It’s just an average lunchtime at Acapulco Joe’s Mexican Restaurant on the southwest corner of Illinois and Vermont. Customers are lined up on the sidewalk outside, even thought it has rained on and off all morning. Clusters of hungry people are jammed together just inside the door. Others are trying to get takeout orders. Every booth and table is filled. A recording of Kate Smith singing “God Bless America” can be heard faintly over the already high noise level.

Suddenly the volume goes way up, blasting away all conversation. Joe Rangel, the proprietor, wants us all to listen. What Kate Smith is singing epitomizes what he tells everyone about before he talks about anything else.

While Kate’s booming voice bounces off the walls, everyone is silent. And when she finishes, the people in the crowded café applaud vigorously. A part of that applause was respect for Joe Rangal, founder of Acapulco Joe’s. He was a man who loved his adopted country, and went through much to make it his own.

In Mexico City, Joe, a very green kid raw from the farm, learned survival. He scrounged for meals and worked at any kind of job he could get. Along the way, he was a mortician’s assistant, a detective, a chauffeur for a bordello and a bracero, a stoop laborer in the fields.

At 13 years of age Joe left the small town where he was born – San Jose, Iturbide, in the state of Guanajato, Mexico and began his journey north. He left behind a childhood home where there were mouths to feed than food to feed them. Before that journey ended, it included six deportations, a prison term, a marriage of convenience and more than a few beatings.

Joe crossed the Rio Grande six times and was sent back to Mexico each time. On the unlucky seventh try, he was sentenced to a nine-month term for illegal entry and imprisoned in the federal penitentiary at Springfield, MO. There he learned, among other things, that if you marry an American it is a lot easier to become one. Soon after he was released on July 4, 1953, he found a willing lady 20 years older than he. Unfortunately, the marriage ended in divorce.

Still moving north, he walked seven nights from Brownsville to Corpus Christi, TX, avoiding daylight and immigration officials. He recalled the rattlesnakes under the summer moon; the lights of the highway and the railroad too kept him on course.

In Corpus Christi he got a job as a busboy in a Greek restaurant, working 12 hours a day for $50 a week. Soon, through a friend, he learned of a waiter’s job available at Charlie’s Café in Minneapolis. When he had saved $40, off he went to the bus station. There a language misunderstanding changed the course of his life.

“Minneapolis?” he said to the ticket seller.

“Uh-huh,” she replied. “Indianapolis, Indiana, right?”

Meanwhile, a rundown diner on Illinois Street in Indianapolis had been put up for sale. Joe, jobless and not yet a citizen, was determined to buy it. To Joe’s astonishment a friend, Joe Felsher, owner of Koehler’s Pharmacy, loaned him $5,000.00 to buy the diner. That totally unsecured loan is one of the things Joe never did quite believe, one of the things that made him shake his head and say, “Beautiful country, wonderful people”.

“The place was a wreck,” he said, but, ‘on credit’ he improved it, put in a dishwasher and air-conditioning and turned it into the simple, but functional, and highly successful establishment it is today.

Felsher got his money back and, in addition, so many gifts of food over the next few years that he finally had to tell Acapulco Joe to stop bringing him turkey, stew and chili on a nearly daily basis.

Rangel then took the first step toward American citizenship. Returning to Mexico to sort out his status, he found it would cost him $500.00 to “fix his papers”. He wrote letters to six Indianapolis friends asking for help. Within five days, two men had sent him checks with notes, “Good luck, Joe!” One was the dependable Felsher, the other Joe Brown of J & J Motors. Again Rangel shook his head and said “Wonderful country, wonderful people.”

In 1971 when the great day came that the United States finally claimed this determined would-be citizen, a large sign outside the café announced to the world. “Hear ye! I, Joe Rangel, became a U.S. citizen. Now I’m a proud Gringo and can raise hell about my taxes like any other citizen. Come in and share my bliss.” Hundreds shared his bliss that day to the tune of 15 cases of champagne.

When Joe was in Texas picking plums and other crops fro 32.5 cents an hour, he met a “beautiful woman”, Mabel Bardot. A piano player, Mabel tried to make the stooped laborers lives a little less grim by playing in the evenings. One evening she played for them and sang “The Impossible Dream”. It was his favorite song. Why wouldn’t it be? He lived it!