"He said the Sheriff was one of the smartest men in town and spoke fluent Spanish and that's why he went to the Border Patrol."
I think, from reading Skeeter's writings in Shooting Times magazine, he learned his Spanish after he joined the Border Patrol. One "Hipshots" column, in the December, 1975 edition, he wrote about his Border Patrol academy experience and his first 12 months on the border, which was a probationary period in which he was assigned to work with a senior patrolman. The senior was responsible for making sure the probationer learned how to do the job, learned immigration law and Spanish, and prepared him to pass the examinations given at the end of the probationary period.
Skeeter was assigned to a horse-back patroled border sector headquartered in Amado, Arizona, just north of Nogales, Mexico. His senior was a veteran named Buck Smith. Skelton wrote:
"I felt pretty secure about the Spanish part, because Buck, unlike many supervisors, had not been teaching me to say, "Where were you born?" or "Do you have a passport?" Instead, he had required me to put into Spanish such useful phrases as "The farmer got hit with a bucket of _ _ _ _" and "The cow jumped over the moon." I have been able to communicate with Spanish-speaking people ever since."
The man had a way with words!
