Today is my uncle Failo’s birthday. He was born in 1927 and is the sixth son of my grandparents Antonio and Zeferina Diaz. He was a wonderful man, and I always remember him smiling and joking. He never seemed to have a harsh word for anyone. He lived in Needles with his wife Armida and his children Dante, Clarissa and David, and was a civic leader there and very well respected throughout the community. He was quite a guy! I remember very clearly the day he and tia Armida took me with them to Sears when they were visiting Tucson one year. It was around the time that Sears had just opened, around 1965. They bought me a hamburger at the lunch counter there and it came with fries, in a little boat with an American flag on it. I’ll never forget that. Tia Armida has the softest, sweetest voice, and I remember how nice she was to me that day. Another time, years later around 1982, I took my dad to visit his brothers in Needles, and my car broke down along the way, just outside Yucca, Arizona. Luckily for us, there was a motel a mile or two away that we had just passed down the road, and I called my tio Failo in the middle of the night from the phone booth there and asked him to come and get us, which he did. The next day, he fixed my water pump for me and we were able to continue our little trip. I wasn’t much into fixing cars, and he expressed some annoyance with me because I didn’t want to get near all that yucky, oily mess, but he didn’t hold it against me for long. Like I said, he was quite a guy. He was everyone’s favorite tio.