ERNESTO SALINAS VILLARREAL

Vietnam veteran, refinery pipefitter and the boxing coach who taught kids to lose well

Everything that mattered in Neto Villarreal's life happened within sight of a porch in Houston's Magnolia Park: the first dances, the first fights, the first Sunday barbacoa and, in 1967, the long goodbye on the morning he left for the Army.

The son of a ship-channel longshoreman from Matamoros and a seamstress from Brownsville, Ernesto graduated from Austin High School in 1966 and was drafted at twenty. He served with the US Army in Vietnam in 1968 and 1969 as a combat engineer, earned the Army Commendation Medal, and almost never spoke of it. When pressed he would say only that he came home with all ten fingers and a lifelong dislike of fireworks.

Back in Houston he married Gloria Reyes in 1972 and joined the pipefitters at the Shell refinery in Deer Park, where he worked for thirty-eight years. He was the man who could hear a leak before the gauge showed it, and he stayed after shift to teach younger fitters, many of them boys who, like him, had not known a trade was waiting for them. Evenings he volunteered at the Hidalgo Park community center, teaching neighborhood kids to box and, more importantly, to lose with grace.

Neto loved Tejano accordions, Astros games on the radio in the good years and the many bad ones, and Gloria's Christmas tamales, which he insisted he had “helped” with. He went to Mass every Sunday at Santa Rosa de Lima in a pressed work shirt, in the same pew, and he marched in the Veterans Day parade until his knees refused.

Neto died on 12 August 2022, aged seventy-five, at home in Houston after a long illness. He is survived by Gloria, his wife of fifty years; his children Linda, Ernesto Jr. and Marcos; eight grandchildren; and his sister Rosa. He will be laid to rest at Houston National Cemetery with military honors.

“You're going to get knocked down. What matters is how you get up, and who you help up next.”