Cross & Crescent

Growing up in San Antonio, Texas, John Quinones (St Mary’s 1974) and his family were so poor that he used to shine shoes in front of downtown bars to make money.

One summer, things got so tough that the family joined a caravan of migrant workers headed to Michigan and Ohio to harvest cherries and tomatoes.

By the age of 12, Quinones became an expert cherry and tomato picker. While he was glad he could help his family, he had a dream of making something more of his life and one day making his parents proud.

“It was in those cherry rows in Michigan I decided I wanted to do something that wasn’t such hard labor,” Quinones says. “My dad looked at me one morning at 6 a.m. while we were picking cherries and said, ‘So do you want to do this rest of your life or do you want to educate yourself?’”

Becoming a Reporter

Quinones decided he wanted to attend college but needed to find a way to pay for its tuition. While in high school, he found a government funded program called Upward Bound.

The program gives remedial classes to high school students from the inner city and impoverished families who want to go to college.

“So you don’t immediately fail when you are a freshman in college, Upward Bound helps prepare you,” Quinones explains. “In the summer of every year of high school, I took classes to better prepare me for college. I also took classes every Saturday during the school year.”

Quinones attended St. Mary’s University, where he took many of his Upward Bound classes. The first semester was paid for by the program, but he had to work three jobs to help pay for rest of college.

“I worked in the geology department, the cafeteria, and for a pharmacy, Blanco Drugs,” Quinones says. “Not too many people know this, but while I was at St. Mary’s I also had a rock band. We would play at Quinceaneras and weddings.”

What really drove Quinones to do all this work was his dream of becoming a broadcaster.

“I had a dream to someday be like Geraldo Rivera, the correspondent on 20/20,” Quinones says, “He was doing great stories, uncovering corruption and social injustice.”

When the owner of Blanco Drugs learned of Quinones’ dream, he introduced him to the general manager of local radio station KKYX.

Quinones was hired as an intern, but admits parts of his job weren’t impressive.

“It’s really a Texas thing, but the DJs had horses in the back of the radio station that they would use in rodeos and parades,” he explains. “So part of my job was to take care of the horses.”

At night though, he would go into the studios to read copy and newspaper articles in an effort to improve his pronunciation and delivery. The hard work paid off; following graduation he got a job at a Houston radio station. A few years later, he secured a job as a television reporter in Chicago.

ABC Comes Calling

In early 1980s, there were many civil wars going in Central America. Nicaragua and El Salvador were frequently covered by the national media.

Bill Steward, an English-speaking correspondent from ABC News, was sent from New York to Nicaragua to cover one of these wars.

His translator unfortunately looked like a leftist rebel. When the two were stopped at a military checkpoint, they were both killed.

It was at this point that ABC News decided to hire Spanish-speaking reporters who could better understand their environment and soldiers, should they encounter them.

At the time, Quinones was a local reporter in Chicago and had just won a regional Emmy Award. ABC took notice.

In 1982, he became one of the youngest correspondents ever hired by ABC to work on Peter Jennings’s “World News Tonight.”

“I was based in Miami, but really lived in Central America,” says Quinones. “In the 1980s I covered the Contra war in Nicaragua, the Leftist insurgence in El Salvador, and the U.S. invasion of Panama. Panama, 1989, was one of the scariest moments I have had as a correspondent.”

During the invasion the Panama, soldiers who were loyal to the dictator Manuel Noriega attacked the Marriott hotel where all the reporters were staying. They took 40 American reporters hostage at gunpoint.

“I was hiding under my bed with my producer because we heard them taking out people kicking and screaming,” Quinones says. “That night we were spared, as they never did come into my room. But my producer, Robert Campos, and I spent eight scary hours waiting to be taken. Out the windows, we could see our colleagues being taken at gunpoint.”

Though the two made it through that night, Campos was taken the next day when the soldiers returned for more hostages. He was held 12 hours and then released.

Quinones Goes Primetime

In 1991, Quinones was hired to work as a co-anchor and correspondent on ABC’s “Primetime Live” to do long-form journalism, requiring him to often spend time undercover.

He did one story where they were paying Mexican and Asian immigrants to have surgeries they didn’t need, so the medical practitioners could collect from insurance companies.

“They would pay someone $1,000 to have a colonoscopy and then turn around and bill the insurance companies $20,000,” Quinones explains. “It was a multi-million dollar scam that the FBI called us in on to participate with them on.”

Quinones offered himself as someone willing to have an operation, hoping to illustrate the story. He was wearing a hidden camera and other cameras were strategically positioned to cover what happened.

“I took it all the way to where I was in the operating room. I put on the robe and the nurses were getting ready to administer the anesthesia before I finally said I don’t need the operation,” Quinones says. “I said I had to get something from my car, but came back with my camera crew.”

When the doctors recognized him, they were stunned that this Mexican patient was with ABC News.

“I get so excited about doing those stories,” he says. “I love what I do. Journalism is my life, and it’s all I ever wanted to do. The adrenaline gets pumping, it’s exciting.”

His favorite story is when he swam across the Rio Grande River as a Mexican immigrant trying to get a job in the United States. He paid a smuggler $300 for a social security card and fake birth certificate, got on an inner tube, and swam across river.

The camera crew was hiding in bushes on the American side filming the whole thing. The package won an Emmy.

“It was my favorite one,” Quinones says. “I will never forget the words of my producer, ‘John, you are the only Mexican to swim across the Rio Grande and then go to his suite at the Hyatt Regency Hotel.’”

Quinones says he loves doing stories that involve real people and thinking about the good that comes from exposing whatever crime or corruption is occurring. Whether it’s children living in Colombian sewers, slave children working as sugarcane cutters in the Dominican Republic, or the last vestiges of the Mayan civilization living in destitute.

If he and other reporters can shed light on those dark corners of the world, it makes all the undercover and dangerous work worthwhile.

“You have given a voice to people who may never have access to that kind of exposure,” Quinones says.

Quinones and the Fraternity

Quinones was attracted to Lambda Chi Alpha because it was involved in the community.

He felt this involvement was a good and honorable thing, as opposed to other fraternities that cared more about drinking and getting wild.

Quinones’s time with Lambda Chi was very limited, but he was then, and continues to be, a proud member. Working three jobs made it difficult for him to get too involved, but he attributes much of his success to the Fraternity.

“I did learn a great deal about friendship, loyalty, and respect,” Quinones says, “Lambda Chi Alpha had a lot to with the forming of the young 19-year-old kid from San Antonio.”

In particular, he remembers the initiation ceremony, which he says was a pretty wild and moving event.

“I have never done anything like it. Afterward I had a real feeling of being a part of something that mattered.”