McAllen Heritage Center, McAllen, Texas

March 3, 2018

McAllen Heritage Center was the perfect place for spending the couple of hours between a geocaching event at the nature center and a hawk lecture at the birding center.

We knew this would be a small museum when the prehistoric mammoth was paper and the mammoth tooth was a replica, but we did pick up a couple of stories we loved!

Replica of baby mammoth tooth

The Bubble Gum King

Andy Paris was a McAllen resident and who had established good relationships with Mexican candy manufacturers.  In the mid-1940’s, sugar and latex were rationed in the U.S. and supplies of latex from abroad were curtailed after the bombing of Britain.  Paris acquired the rights on the output of four Mexican factories in Monterrey and became the only person able to supply the world with bubble gum.  He dated Marilyn Monroe and taught Natalie Wood how to blow bubbles for the film Miracle on 34th Street.

Photograph of Andy Paris blowing a bubble.

Paris Headquarters

Rocket Mail

Rocket Mail was a fund-raiser in support of its new meeting hall created by an American Legion post in McAllen.  Special stamps and covers were printed, sold to the public and, on July 2, 1936, launched across the Rio Grande in ten cardboard rockets each seven feet long and 12 inches in circumference.  According to legend, school children emptied the powder from firecrackers to power the rockets.  The rockets went up to 4,000 feet but one exploded shortly after launch and another crashed into the wall of the U.S. bar in Reynosa.

We borrowed these images of covers from McAllen and Reynosa from a site about the event, as the museum had only a description.

The museum did have a cover from a commemorative re-creation of the event in 1961.