Tony Castro (author)

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Tony Castro
Author Tony Castro
Born	Antonio Castro Jr. (1946-12-02)December 2, 1946 Waco, Texas, U.S.
Occupation	Author, Journalist
Education	Baylor University (BA) Harvard University (Nieman Fellow)
Period	1961–
Literary movement	New Journalism
Spouse	Renee LaSalle, 1984
Children	2
Website
https://tonycastro.com

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Tony Castro (born December 2, 1946) is an American journalist, historian, Hemingway scholar, and author. Widely traveled and having written on a broad range of topics, he is perhaps best known for his career as a Los Angeles journalist, and as the author of several books, among them a controversial civil rights history of the Chicano Movement and biographies of Nobel laureate Ernest Hemingway and baseball legend Mickey Mantle.

Castro was among the first reporters in America to write extensively about race and ethnicity in presidential politics, dating back to his undergraduate days at Baylor, when he reported on Robert F. Kennedy's quixotic 1968 California primary campaign in the Mexican American barrios of East Los Angeles and his friendship with farm labor leader Cesar Chavez. That reporting became a centerpiece of Castro's first book, Chicano Power: The Emergence of Mexican America, (E.P. Dutton,1974), which established him as one of the country's leading experts on Latinos in the United States.

In 1976, two years after the publication of Chicano Power, Castro was awarded a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard for a year of independent study.

Early life and education

The elder of two children of second and fifth generation Mexican Americans, Tony Castro was born in Waco, Texas. His paternal grandfather, José Ángel Castro, fought with revolutionary general Francisco Pancho Villa in the Mexican Revolution and immigrated to Webb County in South Texas. Castro's father, a decorated World War II Army veteran, played professional baseball in the Mexican League and later managed the laundry department at the VA Hospital in Waco. Castro's mother, María Emma Segovia Veracruz deCastro, a seamstress who specialized in making wedding dresses and formal gowns, was the great-great-granddaughter of a Mexican recipient of an 18th century land grant from the Spanish crown.

Castro attended Gurley Elementary School and South Junior High School where he was an editor of the student newspaper's Press Club and University High School where he was president of the National Honor Society and editor of his school newspaper. He graduated from Reicher Catholic High School where he won a state tennis championship in 1965, and received a journalism scholarship to Baylor University from which he graduated in 1969. During his 1976-77 Nieman Fellowship, Castro studied the Age of Napoleon under French history scholars Laurence Wylie and Inge and Stanley Hoffmann and also comparative literature under Homeric scholar Robert Fitzgerald and Mexican Nobel laureate Octavio Paz. He also taught a class on the New Journalism at Winthrop House and lectured on Latino Politics at the Harvard Institute of Politics.

Journalism

Castro was a columnist for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner and a political writer for the Los Angeles Daily News. Previously he was a writer for the Dallas Morning News and the Texas Observer and a national correspondent for The Washington Post

Over the course of more than forty years Castro also worked at the Dallas Times Herald, the Houston Post, the Temple Daily Telegram and Voxxi.com. He served briefly as editor of the Los Angeles Independent and the East L.A. Tribune. Castro's more extensive journalistic pieces have appeared in Inside Houston magazine, Sports Illustrated, the LA Weekly, the Los Angeles Times, Saturday Review magazine, and The Los Angeles Reader. Those stories included the 6,000-word feature The Baseball Presidency about George W. Bush's first year in office and his obsession with baseball and Mickey Mantle. Parts of that story were incorporated into Mantle: The Best There Ever Was. Castro's 4,000-word expose in the Los Angeles Daily News of then Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's fictitious narrative on which he built his political career in late 2006 led to a widespread re-evaluation that brought his rising star crashing to earth.

Castro's personal and professional papers, letters, and documents are archived at The Texas Collection Library at Baylor University and at Harvard.Academia.edu.

Early reporting

Tony Castro, far left, at 17, with Sen. Hubert H. Humphrey, 1964 campaign

Castro became a professional journalist at the age of fourteen when his hometown weekly, The Waco Citizen, hired him to report on high school sports, paying him ten cents per column inch. Soon he was writing the paper's obituaries and even reporting on the city council. In 1963, two days after the death of President Kennedy, Castro took a Greyhound bus to Dallas and wrote a story about the grief-stricken crowds at Dealey Plaza, the location of the assassination.

In 1964, while a senior in high school, he interviewed Minnesota Senator Hubert H. Humphrey, President Lyndon Johnson's 1964 running mate, as he campaigned on behalf of the Democratic national ticket in Texas. The Dallas Morning News published a story of the high school youngster interviewing Humphrey, which was picked up by The Associated Press for its wire service and reported by syndicated broadcaster Paul Harvey on his ABC News Radio show. Later that year, Castro, still only seventeen, was hired as a full-time reporter by the city's daily, the Waco Tribune-Herald.

The Washington Post

In 1971 as a White House Fellow in the Washington Journalism Center's national affairs reporting program,, Castro was assigned to The Washington Post, impressing its editor Benjamin Bradlee who hired him as the paper's Southwest national correspondent based in Dallas. In that position he continued to report on the Chicano Movement, on racial and ethnic discrimination against African and Mexican Americans in Texas and on Cesar Chavez's farm labor organizing campaign in the Southwest. Castro also produced several Latino civil rights documentaries for KERA-TV, the Dallas Public Broadcasting Service affiliate; published a landmark investigative series on conflicts of interest in interlocking directorships in the state’s biggest financial institutions and the exclusion of minorities and women; and uncovered major financial and campaign improprieties among Hispanic appointees in the Nixon administration that led to resignations and criminal convictions. Castro ultimately landed on an “enemies lists” of President Nixon’s re-election campaign.

Los Angeles Herald Examiner

In 1978, the acclaimed editor Jim Bellows hired Castro as a columnist at the Los Angeles Herald Examiner where he wrote about presidential politics, race relations, pop culture, immigration, Hollywood, Wall Street and foreign affairs. In the early 1980s, Castro reported on the civil wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua in English for the Herald Examiner and its sister Hearst newspapers throughout the U.S. and in Spanish for La Opinión in Los Angeles. Castro's reporting on the U.S. legacy in El Salvador narrowly missed winning a 1983 Pulitzer Prize for international affairs. When the Herald Examiner folded, Castro moved on to the staff of Sports Illustrated magazine, then to the writing staff of director Michael Mann’s NBC TV dramatic series Crime Story.

Books

Mickey Mantle

In 1971, while a young reporter in Dallas, Castro befriended the retired New York Yankee slugger Mickey Mantle with whom he often played golf and drank. Their friendship became central to the biographical trilogy Castro wrote about the Hall of Famer: Mickey Mantle: America's Prodigal Son (Brassey's Books, 2002); DiMag & Mick: Sibling Rivals, Yankee Blood Brothers (Lyons Press, 2016); and Mantle: The Best There Ever Was (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019). The New York Times wrote of Castro's first book in the trilogy that "Mantle's story has been told by others, though not with the detail in Mickey Mantle: America's Prodigal Son. Longtime Mantle friend Tom Catal, retired curator of the Mickey Mantle Museum in Cooperstown, N. Y., was familiar with Castro's exhaustive research and wrote in a review:

The book captures Mick as no other book ever has or likely will because Tony Castro knew him as few others ever have. They formed a personal friendship in 1970, not long after Mick’s retirement and right after Tony had graduated from college — and it was a friendship built not on Tony being some obsessed fan or even a prying sportswriter. It was a friendship built on golf and them playing almost daily on golf courses around Dallas, Texas, where they were both living at the time.
The result is the greatest baseball biography around, and I think I’m in an ideal place to judge as a friend of Mick’s, as a baseball collector and historian, and as a friend to countless other baseball legends. In fact, it was through one of those — Pete Rose, our mutual friend — through whom I met Tony in Cooperstown. And I know Pete shares my sentiments. Mickey Mantle: America’s Prodigal Son is the unquestioned bible of Mickey Mantle books.

However, it was not until several years after the publication of Mickey Mantle: Prodigal Son, that Castro, almost accidentally, stumbled upon the pièce de résistance that had eluded Mantle biographers for decades: Holly Brooke, the mysterious New York showgirl who had been Mantle's girlfriend in Manhattan during his 1951 rookie season and then vanished. In 2006, Brooke's nephew introduced her to Castro. She was in her late 80s, lived next to Trump Tower near Central Park, and had first-hand memories of Mantle, Joe DiMaggio, Billy Martin, Roger Maris, and other Yankees of Mickey's era. It was a mother-lode of new material that Castro used in DiMag & Mick and Mantle: The Best There Ever Was. Castro, in turn, introduced Brooke to her favorite writer, Tom Wolfe who had befriended Castro when he taught a course on the New Journalism at Harvard. A baseball fan who in the early 1950s had a pitching tryout with the New York Giants, Wolfe read an early draft of Mantle: The Best There Ever Was before his 2018 death and called it "an American literary stylistic masterpiece... Tony Castro paints Mickey Mantle with the pinstripe magic of Garcia Marquez phantasmagoria and realism..."

Ernest Hemingway

Castro's early fascination with Ernest Hemingway intensified in 1967 when he made an unauthorized visit to Cuba, while it was under U.S. sanctions, with members of the then fledgling La Raza Unida Party and the New Left group Students for a Democratic Society. They met with Cuban Prime Minister Fidel Castro, toured the Caribbean island and visited Hemingway's confiscated Finca Vigía estate in the San Francisco de Paula Ward of Havana. Castro wrote about that visit in his biography of the author's final years, Looking for Hemingway: Spain, The Bullfights and a Final Rite of Passage (Lyons Press, 2016).

The book was based on Castro's first-hand research in Cuba, Florida, Idaho and Spain, as well as years of conversations and interviews with his late friend Teo Davis. He happened to be the son and heir of Bill and Anne Davis, wealthy American expatriates in Spain who lavishly entertained celebrities and the literati, including Hemingway in 1959 when the famous author struggled for sanity and survival as he was about to turn 60 and headed toward self destruction. In calling it one of the best books of 2016, Boston's NPR news station WBUR said Looking for Hemingway is "filled with famous cameos and the ghost of the Davis’ son, Teo, who haunts its pages."

Titles

• Mantle: The Best There Ever Was, Rowman & Littlefield, 2017, ISBN 978-1538122211 Search this book on .
• Gehrig & The Babe: The Friendship & The Feud, Triumph Books, 2018, ISBN 978-1629372518 Search this book on .
• Looking for Hemingway: Spain, the Bullfights, and a Final Rite of Passage, Lyons Press, 2016, ISBN 978-1493018215 Search this book on .
• DiMag & Mick: Sibling Rivals, Yankee Blood Brothers, Lyons Press, 2016, ISBN 978-1630761240 Search this book on .
• The Prince of South Waco: American Dreams and Great Expectations, Prodigal Son Books, 2018, ISBN 978-1475983906 Search this book on .
• Mickey Mantle: America's Prodigal Son, Brassey's Books, 2002, ISBN 978-1574883848 Search this book on .
• Chicano Power: The Emergence of Mexican America, E.P. Dutton, 1974, ISBN 978-0841503212 Search this book on .

Personal life

Castro and his wife Renee LaSalle live in Los Angeles with their black Labrador retriever Jeter. Their two grown sons also live in Southern California.

Honors

A First Amendment rights advocate, Castro sat on the Steering Committee of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press from shortly after its inception in the 1970s. He also was on the board of the Greater Houston Human Relations Commission. He won numerous reporting awards from the Headliners Club, The Associated Press Managing Editors Association, the Press Clubs of Dallas and Los Angeles, and the Hispanic Publishers of America. In 2010 he was elected to the board of directors of the Los Angeles Press Club

Castro was the first recipient of the Charles D. Johnson Journalism Scholarship, named for the founder of the Journalism Department at Baylor University. Active in journalism since his youth, Castro as a senior at Reicher Catholic High School was president of both the Texas High School Press Association, sponsored by Texas Woman's University in Denton, Tex., and the Central Texas High School Press Association, sponsored by Baylor.

In 1971, Castro was awarded a national affairs fellowship at the Washington Journalism Center, a nonprofit founded in 1968 by W.M. Kiplinger to recruit promising young American journalists and giving them a six-month fellowship and national political reporting education in Washington's political atmosphere.

Bibliography

• Chicano Power: The Emergence of Mexican America (1974, nonfiction)
• Mickey Mantle: America's Prodigal Son (2002, nonfiction)
• The Prince of South Waco: American Dreams and Great Expectations (2013, nonfiction)
• DiMag & Mick: Sibling Rivals, Yankee Blood Brothers (2016, nonfiction)
• Looking for Hemingway: Spain, The Bullfights and a Final Rite of Passage (2016, nonfiction)
• Gehrig & The Babe: The Friendship and The Feud (2018), nonfiction)
• Mantle: The Best There Ever Was (2019, nonfiction)
• "The Confessions of St. Con Safos", Tony Castro, Nuestro magazine, April 1978, pages 49-53]
• "Villaraigosa: The Man, The Myth", Los Angeles Daily News, Nov. 18, 2006.
• "Eli Broad: The King of L.A.", Los Angeles Daily News", April 8, 2007.
• "The Baseball Presidency: The Making of George W. Bush", May 2001, Inside Houston magazine.

External links

• Audio interview of Tony Castro by Jeremy Schaap, The Sporting Life, ESPN Radio
• Audio interview of Tony Castro by Chris Mad Dog Russo, Mad Dog Radio, SiriusXM
• Part 1 Audio interview of Tony Castro by Dino Costa, 590, The Fan Radio Show
• Audio interview of Tony Castro by Dino Costa, 590, The Fan Radio Show
• Video interview of Tony Castro by Mary Senter, WISD-TV
• Video trailer for Mantle: The Best There Ever Was
• Video trailer for DiMag & Mick
• 2016 interview of Tony Castro for Looking for Hemingway
• Official website
• Amazon Author Page
• Twitter
• Portfolio
• 2019 audio interview of Tony Castro for Rowman & Littlefield, publisher of Mantle: The Best There Ever Was
• Tony Castro's America podcast: Jackie Robinson

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