An Angel Named Nellie

An Angel Named Nellie,

The Joe Delgado Story

By Jeff Clark

            Everyone knew the Mount Marion Mine was over 400 feet deep. Miners brought tons of coal out of that forbidding shaft over many decades. By 1935 it had been abandoned. The tipple, the machines and most nearby buildings had been removed. What remained was a big open hole in the ground.

        Strawn was suffering through the Great Depression. Margarita Delgado was a section leader for the Texas & Pacific Railroad, lifting his hand-powered push cart on and off the rails with his six-man Mexican crew, just west of the Bankhead Hotel each day. Those men traveled the rails, making repairs, replacing cross ties. Mexicans were tolerated, but not equal in Strawn back then.

        Wife Carmilla Delgado was an orphan, might’ve had Indian blood. She and Margarita had nine daughters and five sons. Carmilla rose before the rest of her family and was often the last to go to sleep. Her kids showed up to school in clean clothes every day, formal bleached white shirts starched and pressed. “You could eat off her floors, they were so clean,” a neighbor remembered.

        The Delgados lived off what is now Mesquite Street in a two room shack. Their cellar and a renovated chicken coop added to meager living space. “We were dirt poor,” Phillip Delgado shared. But they were never hungry, his sister told me. They grew beans, potatoes and many other vegetables. They had eggs and milk. The Mount Marion Mine sat 200 yards from the Delgado home.

        Strawn Merchandise supplied many residents’ needs. They offered “cradle to grave” service – food, clothing, tools and when the time came, a funeral parlor out back. Once a week, trash and discards were hauled from the Merchandise to the Mount Marion Mine. Backed up, and dumped down the hole.

        I should add that many of the families in that southwestern part of town were immigrants – Mexican mostly, one black family. When the Merchandise truck would finish dumping its garbage into the mine’s hole, kids would search the ground around the opening for wood, food, for something they might use to make life better. One boy found a wrist watch, a pair of nylon stockings.

        Brothers Frank and Joe Delgado walked toward the Mount Marion Mine that Saturday. Frank was a big, outgoing 12-year-old boy. Joe was 14, though not nearly as tall. This day they were hunting wood, fuel for heat and cooking. The Merchandise had built a three wire fence around the hole. Corrugated tin on the ground covered gullies where erosion had caved off the sides.

        The brothers looked down the black hole. It was dark. Bottomless, in their imaginations. Before they knew what was happening, the piece of tin little Joe was standing on gave way, arms flailing, screaming in terror, he vanished into the yawning earth-hungry abyss.

        His brother Frank too quickly heard stone cold silence. The Mount Marion Mine would become his older brother’s tomb, unless someone saved him.

        No one was around. Frank took off running to get his mom. He got halfway home, got scared about what his daddy would do when he found out. Frank turned around and ran back to the mine. Then he ran back toward the house. Then back toward the mine.

        Finally, Frank made it home, telling his mother Carmilla. She flew to the cellar, grabbed a coil of bull rope, then the pair rushed back to the mine. By this time, a large crowd had gathered. No one could see Joe in the dark hole below.

Joe could be 20 feet down. He could have fallen 400 feet to the floor of the mine. Folks knew that black damp gases waited to snuff life from the unwary in the bottom of these old coal mines. No one volunteered to climb down after the little Mexican boy.

        Joe’s 15-year-old sister Nellie showed up. Looking around at the crowd, she sensed all was lost. Nellie looped the bull rope around her, then was lowered into the forlorn black dark mine shaft. Reaching the end of the 40 foot rope, she still hadn’t seen Joe in the darkness. The men pulled her back to the surface.

        Robb Hicks ran home, the only black man in town, retrieving a longer rope and a horse. He returned to the mine. Nellie again tied the rope around her and was lowered, this time finding Joe at 60 feet, his body resting precariously on trash atop the roof of an elevator “cage”. The cage was suspended by one rusting cable, swaying under Nellie’s weight. If the cage fell, Nellie and Joe would never be seen again.

        The crowd grew silent. They couldn’t see Joe. They couldn’t see Nellie.

After many painful minutes she cried out, “I found him! He’s alive!” Nellie slipped the rope around her silent brother. He could be dying, she knew hurrying, the only light on his dirty face coming from the opening far above.

        Hicks, Joe Cole, Joe Poydock and maybe others pulled the rope holding Joe slowly upward to safety. Moments later Nellie joined her brother at the surface. He lay as if dead, unconscious from the impact.

        An ambulance rushed Joe to the Strawn Hospital. Dr. Pedigo treated the boy, a cut on his right cheek, a broken arm. He lay unconscious for 48 hours.

        When father Margarita Delgado returned to town from work, he saw a huge crowd gathered around his house, many white faces among the group. Times were different for Mexican families back then. Margarita was a Mexican national, subject to deportation or skip-due-process legal judgment. He waited in some bushes until he could figure out what had happened.

        I talked to Joe Delgado Tuesday. He’ll be 90 in August. “The Good Lord took care of me that day,” he told me in his home, a different address than his parents but still mere blocks from the Mount Marion Mine. A lady from Strawn Merchandise is said to have sent Joe’s story off to “Ripley’s Believe It or Not” back then. The Strawn newspaper ran a one paragraph article, not mentioning Nellie or Robb Hicks.

        Joe returned to school the day he came to. He worked every Saturday to fully repay his hospital bill. Joe ended up graduating Strawn High School, serving his country during WWII and becoming a skilled furniture maker and welder.

        Nellie Delgado was not celebrated for her bravery that day, or ever, far as I know. Had she been Anglo, perhaps it might’ve been different. She graduated Strawn High School in 1939. Her family couldn’t afford to send her to college. She married a soldier, Mr. Purcell, had a baby and moved to El Paso, where she waited tables. They divorced. She remarried another soldier, Jack L. McGough, had two more children and lived out her quiet life knowing her little brother Joe was safe.

        Joe Delgado was born in 1921. His mind is sharp. His life has been full. Nellie died in 1986. She’s buried with husband Jack in the east end of Mount Marion Cemetery, her six-month-old son Charles Purcell interred beside her. Her parents are buried in this cemetery also, noble Americans who served the town of Strawn, and through their children, served their country.

        Mount Marion was named long ago for another sweet girl, this one taken from her parents by the croup at too young an age. Her parents never recovered from her loss. Did little Marion intercede for Joe Delgado that day in the mine that bears her name? His survival is unquestionably a miracle. His sister Nellie unquestionably his angel.

        Many heroic acts and historic episodes are recorded around this part of Texas. Nellie Veda Delgado McGough’s unsung saving act needs to be added to that proud parade of granite. Her brother is safe. Her story is told. The angel Nellie Delgado lives in heaven.

       

Special thanks to Butter Bridier, Paul Delgado, Phillip Delgado and the Delgado Family.