Saludos a Cobert Roberto Reid Editor: Silver People Chronicle Cobert Robert A. Reid was born in Santo Tomas Hospital in Panama City, Republic of Panama and lived his early childhood with his maternal grandparents and young aunts in the City of Colon. After the memorable 1940 Fire, his parents moved to Panama City, where he spent his adolescent years, impressed with the Panama Barrios and the Gold and Silver Roll period of the old Panama Canal Zone. He attended Pedro J. Sosa Primary School and began his Secondary School studies in the well-known National Institute. He later transferred to Colegio Abel Bravo of Colon, where he met the young Westindian Community at “the College,” engaging in school activities with the school choir under the leadership of Colon Professor Carlos Grant. As with most young people of his day he worked at any honest job he could get and even staid with an unpaid tasks learning to be an assistant in a dental laboratory and clinic. Other jobs followed in this period of his youth, were he found himself working as a laborer in the banana plantations of Bocas Del Toro province, where he got his first taste of success being promoted to office clerk. Other jobs as a youth were brief such as the milk man of Bocas Town and even a short trek fishing and being a woodsman in the beautiful reefs and lagoons of Bocas Province. A promise of an appointment to teach sent him back to the urban centers of Colon and Panama where he took charge of an auto mechanic and car wash business. It was in Panama City, however, that from primary school days he acquired his love of writing and absorbed the artistic and cultural nuances of his people, The Silver People of Panama- who were the Westindian people who were part of the Silver Roll Canal Zone. During the spectacular days of the Panamanian Carnavales that then were a reflection of the marked Westindian influence in the country of Panama, there were few comparzas he missed. He also went around the city sampling the skillful “mask” artists in the alleys and side streets of Calidonia and Marañon observing how they created the most unusual and dazzling works of art he would ever encounter. Later in life he would make it his love in the arts to recreate, in his own artistic endeavors, these beautiful and captivating masks from memory while he was in the U.S. He would also continue his expanded studies of the Afro-Hispanic culture while at Hunter College City University of New York. It was at the age of nineteen that he, as a peon in the banana plantations in Bocas del Toro Province, experienced life as one of the other group of Silver People. They who had exodused in history out of the terminal cities of Colon and Panama to seek other options of making a livelihood and, for some, a reprieve from the circumscribed life on the Canal Zone. Destiny later moved him to the United States where military service with the U.S. Air Force was spent in Japan. That had been the longest trip he had made by then, to a land and a people he so much identified with, and which he calls his “first” home, as he found more acceptance of his person and race there than in either Panama or the United States. He completed his university education in New York City with a B.A. majoring in education and ethnic studies, and making his first discovery of Black Studies. Later he obtained his Masters Degree in Planning for the Aging, something that opened his eyes to the importance of having intellectual and life interests other than family and job. He has been a pioneer in Afro-American and Afro-Hispanic studies since he entered the university and has been writing novels and articles since then. Today he authors several blogs both in English and Spanish that center around the experiences of The Silver Roll People of Panama. He repatriated to his native Panama in the early 1990’s and actually lives in Panama City. |