BROWNSVILLE — Renato Cardenas, who died yesterday at the age of 86, didn’t make it to Brownsville until the age of 11, and it hadn’t been an easy journey up to that point.
Reba Cardenas-McNair said her father was born Dec. 8, 1930, in Matamoros to a mother who died when he was 18 months old and a father who Cardenas saw perhaps twice in his life, and who died young from lung cancer. The baby was sent to live with his father’s parents, who died a year apart when he 6 and 7.
Cardenas was then sent to live with a spinster aunt who died when he was 11, then moved in with an aunt in Brownsville, where he was enrolled in the first grade to learn English.
“There was no such thing as bilingual education,” Cardenas-McNair said.
Despite her father’s turbulent early years, he never regarded his childhood as tragic, she said.
“It did do something,” she said. “It gave him very much an appreciation of every day. He enjoyed every single day of his life. Every day was a gift because he lost so many people early in his life.”
During the Korean conflict, Cardenas enlisted in the Air Force (the Army recruiter wasn’t in) but had to wait until he turned 18 because his aunt wouldn’t sign the waiver allowing him to enlist sooner. He left the military a staff sergeant. With the money Cardenas had sent home during his service, his aunt had purchased three rental properties for him.
He bounced from job to job, working on a shrimp boat and later for Pan American Laboratories assaying chemicals coming in from Mexico. He liked it enough that he enrolled at Texas Southmost College to be a chemist, graduating with an associate degree. In the meantime, Cardenas met Mary Rose Arzamendi, the future Mary Rose Cardenas, who worked for the credit bureau.
Cardenas was acquainted with her brother, but said his friend had never mentioned having a sister named Mary Rose. Cardenas told her that if he had a sister that pretty, he’d keep it a secret, too. They were married a year later, in 1955, while Cardenas continued his education at Pan American in Edinburg.
“He always teased, ‘She never let me go after that,’” Cardenas-McNair said.
Cardenas, with the first child on the way, quit school and used money he’d saved to buy a Texaco station, while his wife stayed on at the credit bureau and helped tally the station’s receipts at the end of the day.
“My father was really never happy working for anybody else,” Cardenas-McNair said. “He was always looking for opportunities to work for himself.”
One day, Cardenas let someone park a car for sale at the station. It sold right away, and Cardenas got the idea of selling a car or two himself. Gas was less than 25 cents a gallon, and he made 3 cents per gallon.
“You made more selling a car than you could make selling 100 gallons of gasoline or whatever,” Cardenas-McNair said.
When Texaco got tired of seeing several cars parked at the station, Cardenas purchased a lot at 9th and East Adams, and did well enough that he eventually sold the station. He would go on to own several new car dealerships including Buick, Renault, AMC/Jeep, GMC and Dodge. In 1975 he built Cardenas Motors’ Brownsville location in what then was practically the wilderness, before Sunrise Mall existed. Today the Cardenas Group includes dealerships in Harlingen and Raymondville.
Cardenas helped start Valley Community Hospital, now Valley Regional Medical Center. When the hospital was sold to HCA, part of the proceeds was used to create the Brownsville Foundation for Health and Education. Cardenas remained a board member of the foundation until his death. He was also a cofounder of Sunrise Bank, now Wells Fargo.
“He was always interested in helping the community progress,” Cardenas-McNair said.
He developed his first subdivision in 1969, serving as president of Cardenas Development Co. from its founding until handing the reins to Cardenas-McNair in 1999.
Cardenas also served on the city commission for six years starting in 1975, and was a member of the last slate of commissioners from the days when commissioners were elected as a group rather than individually. Members of the slate still met for lunch at the Oyster Bar the first Tuesday of each month. Cardenas didn’t miss last month’s meeting.
Cardenas-McNair described her father as a lovely and very generous person who loved a good joke as well as a good poker game. He offered to teach the doctor at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, where he’d been undergoing treatment, how to play.
“He said, ‘I’ll teach you how to play poker and even let you win some money if you send me home early,’” she said.
