#SoCaltech: Ernie Mercado
“I started driving my truck to Caltech in the early ’80s. Prior to that, I was on Wilshire Boulevard in L.A. Caltech was building a new lab in one of the buildings, and I started serving the construction workers. Then the grad students found out about the truck and just started to come, and we felt comfortable with each other. I kept coming back because I felt welcome. I fell in love with Caltech. Then my daughter went to college, and she would tell me she felt lonely, although she was only in Palo Alto. So, I always felt this connection with the students. If I could provide good service to them, I was making them feel better, and I would think, ‘I wish somebody would do that for my daughter.’ When she decided to go for her PhD, I felt even more of a connection. The people I was serving were PhD candidates, and now my daughter was getting her PhD. It was like destiny. So, yeah, Caltech has always been my extended family and my social life. I’ve had great times with these kids. Now that I’m retiring, the messages I've been getting have been overwhelming because I never thought that people would feel this way about what I did. And what I did was nothing really. All I wanted was to bring a laugh and a smile and make people feel comfortable. Often I could see the stress on students’ faces when they were coming out of the lab or having problems with an experiment or about to do a presentation. If I could get a laugh out of them, boy, it was great.”
Ernie Mercado has been a fixture on Caltech’s campus for more than three decades as the proprietor of Ernie’s Al Fresco, a food truck beloved by students, staff, and faculty alike. Mercado announced his retirement in early October. Students and alums upon hearing the news organized an online collection effort to honor his retirement and thank him for his service.
#SoCaltech is an occasional series celebrating the diverse individuals who give Caltech its spirit of excellence, ambition, and ingenuity. Know someone we should profile? Send nominations to magazine@caltech.edu.