Amazing.
Some very nice ladies at the club have taken notice and honored him recently for his dedication and long service. Members of the El Paso Country Club Tuesday Ladies Group showered him with gifts, money, a luncheon and a golf tournament, which they titled “A Salute to Cuco Tournament.”
Cuco was full of gratitude. “People at this club have always been nice to me,” he said, “and especially these ladies.”
WELL, NOT quite always. Born during the depression in Smelter Town in 1931, Cuco and some of his little friends would sneak onto the country club grounds at night while growing up looking for lost balls.
“Those were hard times,” he says. “Balls were worth something and we could sell them. But there was a big guard or watchman or whatever he was who would shoo us away. If he caught us, he would call the police. He caught me once and I was taken to jail. But I was in jail for just a short time and when I got out I went back to looking for balls.”
SOON, CUCO learned that he could make “real money” working as a caddy. He packed his first bag in 1942. “The bags weren’t as big as they are now and didn’t weigh much,” he recalls. “They were small and round and the clubs weren’t very heavy, either. They all had wooden shafts.”
What was “real money” then? A quarter. “That’s how much we got for a round of caddying,” he says. “And sometimes we would be tipped a few pennies.”
Cuco could wind up with as much as 60 cents a day by caddying in the morning and again in the afternoon.
And he could enhance his income even more by looking for lost balls, now legally. World War II was on and there was a shortage of rubber so a golf ball in top condition could bring in the “astronomical” sum of as much as a dollar.
EVENTUALLY, Cuco took up the game himself. And he did it with a passion. He would hit balls down by the Rio Grande River for hours and got so good he carried a single-digit handicap.
But he never gave up his caddying. He has toted bags for some of El Paso’s most influential people and some of the world’s greatest golfers.
And with the help of Bill Eschenbrenner, the club’s golf pro at the time, he was made caddy master in 1976 and was responsible at one time for as many as 30 to 40 caddies.
NANCY AND VAL Brown, sisters-in-law who married brothers named Brown, led the festivities honoring Cuco. Here’s what they said at the luncheon:
“Today we celebrate an outstanding achievement for a man who has been a wonderful friend to us all. Although you (Cuco) have not been a salaried employee at El Paso Country Club for all these years, considering you were only 11 when you started working here, the fact remains that you have been a mainstay at this club for an incredible 70 years.”
Now 81, married and living in the Ascarate Park area, Cuco shows up faithfully to take care of what he calls his members. “It’s the only job I’ve known,” he says, “and I’ll just keep on doing it as long I can.”