WHEN I WAS A WANNABE DEBATE champion in junior high school, I met my match in a girl whom I began calling Caroline. That wasn't her name. It was Carolyn. But this was 1961. John F. Kennedy had just become president, and his family, including his young daughter Caroline, was on almost every magazine cover in the world.
So if I was going to lose a debate title to a girl, I was insistent that she be someone named Caroline.
And Carolyn Quintero didn't seem to mind.
"If Caroline Kennedy is someone who reminds you of me, you'll never forget me," she said.
I was fourteen, a very immature fourteen. I didn't know what to say to her. We became pals in speech class but didn't see each other much outside that classroom. Then I changed junior high schools in the middle of the ninth grade, and I saw her only once -- at that year's speech and debate tournament where we each won champion's ribbons, though we didn't compete against each other.
As I said, this was the 1960s. It was not a friendly period in public schools in Texas for Latinos. Dropout rates were scandalous. In my hometown of about 100,000 residents in Waco, Texas, I knew only one Latino who had gone on to attend college, a standout All-State baseball player who had been recruited to Baylor. But there was no one else, certainly no women. As golf pro champion Lee Treviño once said, "To succeed in Texas then, you had to be 'Super Mex.'"
I hoped Caroline would help change that. In high school I received a beautiful letter of friendship and encouragement from her, and we may have spoken on the phone once or twice. But I think we were both too self-immersed in our own struggles to break the stereotypes, not to mention the landmines of growing up ethnically and culturally different in a small world that had little understanding or empathy toward anyone outside the homogeneity of the time.
So I lost track of Caroline, though she was right. Having christened her with that name, I would never forget her. A few years later, while in Washington D. C. on a book tour, I attended a cocktail party at the home of famed Washington Post editor Ben Bradley in Georgetown. Whom should I see while I was getting out of a taxi? Former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy with her two children -- John and, yes, Caroline -- leaving the home of a Kennedy administration friend who happened to live on the same street.
Caroline Quintero came immediately to mind. Of course, she did. As she did again several years later when I was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard, having lunch at Winthrop House, one of the residential dormitories for undergraduates. A young lady sat down across from me and introduced herself to those of us at the table.
It was 18-year-old Caroline Kennedy, an incoming freshman.
Caroline Quintero... that is, Carolyn Quintero Lee, and I reconnected again in the Age of Facebook. We exchanged a friendship request and confirmation, but never spoke, either by phone or via message. Fortunately, I did tell her how smart and brilliant I thought she had been when I knew her, that I treasured the letter she had once sent me, and that I regretted not having stayed in touch because I'd never forgotten her. I received a smiley face emoji.
Sadly, Caroline, née Carolyn, passed away this morning. Carolyn, our mutual friend Rachel La Travis Coronado wrote, "walked thru the gates of heaven this morning peacefully. She now wears the wings of an Angel. She was such a gentle soul, my best friend."
Go out-debate them where it counts, Caroline.
