The Only Escalator in Town: Growing Up in South Texas

Mike Robinson grew up in Kingsville, Texas—a small university town where the King Ranch owned the bank, the lumberyard and the only department store with an escalator.

As a boy, Mike rode his bicycle for miles, helped publish a neighborhood newspaper on a mimeograph machine and built a miniature golf course using tuna cans for holes. By his teens, friends were driving at fourteen, the Beatles had arrived in South Texas, and Mike had become the drummer in a garage band despite never having played the drums.

But growing up in the late 1960s also meant watching the Vietnam draft lottery determine the futures of young men around him. Mike remembers receiving his number, friends who faced very different outcomes, and parents who were prepared to send him to Canada rather than risk losing him to the war.

After college, Mike went to work at a Levi Strauss factory manufacturing women’s clothing. Managing a cutting room taught him that the theories he had learned in school rarely survived contact with actual people—and that getting someone’s paycheck wrong could erase nearly everything else a manager did right.

From house painting and homemade wind chimes in a red Datsun to factory floors and the beginning of a career at H-E-B, Mike shares a funny, thoughtful and occasionally sobering story about growing up, learning to think and discovering that the most valuable lessons rarely come from a textbook.