Postwar prosperity brought first big wave of visitors

HARLINGEN - After the end of World War II, motorists hitched up roomy travel trailers behind V-8-powered cars with fastbacks and turtlehulls for road trips across America.

Postwar prosperity, cheap gasoline and paid vacations made travel a seemingly limitless proposition.

At the same time, Midwestern retirees, including farmers and former factory workers from Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Louis, Omaha and Cleveland, had money to spend from pensions and Social Security checks.

This was a combination the Rio Grande Valley was poised to capitalize on. Balmy winters, swaying palms, friendly people and a low cost of living made the Valley a natural destination for "winter tourists" looking for a haven from the frigid North.

One such was a man named W.S. Malony, whose January 1947 postcard from Palm Garden Trailer Courts in Harlingen to a friend in icy Chicago has survived the decades.

The photo on the postcard shows lush grounds with palm trees and flowers nearly obscuring the tiny trailer homes on each lot. A shuffleboard court occupies the foreground.

"Here is where we are spending the winter. Enjoying the South very much. Best regards," the postcard reads.

The Valley has a long history with "winter tourists," who in the 1960s would become known as Winter Texans. As early as 1953, the Valley was promoting itself as a "playground for tourists" and a tropical paradise.

Even in 1960, people were expressing hope that the Valley could one day rival what was then called the $1 billion-a-year Florida tourist industry. By 1961, some predicted tourism would become the Valley's top source of income.

But that history didn't begin in the 1960s, or even the postwar years of the late 1940s. The phenomenon's roots trace back to the very beginning of the Valley's emergence at the turn of the last century.

"Tourism isn't anything new in the Valley. In a sense, it began July 4, 1904, the day the first passenger train pulled into Brownsville." So says an article in the 1960 edition of The Yearbook of the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas and Northern Mexico.

That first train was "packed with curious people" lured by "real estate promoters" trying to sell the Valley as a place of "fabulously fertile land" ripe for investment, the article says.

Many more trainloads followed as land speculators brought in potential customers from the North to inspect the region's semi-tropical bounties.

That included the early developers of what would become Adam's Gardens, promoted as citrus farm investment property between Harlingen and La Feria. Later, the San Benito Land & Water Co. enticed would-be farmers and citrus growers with land tours and brought them in via the Missouri Pacific Railroad.

By the mid-1930s, the Valley was promoting itself as: "A place to play, it leaves nothing to be desired." That was one slogan on "an illustrated facts booklet" printed sometime before 1935. It's unclear who printed the pamphlet or how it was distributed.

But it appears the booklet was aimed at a receptive audience. "Bona fide tourists began coming to the Valley in some quantities in the middle 1930s," says the 1960 Valley yearbook.

Harlingen shared in that influx. The city saw "a sharp increase in winter visitors" between 1930 and 1940, according to the "official program" for Harlingen's "golden anniversary celebration" in 1960.

The increase "gave promise of the later developments of the tourist business in the economy of the city," the program said.

The boom continued into the early 1950s. By the time Falcon Dam was dedicated in 1953, the Valley was being touted as an "all-year playground for tourists" and a "tropical Paradise," where the "warm, dry, sunshiny climate ... has a direct appeal for those from the wintry north," according to a souvenir program for the dedication ceremony.

A McAllen Monitor story, whose publication date is unclear, describes "vagabond retirees" visiting Falcon Lake in the 1950s.

The souvenir pamphlet contains chamber of commerce-style plugs for Harlingen and San Benito.

"This pleasant year around climate (in Harlingen) attracts tourists in ever increasing numbers from all over the United States who vacation here to escape the cold northern weather," the pamphlet says.

Already, in 1953, San Benito was described as a winter tourist haven.

"Hundreds of people from the colder climates of the United States and many from Canada spend their winters in San Benito," the Falcon Dam souvenir pamphlet says.

The city could not have been more pleased with their winter tourists.

"San Benito welcomes them with open arms," the pamphlet says. "These people become a part of the citizenship of this town during the months they live here.

"They go to church, attend social and civic functions and become ‘home folks.'"

A "considerable number of ‘retired' people" were choosing to make San Benito their permanent home.

It is unclear who published the 1953 Falcon Dam dedication pamphlet. But one contributor offered a prediction: "... the Magic Valley of Texas will attract tens of thousands of ‘new' tourists, winter residents and weekend guests. The saying is, ‘The tourist is worth more than a bale of cotton and a lot easier to pick!'"

Despite all of the promise evident in the winter tourist business, it wasn't until 1955 that the Valley Chamber of Commerce launched a full-scale, national "fall-winter advertising program," placing ads in Midwestern and Canadian newspapers, according to the 1960 Valley yearbook. As one article in the book put it, "Intensive cultivation of the Valley's tourist crop began comparatively recently."

The first assessment of the economic impact of winter tourists, "on a Valley-wide basis," came at the same time, the yearbook says.

The Valley Chamber took a survey and estimated that in the winter of 1955-56, the Valley welcomed "97,500 visitors who spent $24,906,375."

By the winter of 1958-59, the "count was 125,000 visitors who spent $32,000,000."

But the Valley Chamber estimated that the economic impact was even greater, tacking on an additional $10 million in spending by tourists who visited in the off-season, bring the total to $42 million.

"This places tourism fourth in the Valley's sources of income," behind agriculture, "industry" and oil and gas, but ahead of "national defense" and fishing, the yearbook says.

Evidently, the Valley Chamber couldn't contain its enthusiasm. One headline in the 1960 yearbook shouts: "Tourists, We Love You!"

"We do love the tourists, and not just because of the jingle in their pockets," the article says.

"Essentially, our average tourist is about the same kind of person as the average Valleyite. He's from the Midwest. He's more interested in agriculture than factories. He's friendly. He talks our language."

Optimism was boundless.

"Tourism is the apple of the Valley's eye. Today bringing in $50,000,000 a year, the tourist industry eventually will be the area's chief source of income, many people believe," says the 1961 edition of The Yearbook of the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas.

As the industry bloomed in the Valley, people in Harlingen seized on it to help the city recover from the second and final closing of the old Harlingen Air Base in 1962.

Harlingen had taken a huge economic hit from the base closing and subsequent departure of a sizable portion of the city's population. Something needed to be done.

Civic leaders like Bob Youker, George Young, Robert Farris and Don Bodenhamer conceived a program called "Go Harlingen!" to market 2,000 empty houses vacated when the base closed, said David Allex, the former longtime president of the Harlingen Area Chamber of Commerce.

According to some reports, it was more like 3,800 empty houses - a staggering number.

The city's business and professional community donated $100,000 a year for three years for an aggressive advertising and professional campaign that brought retirees to Harlingen, Allex said.

Retired couples who did not need jobs, who would not fill the schools with more children and who would buy small vacant houses costing $5,000 to $6,000 were an economic boon for the city, he said.

Joan Cocozza, of Harlingen, remembers those times.

"They were perfect for them," Cocozza said of the little houses vacated by military families and subsequently bought by retired couples. "My folks bought a three-bedroom house on Bowie Street for $6,000."

In 1967, Cocozza's then-husband, Hank Stanley, spawned another boom in the Winter Texan industry when he transformed abandoned land at the old air base into the first Fun-N-Sun RV Resort. In 1972, Stanley moved Fun-N-Sun to San Benito. At the time, it was the largest RV park in Texas with 1,300 sites.

Stanley's Winter Texan boom supplemented the recovery spurred by the "Go Harlingen!" campaign, Allex said. "It really took off in 1967."

Many point to 1967 as the year the Valley began realizing the vision of the 1950s.

"The vision is staggering," says the 1951 edition of The Yearbook of the Rio Grande Valley of Texas.

"We could easily build to take care of a million Winter tourists and an all-the-year-round tourist trade. A $200,000,000 tourist crop every year could easily be a reality."

The Valley has yet to see 1 million Winter Texans in one season. But the $200 million mark has already been surpassed.

Last winter, "the direct economic impact on the Valley" from Winter Texans was about $606.7 million, according to the University of Texas-Pan American's Valley Markets and Tourism Research Center.