![]() ![]() Pacheco was Juilliard trained and was also a natural entertainer. The other musicians were great but looked like mummies onstage. ![]() He was funny and charismatic, dancing and leading his first bands. The energy he projected was electrifying. Even then, he had a vision and wanted to stir things up. I met Johnny Pacheco around 1960, when I was getting started in New York. “I decided that if I wanted to become better acquainted with the South American Continent,” she wrote in the Sierra Club Bulletin, “the best way would be to make my way right across it.” And altogether, she collected almost 150,000 plants, 500 of which were new to science - and 50 of which bear her name. She fell off a cliff, broke bones, ate poison berries by mistake. Mexía collected plants from Tierra del Fuego to Alaska’s Mount McKinley she emerged from one 2½-year journey with 65,000 specimens. But she was soon operating on her own, and on a spectacular scale. At 51, she enrolled in college, studying botany, and in her mid-50s, she undertook her first real botanical expedition, into Mexico, as part of a Stanford team. After an early life best described as tempestuous (she moved around North America following her parents’ divorce), she ended up in Northern California, where she started hiking into the mountains with the Sierra Club. It is perhaps too clever by half to call a botanist a late bloomer, but Ynés Mexía fits the label perfectly. And he helped to get those convictions overturned. But he was compelled to do it because of the injustice against the kids. He was called a communist because of it - he risked his brand in a big way. Anthony worked really hard to bring awareness to the plight of these children. In 1942, despite a lack of evidence, 21 Mexican American teens were put on trial in Los Angeles for murder in the unexplained death of a teenage boy, and most of the defendants were convicted. What many people don’t know is that Anthony once put his career on the line to save some boys he didn’t even know. Yes, you need to know the technique of acting, but the way you use that technique has to come from deep inside. You have to hit a level of truth, of being authentic, for characters to come to life. He influenced a lot of us in the industry. When he played Zorba in Zorba the Greek, people really thought he was Greek. In a way, he has never left.Īnthony Quinn could do everything. Even today, I think of him as somebody who is still alive. People always ask me if his death devastated me. I wasn’t surprised when the Pittsburgh Pirates retired his uniform - number 21. When I found out about the accident, I dived into the waters near where it had been, trying to find his remains. I’d like to think he never felt the crash, that he went straight to heaven. I later heard that it had been overloaded with goods. On December 31, 1972, he was flying back to Managua when his plane crashed. “I want to help out the poor,” he told me. He’d traveled with his wife to Nicaragua and was mortified by the poverty there. He spent most of his time off-season doing charity work, delivering food and supplies to countries in need. He taught me about baseball and life in general. He took care of himself, and that’s how he won the Gold Glove Award for 12 consecutive seasons. ![]() One of the reasons why Roberto Clemente was such an amazing athlete was that he never abused his body. When you’re a famous ballplayer, life is filled with all kinds of temptations. ![]()
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