The Long, Slow Death of Eddie Romero
What became of the Monterey paisano immortalized by John Steinbeck?
By Joe Livernois
Eduardo Romero looked to be suffering the cruelties of neglect and the ravages of malnutrition when Pat McFadden found him in a shabby room in a house on Fourth Street. McFadden was a Monterey police officer in February of 1955, and Romero was a withering relic of Monterey’s ragged history.
Eddie Romero was 85 at the time, and he had been a famous pain in the ass for at least five decades. He was an inebriate, a small-time crook who’d done hard time in San Quentin. No one knew him better than the administrators of local justice. Cops and judges seemed to like Eddie because he embraced the concept that consequences must naturally follow bad behavior. If he did the crime, he accepted the time. Cops appreciate that.
Also, you couldn’t help but like Eddie, in a funny way, even when he was at his drunkest. He was sort of a happy inebriate, at least when he wasn’t stabbing his friends with whatever sharp object he happened to be holding. The city cops looked out for him. Sometimes they plucked him off the street and dragged him into a cell without charges, as an act of mercy. He’d at least have a warm spot to sleep it off on cold Monterey nights.
Eddie was the archetype of a Monterey “paisano.” It was a word Italians commonly used to describe fellow countrymen. But in Monterey at the time, paisano was an all-purpose designation for a certain breed of natives who failed to engage the norms of civilized society. I don’t know if the word was meant as a pejorative, but it was used openly and without malice.
Salinas had its bindlestiffs and Monterey harbored paisanos. And within the grimy fraternity of paisanos, Eddie Romero was the most famous. Everybody knew the paisano known as “Pilon.”
McFadden had saved Eddie from a lonely death, showing up at the Fourth Street home on a report that an old man was dying in a back room. The scene was pathetic. McFadden reported that the room was filthy and Eddie looked like “walking death.” A doctor was summoned; he recommended Eddie to the county hospital. The county-operated indigents’ hospital in Salinas (now the modernized Natividad Medical Center) was a dank and joyless place, usually the final destination for forgotten and infirm souls.
By 1955, Eddie “Pilon” Romero’s existence had been immortalized by John Steinbeck. He was the wine-guzzling, impoverished and indolent hero at the heart of Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flat, the novella that had been published twenty years earlier. The book touched on Arthurian themes, played out by derelict rummies; their bad behavior disguised good intentions.
Steinbeck presented Pilon as a fictional character, but not really. There was no mistaking who Steinbeck was writing about. He’d even used the paisano’s name. Pilon! The episode in the book describing Pilon wandering along the Monterey-Salinas highway without trousers? That was something Eddie Romero might do.
Tortilla Flat is dedicated to Susan Gregory, a Monterey High School teacher and poet who is credited with providing Steinbeck a lot of the details for his book. She knew the paisanos and the circumstances of their lives. As portrayed and as remembered, Pilon and his pals were lovable rogues. Like Ed Ricketts (Doc) and Flora (Dora) in Cannery Row, Pilon and the other reprobate paisanos were flawed Monterey personalities made famous by one of the most successful authors of a generation.
Steinbeck presented a decidedly romanticized version of paisanos. He referred to them in noble terms. They were, he said, “good people of laughter and kindness … clean of commercialism, free of the complicated system of American business, and having nothing that can be stolen, exploited or mortgaged that system has not attacked them very vigorously.”
Tortilla Flat became a big hit, Steinbeck’s first in the publishing world. There was the film version, of course; Pilon’s character was portrayed by Spencer Tracy. Someone also produced a version of the novel for Broadway, but Pilon’s besotted exploits were apparently difficult to stage.
The book and the movie had brought Eddie a level of local fame but it didn’t do him much good. The romance of fiction didn’t translate well in the stark reality of raging alcoholism and low-level poverty of spirit. Eddie’s notoriety and 25 cents might buy him the next bottle of cheap wine.
Twenty years after his Steinbeck moment, Officer McFadden found him emaciated and alone in a filthy room.
_____________________
EDUARDO ROMERO was born in 1867 on the Doud Pico Blanco cattle ranch in Big Sur, where his father worked. According to legend, Eddie often hung around local shops as a kid. He would utter the word “pilon” and would stand there like a pest until the merchants offered him free candy. “Pilon” in Spanish translates to “bonus,” and it apparently could be slang for “gift.” Anyway, that’s how he earned his paisano nickname. Pilon. Say a word often enough and it will follow you everywhere you go.
He took to drink as a young adult and drink would follow him to his grave. The alcohol inhibited good sense and caused him a lot of needless trouble. Eddie shot a guy in the shoulder in 1891, did his time in San Quentin, and mostly did nothing but drink and grift the rest of his life in Monterey.
The local papers made note of his wine-soaked misadventures and his bad behavior, just as they did with all the other two-bit criminals and paisanos in town. But Eddie drew extra attention — headlines — after 1935, following the publication of Tortilla Flat. He was Pilon, after all, and the newspaper descriptions of his arrests always included a paragraph about his connection to Tortilla Flat.
For a time he lived in a cave in Iris Canyon, scavenging empty bottles and chopping wood to pick up quarters to keep him in wine. As he grew older, he turned more and more violent.
In February of 1948, a reporter for The Monterey Peninsula Herald paid a visit to “the Romero Camp” in Iris Canyon, up above Monterey Peninsula College, to survey the scene. The reporter, Dave Hoff, found Eddie and his brother Tom lolling about with several other friends, including a woman named Beatrice and a 4-year-old child. Hoff noted that “as far as the eye can see, there are gallon wine bottles, all empty.”
Someone had been stabbed not far away a day earlier, Hoff reported, and the police showed up to Romero Camp. They rounded up Eddie, Tom and the rest of the paisanos, drove them all to the station in the police Studebakers. Eddie was eventually charged with assault, and the rest of the bunch was released. Hoff watched a cop add a new index card to Eddie’s police file. “That makes 30 cards in his file,” wrote Hoff.
A year later, Eddie was arrested again and charged with stabbing another paisano. Police found Eddie “in a drunken stupor, his hands, face, and clothing stained with dried blood.”
And yet Eddie was allowed to roam free. Judges let him plead out in exchange for shorter sentences or they simply released him, even as the index cards piled up in the police file.
A retired municipal judge in town, Monty Hellam, explained that “Pilon was probably the most docile prisoner I can remember. On those ‘mornings after’ he never entered a protest and was always willing to accept the wisdom of the court.” As mentioned above, cops appreciate those particular traits among certain criminals.
At one point, attorney Fred Farr was appointed to represent Eddie after his arrest on some forgotten caper. Farr, a flamboyant lawyer who would later get elected to the state Senate, wrote a letter to Steinbeck, beckoning the author to testify as a character witness, but the case was adjudicated before it went to trial.
By 1955, Steinbeck was living in New York City and was known as, well, John Steinbeck. He had won the Pulitzer Prize in 1940, after publication of The Grapes of Wrath. (The Nobel would come later.) His work was being translated into every language on the planet. In 1955, Steinbeck’s East of Eden was released as a major motion picture, starring James Dean.
While Steinbeck was getting plenty of deserved attention that year, Eddie was all but forgotten until Officer McFadden discovered him in the room on Fourth Street.
“Bad times have befallen Eduardo Romero,” read the lead to a six-paragraph story in the Monterey Peninsula Herald on Feb. 3, 1955. Pilon had evidently been in the room for about six months, incapacitated and starving to death.
“It is irony that Pilon would be saved from possible death by a policeman,” observed the anonymous Herald reporter. “In his younger days, Pilon was a chronic thorn in the side of Monterey police and his antics inspired many of Steinbeck’s yarns. Gone now are the happy days — the revelries with ‘Danny and Pablo,’ the nights in Iris Canyon, the wine jugs, the visits to the Monterey jail.
“The ‘paisano era’ is almost ended,” the story concluded.
Eddie would spend more than two years in the county hospital, his health rallying for a time until he started failing again. In October of 1957, an old friend named Beatrice took pity and drove Eddie and Edward Martin to her Seaside home. Beatrice had been slumming on Iris Canyon with the Romero brothers for a bit, but now she had her own place. Martin was an ancient Indian, another paisano who had shared those happy days with Eddie and Beatrice. He had also been convalescing at the county hospital for a spell. Beatrice took them both home, providing them a happier place to die.
It was evident that Eddie was fading fast as the sun set on November 6, 1957. When Beatrice asked if he needed anything, Eddie pointed to two candles beside his bed. Beatrice lit the candles, and saw he was trying to tell her something. She bent closer to hear him better, and Eddie kissed her on the cheek.
“Just a minute later he died,” Beatrice told Earl Hofeldt, another Herald reporter.
Eddie’s death was front-page news for the Herald. The headline was above the fold: “Monterey Paisano Dies.” The chief of police was quoted. He said Eddie’s passing marked the end of an era in Monterey. A municipal judge called Eddie “an institution in this community.”
Beatrice told Hofeldt that the old paisano was glad to be among friends at the time of his death.
“He died happy,” Hofeldt wrote.
_____________________
Sources:
“Monterey Paisano Dies,” by Earl Hofeldt, Monterey Peninsula Herald, Nov. 7, 1957.
“Tortilla Flats — it’s real location and characters,” by Neal Hotelling, Carmel Pine Cone. Sept. 27, 2019.
“Inside: Susan Gregory’s ‘Tortilla Flat,’” by Dennis Copeland and Edna E. Kimbro, NOTICIAS DEL PUERTO DE MONTEREY: A Quarterly Bulletin of Historic Monterey Issued by The Monterey History and Art Association, Fall 2002.
“Congressmember Sam Farr: Five Decades of Public Service,” Interviewed and Edited by Irene Reti, UC Santa Cruz University Library, 2017.
“Tortilla Flat Is Still With Us,” by Dave Hoff, Monterey Peninsula Herald. Feb. 16, 1948.
Monterey Peninsula Herald, various dates.
Salinas Californian, various dates
The New York Times, various dates
“Tortilla Flat,” by John Steinbeck. Covici, Fried Inc. publishers, 1935.
_____________________
Note: Eduardo Romero’s name and nickname always seemed to be in flux in the public record. Over the years he was aka Eddie, Eduardo, Edward, Pilon, Pilar & Pelon.
Photo illustrations of Eddie ‘Pilon’ Romero (above) by Joe Livernois
I remember Dave Hoff. He stayed overnight at my parents' house once, and he was sleeping on the living room couch when my sister and I, very young kids at the time, got up. Dave Hoff died not too very long after that from, I believe, liver cancer. I remember my dad telling us about visiting Dave Hoff in the hospital.