Members of the family of Joseph O. “Jose” Quintero. Clockwise from top left are Quintero’s grandson Nicholas “Nick” Quintero; his sons Leo and Joseph F .; his widow Gladys Baltz-Quintero; and his daughter Margaret Quintero Weber. (Adolphe Pierre-Louis / magazine)
They were playing hide and seek when they found the flag in a closet. It was wrapped around his staff and wrapped in a sheet.
“I thought it was my father’s weapon from the war,” said Joseph F. Quintero. “I was disappointed that it was a flag.”
But not just any flag. The American flag that Quintero and his siblings discovered as children was secretly made from fragments of material by their father Joseph O. “Jose” Quintero and other prisoners in a prison camp in Japan during World War II.
Quintero and his prisoners of war might have been tortured or killed if their Japanese guards discovered the flag made of blue denim, white linen, a red blanket, camouflage and courage.
The story of the flag is known to many today, but Jose never told his children about it.
“We didn’t hear about the flag until people started writing stories about it,” said Margaret Quintero Weber, Jose’s daughter.
Joseph Quintero said his father feared that if the military found out about the flag, they would take his pension away because the manufacture put the lives of his fellow prisoners at risk.
I recently wrote an article in a journal about the flag donated to the Smithsonian Institution by the family of the late Lieutenant General Edward Baca, former adjutant general of the New Mexico National Guard. Jose entrusted the flag and its history to Baca in the early 1990s.
I wondered what Jose’s family thought of the flag going to the Smithsonian.
And all I knew for sure about Jose was that he was born in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1918, made this flag in the prison camp during World War II, made this flag in the prison camp, left the army as a sergeant at the end of the war, moved to Albuquerque in 1946 and died here in November 2000 at the age of 82.
Who was this man who came up with the bold and dangerous plan for making flags?
Searching for answers led me to a chair in the shady and pleasant back yard of the North Valley house where Jose Quintero spent the last nine years of his life. Nearby sat Jose’s daughter Margaret, sons Joseph and Leo Quintero, grandson Nicholas “Nick”, Quinteros and Jose’s widow Gladys Ann Baltz-Quintero, 91. Joses and Gladys’ daughter Mary Tafoya could not be with us.
The family is excited that the flag will be in the Smithsonian.
“The Smithsonian will take good care of it and we have been told it will always be made available to the family when we visit,” Margaret said.
Joseph said he believed that displaying the flag in the Smithsonian will soothe his father’s conscience for keeping it in a closet for so many years.
Jose’s wife and children knew him as a happy, fun-loving, and compassionate man who was looking for people to help him.
“He was a joker,” said Margaret. “He loved making people laugh. My father always threw parties. “
“He liked to cook,” said Leo. “Enchiladas, tacos, tamales, posole, menudo.”
“He went to church on Sundays and brought someone to dinner,” said Joseph.
The man, who almost starved to death in the filthy prison camps, was apparently forced to make sure that those around him did not suffer. The family said Jose would pull up his white Ford pickup, ask someone if they needed a lift, and then take that person home for dinner.
“My daddy brought a lot of people to shower and bathe,” Margaret said.
Every now and then the memories were interrupted by a rushing train on the tracks west of the backyard.
Jose’s father, Faustino Quintero, worked for the Fort Worth railroad. He and his wife, Lorenza Olivas, were immigrants from Mexico, and Jose was the second oldest of their nine children. The family lived in railway wagons that the railway made available to its employees.
Margaret said her father dropped out of school after sixth grade to earn money to support his family. He worked on a chicken farm and dairy farm, and as a teenager got a job in a hospital where he first helped the cook, then cleaned rooms and drove ambulances.
Jose joined the army in 1941. After his capture in 1942, he nearly died of appendicitis while being transported on the ship to Japan. Fellow inmates performed emergency surgery in the dire conditions of the hold, using a razor blade to make the cut, spoons as retractors, a small can of ether to relieve the pain, and catgut to stitch the wound.
Jose settled in Albuquerque after the war because another prisoner of war lived here. He got a job as a nurse at the Veterans Hospital and later worked there and at Lovelace as a medical research technician. In 1951 he met Gladys, a nurse, in the veterans hospital. Jose was a few inches shorter than tall, pretty Gladys, but she didn’t mind. She remembers the first time she saw him.
“He was just walking through the building and I followed him with my eyes,” she said. “One day I was waiting for the bus to take me home from work and it said, ‘Can I take you with me?’” They married in December 1952.
Margaret said her mother had her father’s compassionate heart that Gladys once worked through the birth of the Catholic Church of the Blessed Virgin Mary to make sure people had enough to eat.
“You were in the service industry,” she said of her parents. “My father was roadworthy and my mother was more protective. But they shared a strong belief. “
UpFront is a regular news and opinion column for the journal.
Comments are closed.