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Jose "Joker" Mendoza
Born: February 1, 1917 in Duquesne, Arizona
Passed: August 15, 2003 in Patagonia, Arizona
Mother: Tomasa Mendoza
Father: Eleuterio "Jesus" Mendoza
Siblings: Jesus, Jr., Margarita, Isabel

Joker Mendoza was a familiar face around town and known for his colorful stories about how it was in the "old days." One of the last surviving miners, Joker had 113 children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren when he passed away. Throughout his lifetime, Joker served as Mayor of Patagonia, and was known to many as the great Patagonia storyteller. Here are a few of Joker's famous stories.

Growing Up
"I got the nickname Joker 'cause I was a devil. I had just started high school in '32 and I was a little bit of a hellraiser. I used to make faces at the girls and stick my tongue out, keep them laughin', you know. Well, the teacher caught me one time and she said 'I'm not having no jokers in class today, so you better settle down.' So the kids started calling me Joker from then on.

I don't remember if Patagonia ever had a boom time in the early days. All I can remember is being poor when I was a kid. Mother had a hard time raising us kids, and my father died when mother was pregnant with me. Me and my brother helped bring in money for the family. I had a custodial job for nine years and I got 30 dollars a month¾a dollar a day. Besides the dollar a day, sometimes my brother'd bring in $10 or $20 to makes ends meet. The last two years of my custodial job I got a raise. Went up to 45 dollars a month. I was very fortunate to get that raise.

Patagonia in the Old Days
"When I was young, Naugle was a dirt road and it ended right at the sewer plant. There used to be a bar on Naugle¾that was in 1933. They opened the first bar at the Wagon Wheel, and there used to be a little produce store and a grocery store right next to it. Today, the service station is in the place where the original Wagon Wheel bar was, and the Wagon Wheel has moved down the street. The ore docks used to be right across from where the Big Steer is today. Miners brought ore down on wagon and jackasses, and kept hauling it there till there was 50 tons of it. Then they would load on the ore cars that came through with the railroad.

In those days we had a light power plant here, one diesel engine. We had electricity up to 11:00 at night. That thing'd be boomboomboomboom all day and night long. And about 11:00 they'd shut your lights off. No more electricity till the following day.

Used to be you could stand up there at the top of cemetery hill and it looked like a blanket of green. Everything was so pretty and green; now it's gonna die. I wonder if it's a shortage of water? The creek's goin' dry. Hell, it's lost over half of the water that used to run down there. Hell, it used to run under the bridge all year long. And then it went to dyin'.

When the creek flooded between Patagonia and Nogales, it washed out the railroad and the bridges were damaged. They decided they weren't gonna repair it anymore, so they set up a turntable just below the Wagon Wheel a ways. They used to put their locomotive on there and wheel it around headed out towards Fairbanks (a town near Tombstone), and us winos used to hide under that turntable and drink. It was nice and cool there and has cross-members that we'd sit under.

The Lopez Pool Hall [located on Duquesne] is a fairly new building. It was built in 1940. That's when they closed the Ruby Mine down. Mr. Lopez was a miner that worked in Ruby, and he also ran a gambling joint there in Rudy. There was a little store there too, that later turned into a pool hall. It was open for quite a while. A lot of guys would go in there and get credit and buy stuff, and some of them would get money to play pool there. The owner had a list of these guys that didn't pay their bills, and he put it on the window under the heading, 'These guys don't pay their bills!'