News
'From rags to riches' for UNT UNT Dallas graduate
DALLAS – For many of the 60 University of North Texas UNT Dallas students receiving their diplomas in Denton May 16, graduation is a dream come true. But for one student, Joe Martinez, it is the achievement of one more goal in his “rags to riches” story.
Joe’s parents, Pedro and Cruz, were married in Mexico in 1953. Pedro worked in a silver mine; Cruz was a nurse caring for injured miners. In 1954 their first child—a son—was born. The next year they came to the United States seeking a better life and became migrant workers traveling the country picking cotton and strawberries. Their second son, Joe, was born in Dallas in 1955, delivered at home by a midwife. They traveled to Michigan, had another son and finally settled in Dallas when their daughter was born in 1959. A fourth son was born a few years later.
Pedro went into construction and Cruz started working for a meat packing company. Pedro eventually joined Manor Baking Company and worked there 22 years. They spoke no English, so Joe and his siblings interpreted for them. Pedro taught his children to give 110 percent in everything they did.
“He always did,” Joe says. “If he started something, he always completed it.”
Meanwhile Joe and his siblings grew up, enduring “a little discrimination” in the 60s when they would be spanked if they spoke any Spanish at school. “That didn’t deter me; I still succeeded in what I did,” Jose remembers.
Longtime Dallas resident Joe Martinez poses at his job at Antique Drapery Rod Company. He graduated from the UNT UNT Dallas May 16. Martinez said it took him 25 years to complete his degree and that he would not have finished it had the UNT Dallas not been open.
Joe went to three Dallas high schools, L.G. Pinkston, Crozier Tech and Skyline High School. He joined the ROTC at Pinkston and became battalion executive commander over 600 cadets at Skyline. He graduated in the top two percent of his class at the age of 16 and left ROTC as a cadet lieutenant colonel. He received $25,000 in scholarships. He earned an associate’s degree in accounting from Mountainview College and then enrolled as part of the first undergraduate class at the University of Texas at Dallas in 1976, which until that year was a graduate school.
Joe attended several semesters but got burned out. “All of a sudden you become 18, 19 years old and you see all of your friends having fun, and here you are in the books at 2, 3, 4 o’clock in the morning. I had to get away for a little while,” he says. He planned to work only a couple of years and then go back to UTD. But about that time tragedy struck. His mother was in an accident and her hand was amputated. Out of school, Joe took care of her for the next few years. His dad helped him get his first job—at Manor Bakery, which was Rainbo Bakery by then. He got married at 27 and soon had a son, and college became a faint dream.
Joe worked in accounting and office management for Rainbo, which became EarthGrains, for 20 years. During that time, Joe’s youngest brother, Antonio, excelled in school. He was senior class president and earned a bachelor’s in science from Dallas Baptist University. Tragedy struck again when he died in 1991 of a brain tumor at the age of 26. Five months later, Joe’s second son was born on Antonio’s birthday, and they named him after his brother.
Joe joined Tia Rosa Bakeries of Mexico; they acquired Mrs. Baird’s Bakeries, and he guided the consolidation of the companies’ bookkeeping operations. Things got out of balance and again he burned out working six and seven days a week, 14 hours a day.
“I never saw my family. I was making the right money, but when you get to the point that you’re not happy with what you’re doing, money is not a priority anymore,” he says.
Soon Joe was the only Tia Rosa employee left, and he had to convert five bakeries into the Mrs. Baird’s accounting package, into “nine consolidated statements,” he says shaking his head. Following his dad’s advice, he finished the task. They gave him a six-month severance package, and he joined the El Conejo bus line. Within two months Affiliated Computer Services—a Fortune 500 company—in downtown Dallas hired him as a payroll supervisor. When he told the CEO of the bus line that he was leaving, he offered to work nights and weekends until they found someone to replace him. He never dreamed that would take 18 months.
ACS started sending him to Mexico to audit their companies. He had to make sure there were no “ghost” employees (insert explanation here), that the paperwork criteria were met and that each employee had a contract. He also had to learn the Mexican worker laws.
“When I was going to Mexico there were times that I didn’t know how to say certain words. I was talking to a janitor in the bathroom and I said, ‘How do you say so-and-so?’ He became my source because his wife used to work for the municipality (city) in Mexico.”
At ACS seven people reported to him. “I was doing really well there.” The payroll department vice president decided that Joe was overqualified and moved him to mergers and acquisitions. Joe made sure that employees coming on board from newly acquired companies didn’t miss a paycheck, and that everything was seamless. The vice president told Joe he should go back to college to be able to advance to higher positions.
“I thought about it for a couple of weeks, and then decided yes, it’s time for me to go back.”
Twenty-five years had passed since Joe dropped out of UTD. He heard about the new UNT UNT Dallas and enrolled when it first opened on Hampton Road in 2000. He had to drop some classes because of his travels with ACS. There were times he couldn’t pay his tuition. In 2000 his younger sister gave him the money to pay his tuition. Then his wife developed cancer. Joe and their two sons took care of her during that four-year period because she had no other family in Dallas, and taking classes again took a backseat. “Hopefully she’s in remission now. Her hair has grown out now. They’ve (his sons) been through a lot; they almost lost their mother. They realize that life is short,” Joe says.
At work, his department was outsourced to Jamaica, and Joe again received a six-month severance package leaving ACS in 2006. That’s when he started concentrating his efforts on finishing his degree. He completed most of his courses at night by 2006, but he needed an entrepreneurship class that never seemed to fit his schedule. That class was a prerequisite to a policy class, so he was out several semesters. His other younger brother died in 2007 at 53 from Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome.
Joe joined the Antique Rod Drapery Company in June 2007 as director of human resources. His sons encouraged him to finish his degree. Then the school called and said it was offering a special entrepreneurship class during the summer of 2008. He took that five-week summer course a marketing course, and finally the policy course this spring.
“It was a really tough one, but I survived it.”
“I had to make sure that I completed my goals,” Joe says. “I was 19 years old when I set these goals. I still have goals; I want to go back and get my PHR (certification) for human resources, and maybe take some teacher certification classes because I want to teach in high school.”
He also wants to retire and run for school board in his district. “I’ve always wanted to go into politics.”
In a sociology class one of Joe’s assignments was writing an autobiography. At first he wasn’t excited about the project, but once he started writing, he began to realize that he had accomplished something. “I documented my life as it came from migrant workers all the way to succeeding, graduating top two percent of my class,” he says. “The way I ended my autobiography was stating that ‘Here I am writing this, taking my tie off, putting my cell phone down.’ That’s the sense of accomplishment — that I went from rags to riches in my life in a sense.”
“If it wasn’t for the UNT Dallas, I probably would have forgotten about education. Because it was relatively close to my house, I could take a lot of the classes that they offered. I think I’ve been here so long, a lot of professors know me by name. It might be something trivial, but at the same time, I thought, ‘Wow, they know my name.’ That’s why I enjoy the professors here because they actually take time to teach you what you need to know in life and in education. I would have liked to have taken more classes. I know they are crunched for classrooms here. I would have liked to have taken the compensation class here, which eventually I will do.”
Joe has attended a lot of “positive thinking rallies” featuring Paul Harvey, Zig Ziglar and Rickey Rush. “You pick up things, not necessarily at the time, but after awhile you think, ‘Yeah, he was right about how there are bumps in the road of life. If you meet every challenge, you become more successful. I try to instill that same positive attitude in other people who are going through the same process. It’s been a struggle for me, but I finally succeeded.”
Joe’s older son graduated from the Dallas Art Institute; he is now 28 and is implementations manager for Credit Unions of North America. Antonio, their younger son, is 17, a junior and graduates next year.
“I’m very proud that they saw the hard work that I put in. You encourage them because they see you studying at night. They see the struggles that you’ve been through, and that encourages them to do more. My younger son wants to go to UNT Denton as a music major. He knows how to play the cello, violin, keyboard and saxophone, and he knows how to read music. That’s more than I know how to do,” Joe says proudly.
Whitney Walker, CEO of the Antique Drapery Rod Company and Joe’s current boss, says she has a huge amount of respect for him.
“He is one of the highest quality employees I’ve had in 36 or 37 years. He’s incredibly organized. He documents everything very carefully. All of his notes are notes that you could use later on in any legal situation if necessary. If anybody else tries to hire him, I will have to kneecap them, she jokes”
Joe will walk in the line at undergraduate commencement ceremonies at the UNT Denton campus May 16. His older son bought his graduation ring and cap and gown. Pedro and Cruz Martinez, who now live in west Dallas two blocks from the house in which Joe was born, won’t be at the graduation because Cruz is in poor health, but Joe knows they are very proud of him.
“They are astounded, even though it’s taken me so long to finish. They have always looked on us with pride because we always excelled.”
For More Information:
David Porter
Associate Director of Marketing, News and Information
(972) 780-3663
David.Porter@unt.edu