Rest in Peace Anthony Castro and Molly Ivins

The brilliant life of Anthony Castro
By LZ Granderson
Page 2

From what I know of Michael Anthony Castro, he would not like this column.

He would have been uncomfortable with all the focus being on him. A leader in the true sense of the word, Anthony was the kind of guy who avoided the spotlight, preferring to lead by example. Of course, that rarely stopped the spotlight from finding him.

Michael Anthony Castro made a lasting impression on those who knew him.
A four-year starter for the Banning High Broncos when the team's starting quarterback was ruled academically ineligible, Anthony, a 6-foot, 210-pound fullback, volunteered to take his place. He had never played the position before, but that didn't stop the Broncos' captain from making all-conference.

Anthony was also captain of the swim team, a member of the wrestling squad and part of the yearbook staff. Despite his being the big man on campus, freshmen felt comfortable enough around him to ask for help if they were being bullied by other upperclassmen. Teachers loved him, and the girls adored him. In six years, there had been only one graduation party principal Jim Broncatello stayed at until the end. It was Anthony's.

"He was just an amazing kid," Broncatello said. "He gave a lot to the people around him. When he graduated, we all knew he was going to go on to do some amazing things in his life. Then something like this happens …

"It is always tragic when one of your kids dies, and I consider all of my students my kids," Broncatello said. "But it's especially hard when it's someone so special."

It is said that God works in mysterious ways. Today the people of Banning, Calif., are trying to figure out why he called this beautiful soul home after only 19 years. Anthony died last week after the driver of the truck he was riding in lost control of the vehicle and crashed more than 120 feet into a ravine.

His funeral is today.

I never had the pleasure of meeting Anthony, but when I read about his story, tears filled my eyes -- in large part because he died so young, but also because he lived so courageously. You see Michael Anthony Castro, the three-sport star athlete and most popular kid in school, was openly gay. Came out when he was a sophomore.

"He caught a lot of crap over the first six to nine months after coming out," says Phil Takacs, a Banning High counselor. "Sometimes he would come to my office and ask if he could just spend the rest of the day there. He would say that he couldn't take being called 'faggot' any more today and just needed a break. He even thought about quitting sports. But over time, Anthony just got tired of the other kids making him feel bad for who he was.

"One day he was in practice and one of the other wrestlers was giving him a bunch of crap about being gay. Anthony looked at the kid and said 'You have a problem with me; why don't we take this to the mat?' This guy wrestled in the heaviest division, but Anthony pinned him in less than 30 seconds. That guy never said anything else again."

Takacs became Anthony's guardian after Anthony's mother showed him the door shortly after he came out at 16. His father is in prison. Takacs, who is also gay, said initially he was concerned about having Anthony stay with him for fear of disparaging rumors, but he didn't want to see Anthony out in the cold either.

"We're a redneck little town out here," Takacs said. "My partner and I were always scared living here because we always thought our asses would get kicked. But Anthony taught me a lot. He taught us all a lot. He made it OK to be gay."

Castro was a three-sport star at Banning High in California who had the courage to come out at 16.
Garth Jensen, Banning's football coach, said his fondest memory of Anthony is watching him run over a linebacker during an option play.

"You know, normally the QB just slides or runs out of bounds," Jensen said. "He just lowered his shoulder and 'bam!' The guy never knew what hit him."

Jensen said that, when Anthony was a student, he had heard rumors his team's captain was gay but that he didn't know for sure until the memorial service held at the high school shortly after last week's accident. Not that it mattered to him.

"No one wanted to win more than him," Jensen said. "He was a workhorse on the field and a really great kid off of it."

Jim Buzinski, co-founder of Outsports.com and author of the first story I read about Anthony, played on a gay flag football team with him. He said the most remarkable thing about Anthony was the impact he had on people who had been out of the closet much longer than he had.

"He never saw himself as special," Buzinski said. "He just lived his life with dignity and strength. Despite all the things he'd gone through, he never complained. He just handled it … and a lot of the older guys on the team looked up to him, including me."

After graduation, Anthony attended Riverside Community College and moved in with his boyfriend, Cody Mariscal, who had graduated from Banning four years earlier and competed on the football, swim and track teams there.

"I was too scared to come out when I was in high school," says Mariscal, who was driving the truck in the accident. "There were no gay people when I was there, and it is very tough to be openly gay outside of school because we live in such a small town. But if there's one thing that Anthony taught me, it's to stop being afraid.

"I loved him very much. He changed my life, and I'll never be the same without him."

Neither will Banning High.

Takacs said that there are now 10 openly gay students at the school that he is aware of and that the community is a lot more tolerant.

"Anthony changed a lot of people's attitudes about gay people by simply having the strength to follow his heart," Takacs said.

As I looked over my notes detailing Anthony's life, I was reminded of a line from one of my favorite Dolly Parton songs, "Travelin' Thru."

God made me for a reason and nothing is in vain
Redemption comes in many shapes with many kinds of pain
Oh sweet Jesus if you're listening, keep me ever close to you
As I'm stumblin', tumblin', wonderin', as I'm travelin' thru
It was then I decided to dedicate my weekly column to Anthony by renaming it "Travelin' Thru." It will serve as a constant reminder to me that one of the most important things any of us can do is be ourselves.

You just never know who's counting on us to do so.

LZ Granderson is a senior writer for ESPN The Magazine and host of the ESPN360 talk show "Game Night." LZ can be reached at l_granderson@yahoo.com.

source: http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=granderson/070130
--------------------------------
Opinion
Posted on Thu, Feb. 01, 2007

Molly Ivins: A fond remembrance
By MIKE BLACKMAN
SPECIAL TO THE STAR-TELEGRAM

I remember the first column Molly Ivins submitted to the Star-Telegram. It was the same day my I saw my newspaper career pass before my eyes.

It was February 1992, and we had just hired Molly as a full-time staff member — a free-ranging, free-wheeling political columnist based in Austin. We — the Star-Telegram — hoped to bask in the glow in our nationally renowned, left-leaning, populist writer who was a three-time Pulitzer Prize finalist and best-selling author.

We hoped to signal to our newspaper peers that we had hit the big time. We hoped, perhaps naively, our circulation might rise on the wings of her soaring prose.

We hoped we weren't making a big mistake.

Since her longtime newspaper, the Dallas Times-Herald, had folded two months earlier, media outlets from across the nation were tussling for her talents. We joined the fray with little more than hope and a prayer, and more than a bit of unsolicited encouragement from various colleagues and friends who felt compelled to offer advice:

"Fort Worth readers won't stand for a columnist like Ivins — they're convinced she's a pinko commie-lover."

And:

"You're gonna do the Hell what?"

And:

"She closed one paper — you trying to close yours, too?"

Several editor friends, knowing we were trying to hire Molly, sent her messages: If you stay in Texas, they said, the Star-Telegram is where you want to be. Her old editor in Dallas, Roy Bode, was one. "You all make a good fit," he said.

Fortunately, senior editors at the Star-Telegram thought trying to hire Molly was a grand idea, as did then-publisher Rich Connor who suggested she'd be a sure-fire way to grab readers' attention. A more prescient thought he never uttered.

Her first column, a Sunday missive in which she introduced herself to Star-Telegram readers and saluted Fort Worth's character and values, proved to be vintage Molly — elegant, insightful, and funny as hell.

It just didn't start out that way, the column.

We quickly learned at the Star-Telegram that editing a high-octane writer like Molly could, at once, be both precious and perilous.

■ ■ ■

When Ken Bunting and I flew to Austin in January 1992 to interview Molly, we agreed to meet for lunch at the Oasis, a trendy watering hole perched precariously on a hillside overlooking Lake Travis. Ken was deputy managing editor of the paper, had known Molly from his days as our Austin bureau chief, and, I figured, would be the gilded edge we needed to woo Molly to Fort Worth.

The lunch — and interview — turned miserable. A blustery, hard norther had blown through overnight and the wind gusts had to be topping 50 mph, at least. I had brought a suit and tie for lunch, but discarded them for Levis and a motorcycle jacket, it was so cold. The old barn-like Oasis creaked and groaned and tipped with every blast. I couldn't finish my cheeseburger as I kept running to the west wall of windows — looking down the hillside to see where we were all going to tumble and die. My stomach tumbled the whole time.

The only thing I remember about the interview was promising her that we wouldn't screw up her columns with clumsy, heavy-handed or skittish editing; we wouldn't rob her of her indomitable voice.

Her response: money wasn't important, and decent, well-intentioned editing she could live with; she just wanted her freedom to call things the way she saw them, with passion and fun, no cows sacred. Exactly what we want we said, adding, delicately, a modest caveat about libel and good taste. Our readers were, well, just regular folks, after all. West Texas-oriented Fort Worth, we said, though surprisingly tolerant of mainstream quacks and contrary views, would never be confused with New York City. She had kin in Fort Worth, she said. "I always liked that town. Good folks."

Lunch finished, Ken and I figured the most we had accomplished was one more at the company trough. A trip for nothing.

"When do I start?" she asked.

It was one of the happiest days of my newspaper career.

■ ■ ■

It didn't last long, the euphoria.

"OK, Mister Editor," Ken said, dropping off a copy of Molly's first column, scheduled to run in a couple of days, "you might want to look at what Molly wrote."

I'd been in the business to know that the words "you might want to look at" rarely meant "you're going to love it."

I read the lead paragraph.

"Good god, Molly can't say this!" I said.

"I think that was the name of her first book," said Ken.

"This is crazy," I said. "This can't run this way."

Ken laughed a little. I banged my head on my desk, and said to myself, "Oh, Lord, why me?"

"Maybe you should call her," he said.

"What — and say, ‘Molly, will you please consider altering the name of the sex toy in your lead?' Hell, she'll quit on the spot, and we'll all look like fools."

First column, and already I was being tested. I could just see this celebrated, nationally acclaimed writer think of me as a hick hack. But I always edited with my First Baptist mama in mind — what would Mama do? — and I couldn't back down. Family newspaper and all that. And thus Molly'd probably resign, knowing she'd made a huge mistake coming to write for us "regular folks" in Fort Worth.

A mess was truly brewing. I could just see my publisher, known to embrace an equal-opportunity temper, would surely take decisive action: me out the door for embarrassing all concerned. OK, fair enough.

No, it didn't come to that. And now it all seems so small, so quaint, so far away.

What really happened was this. I finally got Molly on the phone, hemmed and hawed and cajoled and groveled and finally, after all the agonizing and sputtering, knowing how proud she was of her word choices and their impact, said something like, "Molly, I just want be sure we want to say ‘dildo' in the lead. I'm a little worried…"

Silence.

Uh-oh. I was expecting the worst.

Then: "Oh, Honey," she said, sweet as a prom-bound belle, "you change that to anything you want, and don't you worry…"

Don't you worry your pretty little head, I thought.

Not until an hour after news of her death Wednesday did I learn from Ken that Molly, on the day she sent in her first column, had in fact called the switchboard and left a message for him — you might not want to let this word get in, she said.

She didn't always try to test us, Ken said. "She was very much a professional."

Together, Ken and Molly had removed the word, crafting a new graph, which said, in part:

"…Should you happen to contravene a law made by the only politicians we've got, this too will become a matter of some moment to you. For example, if you happen to possess six or more phallic sex toys, you are a felon under Texas law. In their boundless wisdom, our solons decided that five or fewer of the devices make you a mere hobbyist."

I could have killed them both.

■ ■ ■

On the day Molly came to Fort Worth to meet her fellow staffers, I got what I thought was a whizbang idea, with a bit of mischief, to boot.

After picking her up at the airport, I swung by the auto dealership where then-Arlington Mayor Richard Greene worked. Mr. Republican himself — think really tight underwear. As conservative as the political assembly line ever produced. But a straight shooter and good guy. What the heck, I thought, what poetry for Molly's first introduction to be to one of the Star-Telegram's most prominent detractors.

"I wouldn't say I was stunned," Greene recalled last night, "Let's just say I was surprised in the extreme."

The meeting lasted about 20 minutes. After each got over a mite of unease, they carried on like, if not long-long friends, cordial acquaintances. Both were gracious and good-humored, and genuinely appreciated the incongruence of their encounter.

I remember thinking: Molly and Star-Telegram readers might just do all right together.

"Even conservative Republicans have to admit that with her use of words, her use of the language and her commentary and criticism, she gave Texas an identity," Greene said. "She helped the whole country understand Texans.

"I will always carry the memory of that meeting with me."

■ ■ ■

Molly and I weren't close friends, but we visited occasionally over the years.

She took me to little Tex-Mex joints in Austin, let two of my children spend a week camping on her floor during a sports camp at UT; I once told her my daughter, named Molly after a character in McMurtry novel, I wished I had named her for her.

On another Austin visit, she took me back to the Oasis in her new 18-wheeler pickup (gussied up like some LaGrange parlor), and after lunch she toured me through the iconic Hippie Hollow of skinny-dip fame, and then she went for a swim in Lake Travis: a powerful picture of grace gliding through the whitecaps; from the bank I could see her, in all her grace and glide, 30 years earlier, a basketball stalwart at Smith College. Later that day we talked about her family, about the relationship with her oil executive father, about estrangement and hurts and disappointments, and healing. I suggested, practically begged her, to consider writing her memoirs. Maybe, she said. Maybe some day, but, "Honey," she said, "I've got more important things to do."

I never saw her again after that; we passed messages every year or so. I was saddened to see her leave the Star-Telegram in 2001, two years after I retired.

Wednesday night, Ken Bunting, now a newspaper executive in Seattle, sent me his thoughts about Molly.

"She was one of a kind, with a Texas-sized presence about her that was totally devoid of pretense. I'll never forget our trip to Austin to convince her she wanted to come to work for the Star-Telegram. We practiced our sales spiel over and over, trying our best to perfect it. But she told me many times she was sold the moment you walked into the Oasis restaurant wearing a leather jacket and no tie. She knew right away you were the kind of newspaper editor she wanted to work for."

Lucky were we all, just to know her.

Mike Blackman, a former editor at the Star-Telegram, teaches journalism at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas.

source: http://www.dfw.com/mld/dfw/news/opinion/16596766.htm
-----------------------