Mike Gonzales learned English watching television
Published in the Oct. 28 – Nov. 10, 2015 issue of Morgan Hill Life
By Robert Airoldi
Photo by Robert Airoldi
Mike Gonzales washes windows at Ladera Grill, one of his many Morgan Hill clients.
When Mike Gonzales was a 4-year-old child in Tepatitlán, Mexico, his father was killed in a bar brawl. So the boy and his brother sold Chiclets gum and shined shoes to help support the family.
“There was no welfare, no food stamps,” he said. “We just survived.”
Three years later when he was 7, his mother brought him and two sisters with her to Higley, Ariz., leaving three other children in a monastery. When he arrived in America, Gonzales spoke no English. He should have been in second grade, but was put in first grade where his teacher made him watch two hours of TV each day from 10 a.m. to noon to learn English.
“That’s how I started and I just worked it,” he said.
He went on to win a spelling bee in the 8th grade and was the valedictorian that same year. Even though the graduating class had only 14 students, he still felt proud of his accomplishment.
“It was important to learn and important to set goals,” he said.
His mother had by then remarried a man in charge of braceros (Mexican men on a guest worker program in the United State). Gonzales would join the other men as they toiled in the fields, picking cotton, onions and tomatoes.
“We picked them all,” said the now 65-year-old Gonzales.
The summer before his freshman high school year the family lived out of a station wagon picking crops in Yuba City, Visalia, Fresno, Salinas and other farming areas, before heading back to Higley in October. That same year his three other siblings immigrated, joining the family which was by then living in San Jose, where his father worked in a cannery.
Gonzales attended Andrew Hill High School in San Jose.
While there he got involved in sports and had some wonderful coaches, he said. School was 10 miles from his house and coaches would often drive him home.
“They’d stop and buy me a burger on the way home,” he said. “Along the way, they’d teach me life lessons.”
After graduating in 1969, Gonzales started attending San Jose City College. While there the teen played football. It was by chance when his friend Kim Bokamper — who would go on to play nine years for the Miami Dolphins — encouraged him to try out.
“I told him I was too small,” said Gonzales, whose nickname was “Smurf” because he stood 5-feet, 4-inches and weighed 140-pounds. “So I went out for spring practice and the coach asked me what I was doing there. ‘We don’t need a water boy,’ he told me.” But Gonzales made the team as a defensive back and running back, until he got hurt in week 7.
“That’s as far as I went,” he said of his sports career.
At age 24, he started working windows seriously, got a girlfriend, a Jeep and a dog and never went back to school. When he was 26, he married his first wife. He has four children with three different women.
“Things just didn’t work out but I never abandoned my kids.” He eventually got custody of his three youngest. Now, his oldest is a teacher in Morgan Hill, another just had a baby, the third is engaged, living in Morgan Hill and going to nursing school, while his youngest lives with her mother works in a day care center.
Today, Gonzales, the grandfather of six, has custody of his 8-year-old grandson who attends Paradise Valley Elementary School. He owns a window washing business and does about 15 to 20 jobs a day, organizing his days in Morgan Hill, Gilroy, Santa Cruz, San Jose, Mountain View and other cities in Silicon Valley.
“Wherever the work is I go, but I’m always home at 6 p.m.,” said Gonzales.
He makes it a policy that he only washes windows of nice people. “If you’re mean to me, I won’t work for you,” he said.
