WHEN I EULOGIZED my mother a year ago this month, some surly members of my family grumbled that I’d spent too much time talking about her surviving younger brother, Jesse. Maybe I had, though I don’t think my mother would have objected.
Before I took his place in her heart, Jesse had been the apple of her eye and of my grandmother’s as well. 
He was the Segovia family’s prodigal son, a phrase I came to know because of Jesse and which I later fittingly applied as a subtitle to my 2002 biography of Mickey Mantle.
Jesse and Mickey had nothing in common except that they were sons upon whom high expectations were placed but who lived their lives as they pleased, thumbing noses — and middle fingers, when they needed to — at the uptight mores and social and cultural restraints of mid-20th Century America.
“If you’re an outlaw in this society,” Jesse once advised me, “then be the best outlaw — just be sure to stay ahead of the posse.”
I always saw my uncle as a mixture of James Dean and Elvis Presley. When he returned home to Waco, Tex., from serving in the Army after World War II, he took to living his life as a free-spirited dandy. In 1950, he cemented that image when he bought a canary yellow Chevrolet convertible, driving it at heart-thumping speeds with the wind blowing his long, duck-tailed hair about. There was a price to pay, though: A horrendous middle-of-the-night wreck and the tragic death of a girlfriend who had been riding with him.
My mom rushed us out of our house in the wee hours of a Sunday morning to check on Jesse who had just returned from the hospital to my grandmother’s house, his broken ribs swathed in bandages and gauze encircling a nasty gash on his forehead. He was wearing a colorful silk shirt that buttoned from the neck to about mid-sternum, and my grandmother was ruining it by cutting it off him with scissors.
“I can fix it,” my grandmother said, assuring him.
Jesse, eyes blood-shot and teary, shook his head. “Mama,” he said. “There’s just some things that can’t be fixed.”
Perhaps it was remembering the wreck and my uncle’s guilt that he would carry with him the rest of his life, but it was at that moment that I knew that I could always go to him with my own problems in the future. And those times would be numerous, instances when I had failed to meet the expectations of my father and his brothers, my other uncles — expectations to make of myself, as the only male carrying on their name, what they had been unable to of their own lives.,
If it had been up to my father or his brothers who were all World War II veterans, I would have gone to one of the country’s military academies, or to Texas A&M or some other school mass-producing second lieutenants. They wanted me to become a professional person, and they didn’t see journalism or writing as much more than something akin to the oldest profession.
Leave it to me to challenge what the other men in my family wanted for me. Fortunately, Jesse could empathize, and he was almost alone in his support. By the 1960s, when he was the aluminum siding king of North Texas, I spent a long summer living with him and his family in Dallas. His office was downtown, and I used my lunch hours touring the Dallas Morning News and Dallas Times Herald time and again or wandering around nearby Dealey Plaza, obsessed as I was with the Kennedy assassination.
Jesse was also the one person I knew I could count on when things went wrong in my life, as often seemed to happen.
When I effectively got myself kicked out of high school the week before my senior year began, it was Jesse who suggested that I turn this into a positive.
“Kid, enroll at Reicher,” he said, telling me to go to the Roman Catholic diocesan school in Waco. “They have a better football team and prettier girls who come from rich families. If all else fails, at least you’ll be closer to God.”
That school year, when I was stranded after a Saturday tennis tournament in Dallas and couldn’t get home to take a date to a long-planned Herman’s Hermits concert in Waco, it was Jesse who arrived on the scene with a solution.
“Kid, take my wheels,” he said handing me the keys to his new Cadillac El Dorado. “Drive home, take your date to the concert and return the car tomorrow.”
When, as a freshman at Baylor, I tried to drown my sorrows over a lost love in the Rio Grande, it was Jesse who rescued me and my Mustang from oblivion.
“Kid, count your blessings,” he said as I recuperated at the home of an aunt in Rosebud, his hometown. “You succeeded in failing at the one thing you should always fail at.”
Several years later, when my wife left me for another man just as my book Chicano Power was being published to incredibly positive reviews, it was Jesse who cheered me up in the unlikeliest of ways.
“Kid, she couldn’t have left you at a better time,” he said. “Imagine what it would be like if she’d left you when you were down and out in life.”
A few years after that, when I returned to Waco depressed that a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard had ended, that my Porsche had just blown up and that I’d walked away from my newspaper job, it was Jesse who said it was the right time for me to go to California where he had met his wife and love of his life, Modesta.
“When you get to L.A. and the end of the world,” he said, “you can make of yourself not what you were born but what you have it in you to be.”
Shortly after midnight last Thursday, Jesse R.Segovia died in Waco, surrounded by his family. He was 84. He had suffered the last years of his life from dementia.
“The memories you have of your life,” he once said to me, “are not as important as those that you have of others. It’s those memories that are the true treasures of a man.”
Kid, I feel like telling him, thanks for the advice and say hello to mom.
Adapted from “The Prince of South Waco: Images and Illusions of a Youth,” to be published in 2013.