Manuel Peché

Manuel Peché — an H&H Coffee worker known only through living family memory, recovered on the 13 June 2026 Peché tour of 601 Delaware. He is the project’s first named rank-and-file H&H worker documented from a family’s own recollection rather than payroll, press, or the Menger papers. Husband of Mary Louise Peché (101); father of San Antonio historian David L. Peché and his older brother Albert Peché.

H&H arc (family account, c. 1940–1944)

As his sons and widow reconstructed it — with their own hedges (“I don’t know if…”, “Maybe he was a little older”):

Bottle-washing across the street first. As a boy (~age 14, c. 1940) Manuel washed bottles at a works across Delaware from the plant — the bottle-washing works the project had inferred from the Sanborn maps. He taught himself to drive after his own father died young.
Then H&H. He moved to the coffee plant, unloading coffee sacks off the rail dock (“they were heavy”) and driving. Mary Louise, directly: “I know that he came to unload the train.” The family says “he didn’t work here very long.”
Navy ~1944. Drafted into the Navy around 1944 at age 18 (so at H&H c. 1942–43; b. ~1926). Met Mary Louise in 1949, married 1950.

The photograph — and the surviving tin

Manuel was photographed posing with an H&H coffee tin in front of the [factory] gate — a photo his son David L. Peché published in his Arcadia book Downtown San Antonio (2013), the book the project used to identify its first tin. The photo is page 127 (confirmed by a 2026-06-18 full-text pass of the book scan, HH-LIB-2026-0005); its published caption is courtesy of Raul Medina III — a provenance lead for who holds the original gate print.

The book is a published, non-consent-gated baseline. David put his father’s H&H story in print in 2013, so the book’s account can be cited publicly now, independent of the family’s pending publication-scope consent on the 13 June 2026 oral-history additions. The page-127 caption states Manuel, age 16, worked at Hoffmann & Hayman (601 Delaware) before being drafted into WWII, delivering coffee bags to businesses, helping to roast coffee beans, and offloading coffee from the trains on the tracks beside the building. The published “helping to roast coffee beans” is a duty the oral account did not stress (the family’s telling emphasized bottle-washing across the street, then the rail dock and driving) — recorded here as a 2013 published source alongside the 2024–2026 family memory.

The actual tin survives. David still has his father’s H&H coffee can — the very one Manuel posed with. That opens a high-value then-and-now recreation: re-shoot the photo of a Peché at the 601 Delaware gate holding the original tin (David does then-and-now recreations himself). The surviving tin is also a documented H&H artifact with direct family provenance — held by the Peché family, not yet in the project collection. David may loan it to the museum for display — a loan-in of the gate-photo tin would be a centerpiece artifact. See TODO-44.

Open questions

Exact vitals (birth/death), Navy enlistment record, the 1950 marriage record.
The name of the bottling firm across Delaware where he washed bottles (city-directory lookup of the even-600 Delaware addresses, late 1930s–40s).
Length and exact dates of his H&H tenure; whether he drove a route or only worked the dock.

Manuel Peché

H&H arc (family account, c. 1940–1944)

The photograph — and the surviving tin

Open questions

See also