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Tales From The New World

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By PHILIP MORGAN, The Tampa Tribune

Published: December 20, 2007

TAMPA - Jack Espinosa's eyes bug out, his face puckers, his mouth twists manically and he explodes - spewing curses, hopping like a toad and tossing his arms forward, as if scooping sand from between his knees.

He's imitating the father of a pal from his childhood in Ybor City. Espinosa and his buddies used to play tricks on the man so they could hide and watch his tantrums.

It's one of the episodes relived in "Cuban Bread Crumbs" (Xlibris), a memoir by the popular native son. Perhaps best known as the longtime spokesman for the local sheriff's office and father of a namesake circuit judge, the 76-year-old retiree is also a former comic and history teacher and a longtime political insider. His self-published book is expected to be available by mid-January.
Espinosa wrote the book to show what life was like for the children of Spanish, Cuban and Sicilian immigrants who came to Tampa to work in the cigar factories and related trades.

The American-born first generation struggled as it formed the bridge from the Old World to the New World.

"The parents don't have to deal with the New World. They still have the Old World with them," says Espinosa, who was a popular comedian in Florida and Cuban nightclubs during the 1950s and later taught history for seven years at Plant, Jefferson and King high schools.

His mother was Cuban, his father from Spain. Both were cigarmakers, and Espinosa keeps his mother's cigar cutter on his desk. He spent the early morning hours in recent years writing in the office at the back of the Wellswood home he has shared for 53 years with his wife, Cerelina (Sally). He has been an early riser since his childhood years as a milk "hopper": the boy who ran the bottles and empties back and forth from the milk truck.

The 150-page narrative reads like Espinosa's impromptu comedy routines, which made legions of hard-nosed reporters double over in belly laughs during his years with the sheriff's office and as media handler for the county's first administrator, Rudy Spoto.

The characters in his book include his mother, Virginia, who died at age 95, singing "La Cucaracha" as she faded out.

He writes about the time she fell while getting off a bus in Ybor City. She wasn't hurt, but her two bags of groceries went flying. Apparently, the 70-year-old's stunt made quite a funny spectacle, a fact that didn't escape her notice. Once the driver and other passengers helped her up and restored her groceries, she turned to the onlookers struggling not to laugh.

With the grace of Jack Benny, Virginia said, "This is a democracy; everybody gets off the bus however it damn well pleases you." The crowd roared.

She wasn't afraid of anything - except frogs, Espinosa says.

As a skinny 10-year-old in Cuba, she jumped on the back of a dog that was attacking her sister, Maria, Espinosa writes. She grabbed the dog's ears and rode its back until the owner could catch it. Sadly, Maria later died from infections caused by the wounds.

When Espinosa was a little boy in Tampa, she thwarted a burglar trying to break into the house. As he reached around the door, trying to unlatch the lock, she picked up a dull machete and delivered two chops to the arm.

"If that machete had been sharper, his arm would have been on the floor," Espinosa says. The man screamed and ran, leaving a trail of blood. As 5-year-old Jack shivered from fear, his mother hugged him tightly and said, "It's nothing, my love, it's nothing."

Espinosa's original plan, he says, was to write the stories he has told over the years and stash them away for his sons and grandchildren to read. He decided instead to string them together in a book.

"I realized they all had a similar theme," he says. "If you read between the lines, it gets pretty serious."

He had a number of wonderful Anglo teachers who taught him to judge people one at a time, he writes. But one teacher at V.M. Ybor Elementary so hated the Latinos she taught that she was overheard referring to them as "roaches." Espinosa and his pals embraced it as a proud title, calling themselves the "Ybor City Roaches."

He tells of venturing over to Sulphur Springs Tourist Club, which still stands today at Nebraska Avenue and the Hillsborough River. It was a good place for getting into a fight with the Anglos over what they considered their turf.
Espinosa - all 118 pounds of him - showed up in a zoot suit for a dance one day and discovered his cronies hadn't come as promised. As the Anglos closed in, he clocked the main guy on the chin with a fist-enclosed lead pipe. The fellow wavered and went down. Espinosa escaped by jumping out the window into the river. He hoisted his cheap - but new - dancing shoes over his head as he made his way across.

Espinosa's book was edited by Bill Duryea, a St. Petersburg Times editor and friend who met Espinosa as one of those reporters cracking up on the crime beat. In a short foreword, Dur-yea writes that he did little editing: "I laughed far too much for it to be considered work."
Espinosa hopes readers who share some of those memories will find his telling of them entertaining. But he also seeks a wider audience of Americans to laugh and understand. A key passage concerns his father, a looming presence who always had a cigar in his mouth. It moved when he talked, and "he would say atrocities."

His objective in life was to see the bridge completed - to watch his son become an American.

When Jack graduated cum laude in history, English and education from the University of Tampa, he gave a short address to the class.

Afterward, his father hugged him, and through tears of pride, he said in Spanish, "Son, you speak a magnificent English."

"He felt more 'American,'" Espinosa writes, "because he had an English-speaking American as a son."

Espinosa plans several book signings when "Cuban Bread Crumbs" becomes available. Dates will be announced. People interested in the book may call Espinosa at (813) 872-7491 from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. after Jan. 7. Reporter Philip Morgan can be reached at (813)

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