Terry: Italian from Raton had greater good at heart

He might have been an Italian from Raton at the core, but he became a true Portalesano long before his life in the desert ran out on Aug. 20 at age 81.

link Karl Terry

I really didn’t know Tony Gennaro closely, but like a lot of other people who got acquainted with him, if you chatted with him once you felt like old friends. When you saw Tony again that’s just the way he made you feel — like an old friend.

Before I knew the man I knew the legend from television. That’s right, Tony was the star of his own television show and quite the celebrity — at least within the broadcast range of KENW-TV in eastern New Mexico.

The desert wildlife biologist at Eastern New Mexico University hosted the education program “Mr. Hank” that featured his American Kestrel falcon Hank.

Gennaro featured a couple of different species each week on the show. He would put together footage from the field and bring in specimens, sometimes live, sometimes pickled to teach his audience.

Each week a panel of kids from the fifth and sixth grades from schools in the area appeared with Gennaro and Hank. The interaction and levity he had on the show was a big hit. His hip beatnik mannerisms and looks along with the zebra stripe painted rig he drove across the screen in the opening credits put the intrigue level over the moon for kids growing up in the 1960s.

Each week we received a videotape of the program in our fifth-grade class and watched it and talked about it afterward. Gennaro had a way that truly inspired lots of youngsters toward thinking about science and ecology in a well-grounded fact-based way.

I was never fortunate enough to have Gennaro in any of my classes at ENMU, but he instilled a curiosity in me to always reach to find out more about the creatures around me.

When I got back to Portales I soon found we had something in common; I was a journalist with a yen for wildlife biology and he was a retired wildlife biologist with a passion and knack for writing.

I used him as a story source frequently. Sometimes it was just to bounce a quick question off him to debunk a tall tale someone was telling the newspaper guy and other times it was a little bigger.

I was personal witness to Tony orchestrating the removal of huge flocks of grackles from the trees in the downtown area — twice, some years apart.

Tony required 15-20 volunteers for the operations, which were part women’s dorm panty raid and part D-Day in the scope of their planning, meaning both meticulous and ridiculous. Tony was in charge completely and relished his part as the field general.

Whether it was teaching students, ad-libbing through the Kiwanis Pet Show every year at the fair, organizing a swim meet, providing for families at Christmastime or selling petunias to raise money for all of those efforts, he always had the greater good inside that big Italian heart.

Karl Terry writes for Clovis Media Inc. Contact him at:

[email protected]