for the Afghan fighters resisting the Soviets, sourcing the animals out of Zacatecas and selling them to purchasing agents in Piedras Negras.

His reasoning was pure Steve, and entirely practical: Zacatecas mules were mountain-hardened, born and worked at altitude on broken ground, unlike animals out of Colorado or Tennessee. If you were sending mules to the Hindu Kush, you wanted mules that already knew that kind of country.

He made the case in public, too. In November 2001, two months after the September 11 attacks, he wrote to The Brownsville Herald arguing that mules would matter again in Afghanistan, and named the two Texas congressmen he credited with the 1980s effort: Jim Wright of Fort Worth and Charles Wilson of Lufkin. The letter closes: “To beat the Taliban, it will take other Afghans, mounted to ride them down.” You can read it on the press page.

The detail of his own role comes from a single newspaper interview, and the family has not independently confirmed it. It is recorded here as he told it.

In the summer of 1980 the historian Malcolm D. McLean wrote Steve a two-page letter. He had to send it care of Steve’s father, because Steve had written to him without including a return address on the letter or the envelope, and the postmark only said Waco.

The letter is a small window onto a stretch of his life that is otherwise thinly documented. He was farming and ranching in Mexico, and McLean congratulated him on it while adding a word of caution: take on a Mexican partner, so that if the government ever expropriated the property, he would lose too, and the risk to Steve’s investment of time, money and labor would be greatly reduced.

He was also lobbying, at thirty-one years old, to change United States policy on Mexican labor. McLean told him that any such change would have to come at the national level and pointed him to Congressman Jim Wright of Fort Worth, whose views, he said, were very similar to Steve’s.

And he was giving talks. McLean closed with a note about one of them:

In your talk on “The Altiplano, Key to the Future of Texas,” be sure to work in a sentence about General Ignacio Zaragoza, who was born in Goliad, Texas, educated in Tamaulipas and Nuevo León, and won the Battle of Puebla for the Mexicans against the French on the Cinco de Mayo. There are literally thousands of schools, plazas, and streets in Mexico, and a number in Texas, named for him. Mention of his name always gets an enthusiastic response.