Henry Azcona 1943-2006

Henry Azcona was born Enrique Azcona on June 19, 1943 in Calexico, California, across the border from Mexicali, where his family was living. He was the second child of his mother, Maria Weber Borello, the American-born daughter of immigrants---Hans (aka John) Weber from Trieste, Austria, and Carolina Borello, of Torino, Italy. He was the third child of his father, Enrique Azcona Covarrubias, who himself was the descendant of Basque immigrants to Mexico as well as indigenous Mexicans, possibly Huichols, from the Nayarit-Jalisco area.

During Henry (then known as Enrique Azcona Weber)’s childhood the family grew and moved around western Mexico, with Henry spending time in Mexicali, Tepic, Culiacán, Guadalajara, and finally Mazatlán. Henry was a mischievous and strong-willed child by all accounts. He enjoyed tormenting his younger brothers, and pulling pranks. In secondary school Henry continued, igual de travieso. Once he and some other boys broke into the school, dressed for the part with bandanas over their faces, and succeeded in stealing an advance copy of the test to be given. However, even having stolen the test ahead of time, they still could not figure out the answers. While he may not have put his efforts into academic endeavors, he was indeed very smart. When they announced that there would be a student of the week competition, with one boy wearing a medal all week and getting special honors, he put himself to study, raised his hand, and knew all the answers, but after he had proven himself by winning the medal in the first week of the competition, he went right back to his errant ways

Henry re-entered the United States on January 1st, 1960, and saw a future president (Nixon) in a parade that same day. He and his godfather practiced his accent on the drive up from Mazatlán. “They’ll ask you where you were born, and you say?” “/kaleksiko kalifornia/”---wrong, but over the trip he learned to pronounce it, exaggerating the lax vowels of English. He went to live with his godparents in San Jose and attended San Jose High School where he excelled at sports, especially football. When he first arrived, recognizing his athletic abilities, they tried him out for everything to see what sports he’d be good at. Impressed by his overall athleticism, the coaches asked him, “Henry, is there anything else you can do?” and he replied “I can sweem.” Later one of his coaches pushed him to try out for the NFL and thought that he could make it, but Henry had to work on the day of the tryouts and didn't go.

When his family temporarily moved to LA, he went there for the summer, working in the garment district. He hid some of his earnings, saving enough to return to San Jose for the next school year. The money was found by his mother, who wanted him to stay and contribute to the family. His father gave the money back to him and he returned to high school in the Bay Area. Finding that his godparents also wanted him to handover his paycheck, he moved into a rooming house, which afforded him more independence. In San Jose he worked once picking apricots, but wasn’t cut out for it and mostly earned money doing odd jobs for a Japanese-American woman who helped him out, and never pointed out the fact that he was obviously inflating his hours. He and friends also made money by stealing scrap metal and reselling it to the salvage yard.

Once Henry gave a ride to another young man from the rooming house, a college student going home to Sausalito. Henry and Sausalito were love at first sight. He decided he would find a way to live there. He moved there a few years later, in the mid-1960's, and stayed until 1993, including 18 years in his beloved condo in the Villa Ladera, a historic building constructed for Scatina, the stepfather of A.P. Giannini (founder of the Bank of America, previously called the Bank of Italy). Also while living at the rooming house in San Jose, Henry met Glenda K. Davis, a fun-loving blond who was to become his first love. A few months into their relationship, Glenda wanted to get married and proposed driving to Reno. According to Henry, he didn't take the proposition too seriously because he believed Glenda to be still under the age of legal consent, and he drove to Reno unworried. However, the Reno officials didn’t think she was too young, and so they got married. His godfather and others tried to tell him that it was a mistake, and to get out of it, but Henry was the kind of person who would stick to a commitment for a lifetime. He loved her more and more as the years went by.

Living in Sausalito he worked at a car wash in Corte Madera for a time, whose owner had a house on the hill and would watch the workers through a telescope. However, most of the time while Henry worked his way through school he worked in a can company in the South Bay. Once he was seriously injured and should have died except for a piece of metal that accidentally blocked a machine from slicing his head open. Several times in his life Henry had chances to sue or settle with companies who had wronged him, but never wanted to. It just wasn’t his style. He refused to see himself as a victim even if it meant financial gain.

Henry wanted to be a civil engineer, to build roads, and majored in math at San Jose City College. When applying for a job at Lockheed he found out that he could go into computer operations (and later programming) there instead, with a bigger salary and free training. Henry’s love of logic and problem-solving were a natural for programming, and he excelled in this field. He took a break from his job to finish his undergraduate degree at UC Berkeley. This was the late sixties and Henry saw the National Guard on top of the student union with rifles pointed down at Sproul Plaza, a police car rolling down the hill from the library right past Dwinelle and Valley Life Sciences, and had opportunities to smell tear gas on campus and to save a shell casing he found one day. Later, walking this campus with me for years, he would often notice the differences. The buildings were the same but the scene was much different. In those years Sproul Plaza was full of small crowds having individual conversations about the war, the peace movement, and other political subjects. Today there are booths student groups have to disseminate literature, and most students walk on by. Henry was in the A1 draft group, but luckily was not sent to Vietnam.

After Berkeley his job at Lockheed was no longer available and he took a pay cut to go and work at Southern Pacific. Later he went to work at Fireman’s Fund Insurance, where he would stay for 27 years until retiring in 2001. He developed a system, Lucas, named after the Lucas Valley Campus where his office was, in his spare time as a response to a need he saw users had. This, originally unauthorized, system became popular among users. Despite later efforts by the management to get rid of this now-"legacy" system, no newer system actually did everything that was available in Lucas and in the end Lucas outlived Henry's tenure with Fireman's Fund, and even Henry himself. Henry preferred to write programs in the SAS computer language. At a special luncheon for Henry when a linguistic question came up about whether or not you could say something in English, I said “not in English but you can in your native language” to which someone responded “What is your native language, Henry? SAS?” Henry had risen through the corporate ranks to become manager, but when the company laid off a large number of employees he returned to the technical side as a "systems specialist." It was the technical work that he really loved. He always wanted to find out what users needed and design systems to help them. In his career as in his personal life, Henry's main source of fulfillment was helping others. Towards the end of his career especially, he was increasingly apathetic towards corporate life and could recognize the patterns. New leader comes in with new ideas and sweeps away the old guard and some of what they did. Later a newer leader comes with his own new ideas and people. Some fall from grace others rise. Their new ideas are cyclical and long-time employees recognize the "new" ideas as ones tried before and discarded by a previous generation of progressive executive. He was later happy to get the opportunity to leave the company to spend time with his family instead, but it was a good run all in all.

Henry was a faithful and loving husband to Glenda for 26 years. He supported her through many incarnations including housewife, paralegal, psychology student, social worker, and finally owner of her own personnel agency. He also supported her over the years as she struggled with alcoholism, finally dying of cirrhosis of the liver in 1990.

In widowerhood Henry discovered aerobics, spent time reconnecting with his family in Mexico (including three of his nieces, pictured above), and dated. Henry and I first met in November of 1991 when I served a pizza to him and the painter, Pascal Cucaro, who was a friend and neighbor of Henry’s. The impression made during that one chance encounter was a lasting one, and we noticed each other around Sausalito without making eye contact (though later we had the same memories of being in particular places at the same times). When he returned to the bar where I worked in April of 1992 we immediately started talking as though we were old friends.

Our first date was the Mountain Play on Mount Tamalpais, in the amphitheatre where we would later wed. Our first Christmas together I gave him a mountain bike, which was later to become a passion of his---riding up Mount Tam, stopping at the West Point Inn, and continuing to the summit or down the other side. He rode all over the headlands and Mount Tam. He would ride the grade between Mill Valley and Corte Madera, on top of a ridge visible from our bedroom, and would call me on his cell phone and flash his flashlight so Erin and I could see where he was. He took Erin along lots of times as well. He always asked that his ashes be scattered on Mt. Tam, and days before his death, hallucinating from high ammonia levels, he described being on the mountain and looking at the valley below.

Henry loved camping, fires, the out-of-doors, hiking, biking, and exercise of all sorts. He loved shrimp (especially scampi, or al mojo de ajo---but not with the heads on), little cokes in glass bottles, papaya, mango, pastries (especially almond croissants and pan dulce), mazapanes, Nutella, and P'tit Basque. He enjoyed drinking Squirt, partly because of the taste and partly because of childhood memories when his father owned a bottling plant in Tepic and his father told him that he was the little boy depicted in the Squirt advertising, something totally believable since Henry was the rare blond kid in Mexico (just like the Squirt boy), and after all his father did bottle it. Besides his famous zest for eating, Henry loved gadgets and new technology, shopping, history, reading the newspaper over a slow cup of coffee, the music of Javier Solis. He couldn’t stop himself from reading the policiaca section of the Oaxaca newspaper, even though it bears a warning that doing so is a risk to your mental health. He liked watching Fox News for laughs, to see what the unfair and unbalanced lies of the day were, and to tease me since he knew I’d rather he watch porn than that smut. But more than anything, he loved me and Erin. We loved to stay in bed all day on the weekend, and then go out for a nice meal around 6pm. We loved to take walks. We loved to watch our baby grow and see her achievements every day. Every night we would ask each other what cute things she had done that day and share them with each other, the only two people who would appreciate them equally. Henry was a very happy person who enjoyed living in every sense of the word.

Henry was a can-do man. He would rarely accept help from others, even if he could have used it. He was capable in every sense and took care of things. His role was to provide help, not receive it. He was the most generous person I have ever known. He would go into credit card debt to lend money to others when he didn’t have the cash to lend. He would give things away or sell them at a much lower price than he could have received. He would stop to give strangers a jump start. If he saw that a family in the grocery store couldn’t pay for their groceries, he would try to pay for them. Whenever he thought of getting rich, his first plans were to help others in his family and social circle. He was generosity personified. He had friends from all social backgrounds, rich and poor, Europeans and indigenous Americans, and he was the same person with all of them. In Mexico especially, people were often surprised at how socioeconomic status didn’t seem to matter to him at all. He was mostly an up-beat person, though rarely he could be moody too, especially when worrying about cancer. He had a nice, and unique, sense of humor. One memory I especially like is what he would always say when driving around an unfamiliar area and accidentally ending up in a cul-de-sac rather than a through street---“un pinche culo de saco” (‘a(nother) fucking asshole of a sack’) which is what it sounds like it would mean in Spanish, due to slightly different meanings between French and Spanish. His quirky sense of humor is remembered by anyone who knew him well, including several coworkers who recall the days when Henry owned a limousine and would take them out to lunch in it. He and Glenda both had special caps they would wear whenever driving it so they would look like chauffers, and they furthered the rouse with their "car phony," a fake car phone which in those days was a sign of status if real.

All his life Henry had a mysterious ethnic identity. He had an accent in English, but it wasn’t heavy enough to give away that it was Spanish. People often thought he was German. Physically, his mother always thought that he took after her Austrian father. He was born in the US, raised in Mexico, and returned to the US as a teenager. He was a mixture of both cultures. In Mexico, both as a youth and later as a visitor, people often thought he was a foreigner because of his height, his fair skin, and later his mode of dress and speech. In the US as a teenager, Chicanos who didn’t know him personally often thought he was a poser. Once when showing up to a party with some Mexican-American high school friends, some Chicano gang members wanted to knife him because they thought he was an anglo crasher. A mutual friend had to explain that he was from Mexico and was still just learning English. Ironically, although fellow Latinos didn't often recognize him as one of their own at first glance, he had seen more of Mexico, both in his youth and as an adult, than most Mexicans ever see. But truly he was a unique sort of mixture of the two cultures. In the US he adopted the anglicized version of his name, Henry Azcona. I always teased him that in the US too his name should be Enrique because this is what it said on his US birth certificate. Seeing his transcript from San Jose City College I noticed semester after semester of B-, mostly C’s, and some D’s under the name “Henry Azcona” but one semester in the middle had mostly A’s and B’s and was under the name “Enrique Azcona.” I told him, “look how much better you did when you embraced your true identity for once” and he told me, “no, that was the semester that they got my records mixed up with a Filipino student by the same name.” My mother sent Erin a stuffed animal called Henry the Hippo which said things in English if you squeezed one wrist and Spanish if you squeezed the other. One of the funniest things I remember was Henry coming in with this hippo on top of his head one day and alternately squeezing each wrist so it was saying “Hi, my name’s Henry-Hola mi nombre es Enrique- Hi, my name’s Henry-Hola mi nombre es Enrique- Hi, my name’s Henry-Hola mi nombre es Enrique-“ and then he said, in a fake strained voice like Captain Kirk fighting off an alien’s mind hold, “This…is what goes on in my brain…all the time.”

Henry always enjoyed seeing people's reactions to his age. Once in an amusement park they guessed my age at 29 and his at 30. Our real ages were then 23 and 51. Later whenever he took Erin to Six Flags he would always go to a similar booth, checking to see if it was a new person guessing the ages or not. He would always win Erin a free stuffed animal there, guaranteed.

Henry and I became a couple in the summer of 1992, almost 14 years ago. From the first time I spent the night at his house, we never spent another night apart until I went to do research in Mexico, and it was only when in Mexico that I ever was separated from him. And these times were not by choice, or at least not by preference. He went everywhere I went. After Erin was born we made it a special point never to be separated as a family. If the LSA conference was in Boston, he and Erin went sight-seeing in Boston, if I went to the WAIL conference in Santa Barbara, we all went there. And once Erin was born we always went to do fieldwork in Mexico together, never being separated until February 7th, 2006, when on my birthday he had to fly home for emergency medical attention. We believed in family togetherness and never wanted to be apart, even for a few days. Amor de lejos ~ Amor de pendejos. We had no secrets, no separate bank accounts, no unknown email passwords. He took care of me like he was my father, cleaning for me, providing for me, but treated me as his equal. He was progressive enough to be a feminist and a liberal who fully supported women’s new roles in society, but old-school enough to still want to protect and provide for. We were partners in every sense of the word. Every success I have had in my career and in every other aspect of my life has had him as the foundation. Without his love, his support, the feeling that I had him even if everything else fell apart, I couldn’t have done everything I did, and it will be hard to go on now without him. He left the corporate world in 2001 so that he could be a full-time dad. This enabled me to finish my dissertation, take a postdoc in Australia and travel the world, without putting my daughter in day care and without breaking up the family---what happens all too often in academic life. Every day he took Erin to the Zoo, the Museum, the Aquarium, the park, or stayed at home with her. He always had memberships to every kids’ place in whatever city we were living in, whether the Bay Area, Melbourne, or Oaxaca. Everywhere, and especially in Mexico, women marveled that it was possible to find a man that would clean the house, treat his wife like a princess, and take on the responsibility of full-time child care---and do it so well. I took it for granted sometimes, but seeing others’ responses reminded me to appreciate it.

Henry loved to travel. He had been to Europe twice before and to Florida and Chicago. Together we visited about two thirds of the states in the Mexican Republic, and in only the last year and a half we had been to France, Monaco, Italy, Ireland (see right), Japan (see below), Australia, and Disneyland. We had hoped to visit together Thailand, Spain (where he had visited before) and South America in the next two years, but that will never be now.

Some things about Henry drove me crazy. He was always late. He would rather look at a map than keep his eyes open for a street sign. If he saw something that needed cleaning while you were on your way out of the house to an appointment, forget it. In financial negotiations he would always open up his mouth with a price that was too charitable to the other side. He got our daughter hooked on junk food even before she knew enough to ask for it herself---he just knew that she would love ice cream and french fries and cookies and coke if she tried them and I think he just couldn't wait to see the joy on her face so he would offer them before she even knew she wanted them. He would still carry Erin, or take heavy things out of my hands even if his back hurt or if he really shouldn't have. He watched too much crap on television. His love of lulling over the paper in a cafe was too slow-paced for me. He was also very impulsive, but I liked being impulsive anyway so I didn't mind too much. Needless to say, I wouldn't mind if I was late to every appointment from now till the rest of my life if I could have him back, and I'd even read the map on the way there while stuffing Erin's mouth with doughnuts. I'd do anything to have him back.

Since 1998 we had experienced what it is to live with prostate cancer. On January 4th, 2006, Henry got a pain in his side. When metastatic cancer was discovered in his liver on February 1st, we all suspected the prostate cancer. Over the following two weeks though, things progressed so rapidly that when he died on February 16th the prime suspect was pancreatic cancer. According to the final pathology report, while it is possible that the cancer in his liver and elsewhere was an agressive variant of the prostate cancer, it is more likely (though unconfirmable) that it was small cell lung cancer, unrelated to the prostate cancer. Thus it seems that, like his father before him, Henry died from a smoking-related illness. This happened even though he was never addicted. He characterized himself as a former light, occasional, and/or social smoker. He never went through the famously difficult task of "quitting." In the first year I lived with him he had an antique box where he kept cigarrettes, but only once did it occur to him to actually smoke one. Between his first fifteen years at home in Mexico and his twenty-six year marriage to Glenda, he had also lived with smokers for 41 of his 62 years. Nevertheless, he did not see himself as a person with a serious risk for lung cancer. He never saw it coming.

Henry's prostate cancer had always been asymptomatic and he suffered physically from cancer (as opposed to cancer treatments) for only six weeks of his life. There are 62-year-olds who are worn out and suffering in one way or another from assorted ailments and the drugs that treat them, and who are going to live another 20 or 30 years, and then there are 62-year-olds in the prime of their lives, strong, healthy, able to keep up with their small children, and dying of cancer. Henry was the latter. The benefit of the prostate cancer was that it prepared us for this eventuality and taught us to not take our utopian life together for granted. The benefit of the lung cancer was that it wasn't too fast---not like a heart attack or a car crash on a bad day, and it wasn't too slow---no lingering in pain month after month. As you can glimpse in the paragraphs above, this man lived a very full and happy life and those of us who knew him are among the luckiest people in the world. At 3:50pm on February 16, 2006, he took his final breath at home in his own bedroom. I was by his side, stroking his hair and thanking him for the wonderful life he had given to me and to his daughter.

Henry Azcona was an exceedingly generous, caring, devastatingly handsome, funny, strong, interesting, self-reliant, positive, easy-going, and smart person. He is survived by his mother, María Weber de Azcona; ten siblings (each of whose own stories he loved to tell) in Guadalajara, Texas, Arizona, and California: Hank, Teresa, Lupe, Miguel, Benji, Carolina, José Luis, Juan, Maru, and Tuty; twenty-eight nieces and nephews, some with their own children; and by his wife Rosemary (i.e. me) and daughter Erin Nikte’ha'.

I have many things to be proud of in my life, but there is nothing at all that I am prouder of than being the wife of Henry Azcona and the mother of his child. Henry Azcona was my “Papito Bonito,” my “Don Quicote” (not Quixote). He was my life, my love, and my happiness. I will love him forever. When you are loved the way that Erin and I were loved, the feeling doesn't go away when the person dies. We know we'll have his love forever too, and we are grateful.

The description above was first posted on February 17th, 2006, the day following Henry's death. I have made minor changes and a few small additions (mostly about his final diagnosis) as of late 2006. Below are older pictures from this page, as it appeared when Henry was alive. Many of them were selected and captioned by Henry himself. Those with their own photos or memories of Henry are invited to send them to his wife and daughter at azconabeams@gmail.com

1959 vs. 2002

On Thanksgiving day 2000 along came our little bundle of joy

Back then she slept a lot more.

Morning in Greoux Les Bains, France

Bundoora park, Melbourne

Bundoora park, Melbourne

Captain Cook's cottage, Melbourne

Botanical Gardens, Melbourne

Boat ride on the river Seine, Paris

Garden in Fitzroy park, Melbourne

Erin's 4th birthday in Greoux, France

Grandmother's town...Torino, Italy

Venice, Italy

Oaxaca, Mexico

Versailles, France

Train from Nice to Digne Les Bains, France

Gas station helper

These days Henry mostly spends his time chasing Erin

Hard to believe we were all that little once. Here Henry is as a baby with his mother and sister, Teresa

His father Don Enrique

Henry's father's cousin was Juan Sánchez Azcona, a journalist/activist who was a friend of Madero's and became part of Mexican History in the Revolution of 1910. He is on the right in this photograph.

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