- Date Of Birth: April 16, 1945
- Date Of Death: February 5, 2023
- State: North Carolina
Juan Manuel Gonzales, Sr. passed away early on Sunday morning, February 5th, 2023, after a years-long struggle with Alzheimer’s disease. Much of the man he was had been overwritten these past few years by the man he’d become– a man with few memories of his own past, no sense of the present, and lost to the ones he loved and who loved him– and so we’d like to take this moment now to remind everyone of the man we lost, his goodness, his intelligence, his humor, his heart.
He hated the color green. No person on the planet felt as much animosity toward a color as Juan did for the color green. He tried to explain to us why but none of us ever understood, not really, except we always made sure, when passing out the dinner plates, to keep the green one far away from him. He loved bananas, but not just bananas, banana pudding, banana ice cream, banana candy, banana popsicles. And maybe, as one of eight kids born in a small West Texas town, with little to call his own, he’d learned that if you love something everyone else hates, you will get as much of it as you like.
He loved Glenn Close but not Meryl Streep. He didn’t like the show Friends because, as he once explained to his son, “None of those people act like friends.” Once, while in college, shortly after watching Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke, he ate twenty hard-boiled eggs on a dare. They made him sick. He loved old westerns and old sci-fi movies, Christmas movies and sappy movies. In the days of video cassettes, he created an intricate system around his house to organize and catalog his collection and created two living documents to summarize it: One in overall alphabetical order, and one categorized and alphabetized by genre. When his daughter was younger, they would sit together and cry while watching movies, while his wife would roll her eyes and tease them for crying at make-believe things. As Juan and San Juana grew older, with their kids grown and out of the house, he would hold her hand and cry while watching movies, and she never wanted to be anywhere else.
He loved stories of all kinds, could always be found reading or watching daily episodes of Jeopardy, wore tank tops long after tank tops should have been worn, had a light-up-the-room kind of smile, and a sharp wit that was jokey but never mean-spirited. He collected old coins and old PC computers and friends and jokes and love. He could whistle, better than Bing Crosby, even, could whistle a tune that would break your heart. And when he whistled his cheeks puffed out of his face and his eyes got wide and lit up, and it would make you wish you loved doing anything as much as he loved whistling. He could also whistle that whistle where you put two fingers in your mouth and produce a whistle that’s sharp and loud and startling and that everyone hates, and he loved whistling that kind of whistle almost as much.
He made the best spaghetti in the world and it took him all day to prepare it. You had to tell him how great it was, both while he was cooking it and while everyone sat at the table to eat it. He made it twice a year and only when they were older did he reveal to his mushroom-hating children that he always put mushrooms in the sauce.
Born April 16, 1945, in Stamford, Texas, Juan worked hard as a kid picking and chopping cotton, and when his father told him and his siblings, “If you like this kind of work, skip school, fail your tests, and you’ll be able to do this kind of work your whole life,” Juan decided, “No, sir, not for me.” He excelled in school, failing just one class his entire time in high school–typing– just so his few friends wouldn’t think he was so square. He was the first to leave home for college, attending Texas Tech on a partial scholarship, while he chased tornadoes and made dorm room beer in his spare time. But then, as he told his children, he dropped out before he failed out, and then joined the Air Force.
Juan loved proving wrong the people who thought he wasn’t smart enough or good enough because of who he was, what he was, and where he’d come from. Once he joined the Air Force, he learned fluent Russian and Japanese and became a communications translator. With his best friend, he had plans to travel across Europe once his four years were up, but he was honorably discharged a few months early when his father suffered a stroke and Juan had to return home to help his family move while caring for his sick father.
Once he got his family settled in their new town, he reunited with San Juana Martinez, a girl he’d known from before he’d left from college, and he asked her out. Even though he couldn’t dance and his Spanish wasn’t as good as hers and he didn’t listen to any of the good Tejano music she loved and only listened to The Beatles and Aretha Franklin, and his hair looked crazy and wild, she said okay, fine. Four weeks later, he asked her to marry him, and she said yes, not because in those four weeks he’d learned how to dance or changed his music tastes or started talking different or fixed his wild and crazy hair, but because in those four weeks, despite all these things, she could tell he was a good man, that he would be a good father, that he loved her and that, in spite of herself, she was beginning to love him too. They were married 3 months later in December 1971, and they loved each other and made a life together as long as life allowed. With a new family to begin and care for, Juan returned to school at the University of Texas at Arlington and graduated with nearly three hundred college credits over a lifetime of learning and exploring, and he would go on to help raise a family of smart, independent, successful children, and made everyone who met him feel warmly loved, happy, and moved by his attention and advice. All throughout, for as long as he could and as often as he could, he put himself in a classroom either as a student or an instructor. He loved languages and he loved learning and he loved his life and his family, and most of all, he loved a good story—telling one, hearing one, and living one.
Juan is survived by his wife, San Juana Martinez, his son and daughter, Manuel and Cecilia, his grandchildren, Anabel and Dashiell, his sisters and brothers, Amelia, Lisa, Rey and Joe Michael, a host of nephews and nieces, and grand and great-grand nephews and nieces. He is sorely missed by everyone who knew him, but your memories and our memories of him will keep him with us in spirit always.
