A 1968 photo of 10-year-old Larry Mitchell at his home in Rainbow Hills.
Photo courtesy of Larry Mitchell
Living in San Antonio in the late 60s was a tale of two cities for me and my old friend Larry Mitchell.
He said he lived in Rainbow Hills, appropriately named for the integrated neighborhood. Recently, during a phone conversation, he revealed the sting of discrimination I’d never experienced in my area of town.
We were both pre-teens when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. On the night of April 4, 1968, our mothers, Valeria Trinidad and Ruth Mitchell, shed tears for the slain civil rights leader.
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Larry’s tears came after stinging remarks from classmates the next day.
“Your king is dead,” they yelled. “Now you’ll have to go back to Africa!”
They called the players’ names in alphabetical order. When he heard “Miller,” he was ready to walk to the trophy table. But something wrong happened — they’d skipped his name.
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A 22-year veteran of the Air Force, Vincent T. Davis embarked on a second career as a journalist and found his calling. Observing and listening across San Antonio, he finds intriguing tales to tell about everyday people. He shares his stories with Express-News subscribers every Monday morning.
Larry was distraught. After the ceremony, his mother asked the team coordinator about the slight. The woman said it was a mistake. The next week, Larry’s mother had him call the official. She said the award wasn’t ready yet at the trophy shop. Larry never received his trophy.
“There will be times in your life when people will not respect you, will not give you the dignity you deserve. But you have to keep doing your best in whatever you do,” his mother said.
The year 1968 was a time of change — the beginning of the end of our innocence.
Our mothers took on double parental duties when our fathers and thousands of military members served in Vietnam. The world morphed from black and white to bright technicolor. Everything was “mod.”
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Radio stations played sweet soul music on the same dial as searing, guitar-driven rock and roll. It was a time when pride in culture, race and women’s rights upended the status quo.
From March 1967 to March 1969, my father was stationed at Kelly Air Force Base. My three sisters and I joined hundreds of military-dependent children who temporarily called San Antonio home. The edge of the Western and Southwest quadrants was our world, a bubble where life was starkly different from other ZIP codes in the city.
We lived off Five Palms, on Reefridge Place, where you could hear the echo of barking military training dogs from nearby Lackland Air Force Base. Bands of kids walked to and from school on streets with names like Mossledge Drive and Kontiki Place. Dry, flat scrubland, where we camped around cactus and scraggly mesquite trees, is now the suburbs, lined with watered green lawns.
In 1969, we said our goodbyes to Larry and his family.
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Our father had been reassigned to Offutt Air Force Base in Omaha, Nebraska — time again to pack, move and make new friends. As we drove to Nebraska’s largest city, I didn’t have a clue San Antonio would play a pivotal part in my future. Six years later, I returned for basic training at Lackland. In 1978, I returned for five years to the “Gateway to the Air Force” after a two-year assignment at Ramstein Air Base, Germany.
When it came time for our family to decide on a place to retire, we chose the Alamo City. It always felt like more than a temporary stop, like home.
Larry’s family stayed in San Antonio, where he married, raised a family and has a successful career as a director of talent acquisition. On a 2020 Zoom call during COVID, his team at Airrosti discussed the murder of George Floyd and race relations.
Afterward, he reached out to team members to check on their well-being as the nation grappled with the pandemic and social unrest. Larry talked about the four times as an adult that police had pulled him over without cause. He also shared the story about how he never received a trophy as his teammates did 52 years earlier.
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At a meeting a week later, Larry was shocked — Airrosti executives, chairman Kelly Green, and chief population health officer Chris Cato had a surprise for him. It was a trophy — the inscription read “Valley Hi Little League All-Star — Larry Mitchell.”
Gratitude for the duo’s kindness prompted the tears he shed that day, not bigotry or bias.
“It was delayed,” Larry said of the long-awaited honor, “but not denied.”
