A New Beginning One More Time

CABO SAN LUCAS —  Sometime today, as you go hiking or spend time with family or simply relax this weekend, you might stop to think why it’s so nice to have a day off.

A break from the 5-mile-an-hour conga line of traffic on the southbound 101 every morning. A chance to escape the smog and asphalt sandwich served up by a 90-degree day in the Valley. The quiet joy of sleeping late.

But what if you had an endless string of days off? You could pursue your hobbies. Learn a foreign language.

Maybe even retire to Mexico and open a bar near the beach.

You can dream. Or do as John and Mary Bragg did.

After spending some 15 years as suit-clad executives at jobs in the Valley, the Braggs decided to say hasta luego to crime, smog and headlines like “Weapons Found in Car of Mom, Son Suspects.”

Without ever having run a restaurant, and with a less-than-fluent grasp of Spanish, the Braggs retired early to Cabo San Lucas on the remote tip of Baja California and bought a small eatery there almost 10 years ago.

Today, they have expanded the restaurant to nearly twice its original size. Mary has opened up another business planning weddings. Their commute is less than five minutes. And they haven’t had to wear business clothes in years.

“This place is great, really great,” says John Bragg, 64.

Sound nice? Just wait ‘til you hear about the world’s largest tequila collection.

*

Pancho’s is a relaxed, easy-going sort of place, a few blocks and a world away from Cabo’s main strip, where Planet Hollywood and the Hard Rock Cafe compete with neon discos and tacky bars for revelers wobbling through the resort town’s streets.

Half of the brightly painted restaurant is in the open air. On one side is an enormous mesquite grill where, for a small fee, the chef will cook the mahi-mahi or tuna you catch. The walls are adorned with Diego Rivera-like murals celebrating Mexican village life and Pancho Villa, hero of the Mexican Revolution.

On this particular evening, as Bragg surveys the scene, a trio of musicians stroll through the restaurant singing traditional ballads. One guest, a man from Santa Clarita, requests “La Bamba” for his young daughter a second time.

“She loves it,” he says sheepishly. “The Spice Girls can’t compete.”

Things didn’t always run so smoothly.

In their 9-to-5 lives, Mary, now 51, was a sales representative for high-end European cooking implements. John spent most of his life as director of promotions for a big sporting goods company in the United States. One of his claims to fame is helping Muhammad Ali design the betassled “shuffle shoe” he used in his 1970 fight against Oscar Bonavena.

One day, as the couple sat on the beach while vacationing in Cabo San Lucas, they started talking about the future--what they would do, where they would retire. Cabo was the place to be, they decided.

Part of the reason was the area’s natural beauty. Cabo San Lucas clings like a burr at the end of the 1,000-mile-long finger of the Baja peninsula. There, at the southernmost tip of land, the sere desert and sentinel-like cactuses give way to sandy beaches, crystal blue water and some of the finest sport fishing in the world.

John, who grew up in Ventura, had been vacationing in the area with his family since he was 12. Lacking paved roads, running water and electricity, the town was best-known then as a remote getaway for Hollywood jet-setters in search of wave-dancing blue marlin.

“I always thought it was beautiful down here,” Bragg says. “I’ve always loved the desert and I’ve always loved the ocean. Here, there’s both.”

There was only one problem: Nobody in Cabo had a need for high-end cookware or fancy German sport shoes.

At first, the couple thought to make money by starting a dude ranch. Since foreigners can’t own oceanfront property in Mexico, they purchased a long-term lease on 100 acres by the Pacific Ocean. They drew up architectural plans, threw barbecues on-site for investors and tried to drum up interest.

No luck.

While seeking seed money, however, Bragg made a small investment of his own in a localrestaurant. He knew nothing about the business, but started hanging around the place to help out. Suddenly, he found himself becoming interested.

‘I’d go behind the bar and mix drinks. I’d work the register. Little by little I got more involved,” Bragg says.

Finally, with no investors in sight for the dude ranch, the couple decided in 1990 to buy out the restaurant owner. And thus, two retired business professionals from Thousand Oaks opened Pancho’s.

For the Braggs, it was a learn-as-you go process. While both knew some Spanish, proficiency came only with time. To this day, John claims to be better at understanding Spanish than speaking it.

“It has been a lot of fun creating several businesses that were totally unrelated to what we did in the U.S.,” Mary Bragg said.

As to the food, the Braggs wanted to make the restaurant as authentically Mexican as possible. They decided to eschew the hamburgers and taco cuisine of most local dining spots and serve traditional cuisine made by local chefs.

That’s where the tequila comes in.

*

Soon after he bought the restaurant, Bragg began buying different kinds of Mexico’s distinctive drink. In short order, he had a small collection of 50 or so labels. When a travel writer made note of the number in an article, tourists began dropping by to check out the variety.

Maybe Bragg didn’t know much about restaurants. But as an old PR hand, he knew a hook when he saw one.

Within a few months, he had begun making regular visits to Mexico’s tequila-distilling region, a small area just north of Guadalajara. Much the way the French control their wines, so the Mexican government regulates the production of tequila. Only liquors made in the area according to certain specifications are allowed to use the tequila appellation.

After touring all but a handful of the 42 registered distilleries, Bragg has amassed over 300 different kinds of tequila--what he calls the world’s largest collection of the fiery drink.

They range from dreadfully cheap--stuff you can buy for two bucks a gallon--to the exquisite, almost as smooth and rich as a fine brandy. The most expensive tequila in the house is $50 a shot. Called Ley .925 after the numeric code for the Mexican law governing the purity of silver, each of the 1,500 bottles made yearly comes with a sterling silver label engraved by an artist.

In the process, Bragg has become something of an expert on the drink--having sampled many, of course. He has collected some 2,000 pages of notes on its manufacture and hopes to write a book on it.

But that’s another project, for another day--and the Braggs have plenty of those since the couple have no immediate plans to return to the United States.

There are, of course, things they miss, especially good libraries and bookstores. When John visits the states, he often racks up a $2,000 bill during an all-day trip to Borders or Barnes & Noble.

But there is plenty they don’t miss: a seemingly ineffective legal system, for one; traffic for another.

“I hated the L.A. commute, smog and masses of people,” Mary Bragg said. “It would be very hard to go back to our old lifestyle, as nice as it was.

Bragg used to read U.S. newspapers every day out of a sense of civic duty. Finally, a few years ago, he quit.

“It would make me crazy,” he said. “Finally, I decided, ‘Why am I doing this? My days for saving the world are over.”

*

If all goes according to plan, there soon will be a postscript to this story--maybe even a sequel.

Cabo, you see, has become a little too crowded for the Braggs. There are 40,000 residents now. Nearly a dozen paved streets. And the restaurant business is booming.

‘It’s been a very, very successful business, but it’s getting a little crazy down here,” Bragg says.

So they are “retiring” again. They plan to move to a home on a lake outside Guadalajara on the mainland where they plan to experience the “real Mexico,” John says. ‘You know, burros and people carrying firewood walking by.”

So they’re putting the restaurant up for sale. And Mary’s wedding business. And 100 acres of oceanfront property.

And that means if you ever had a dream of learning a foreign language, or pursuing a hobby or running a bar near the beach, you’ve got a shot at making it a reality.

Or you can just savor the weekend and let your dreams of freedom, of sand in your toes and tequila on your tongue, remain a dream.