The Boy Who Lived in a Box

In the 1940s and 50s when I was growing up in southwestern Oklahoma, it was a long standing custom for families from Mexico to come up for the wheat harvest in May and June, stay to hoe weeds out of the maturing cotton in July and August, and pick the cotton in September.

I suppose they were the earliest forerunners of the illegal immigrants who are driving all the politicos nuts these days. Most of them, however, took their wheat and cotton money and went home to Mexico to live like kings from October to April. 

In about December of 1950, some of the merchants around town began to notice something odd. It wasn't anything they could put their finger on - just little things that were different. Some of them began to investigate surreptitiously, and they discovered that when one family went back to Mexico one of the sons stayed behind - a boy of about ten, named Jose.

He was living in the big wooden box that housed the grocery store's Dempsey Dumpster, living off of the fruits and vegetables that were not fresh enough to sell and got tossed in the dumpster.

Well, a group of these merchants, mostly WWII vets, who weren't averse to using "spic" or any other racial slur freely, decided they admired the boy's "pluck," so they set him up in a little two-room house no one wanted, and somehow got him enrolled in school. His name was changed to Joe, and he was fluent in English by the end of the school year.

After school, Joe worked bagging groceries in the same grocery store where he had cadged food from the trash. Joe kept on going to school, played football for three years in high school, and graduated with decent grades. He went to the little junior college in town, and became an insurance salesman.

I honestly don't know if he ever did the paperwork to become "legal," but he stayed in that town as one of its best-liked citizens for many years. The Christmas spirit can take many forms, I suppose.