Word: agustins
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Times were hard in the little Spanish town of Santisteban del Puerto when young (30) Mayor Agustin Sanchez Lopez-Conesa took office in 1946. For two years straight, a searing drought had scorched the olive groves that were the town's only means of subsistence. More than 700 families were without work or food. "One day," recalls Don Agustin, "I came across the body of a worker, dead from starvation, lying in a ditch by the roadside. That decided it for me. There were too many rich people in my town for the poor to be dying of hunger...
...trooped to the microphone to sing and play in a two-hour broadcast over Mexico's 254 radio stations. All of the 50-odd songs they sang were the work of a gaunt, sad-eyed, scar-faced wisp of a man who watched from the wings. His name: Agustin Lara, who was celebrating the 25th anniversary of his career as Mexico's and Latin America's favorite composer...
...Agustin Lara has been called Mexico's Irving Berlin, though the parallel is more in output and popularity than in mood.* Inimitably latino, Lara is a composer of melancholy love songs who now single-mindedly says: "Woman is the reason for my existence." Since, like Berlin, he can neither read nor write music, he pecks out his tunes on a piano and lets others set them down. In this fashion he has written some 600 songs of love, of whispered reproach and moaning despair...
...party in honor of her first big picture. "Please come, Señor Lara," cooed María. "But I warn you that we have no piano. Just a guitar." Next day he sent her a snow-white piano and a card inscribed: "With all my respect to beauty, Agustin Lara." They were married...
...have ever heard such tributes to themselves as Lara did through his week-long anniversary. Five ex-Presidents of Mexico sent messages of congratulation. President Ruiz Cortines embraced the troubador, 53 this week, and said: "Work for Mexico, Agustin." Lara went from Mexico City to Veracruz and then on to Córdoba, traveling along whole blocks of flower-covered streets lined with schoolchildren while factory whistles blew and bells tolled. Last week, overflowing with Mexico's adulation, he pursued his lovelorn triumphal path to Havana...