Cito and the NBC News Crew

We were out on a multi-day bird trapping trip upriver on the Tuira, about a half day's trip from the house. Around midday I heard a boat motor and went down to the river to see who it was, because boats with motors rarely came by. Surprise, surprise! It was Arnold (Cito) Talbot, a good friend of mine from Panama City who worked as a cameraman for NBC news in Central America. The word 'Cito' means 'little,' but Cito was anything but little. He was shorter than six feet tall and weighed over 250 pounds, and I don't think any of it was muscle. He was always quick with a joke. Cito was the kind of guy who was the life of the party.
Here was Cito, arriving in the middle of the jungle with a news crew (it must have been a real slow news day). The crew was in Panama to cover the Presidential visit of Jimmy Carter and the signing of the new treaty changing the terms of the management of the Panama Canal.
They took some footage of the jungle and the parrots and interviewed me. I think I said something romantic about the jungle, like how you could feel it because it had a heartbeat of its own. It was something highbrow and philosophical. The spot got picked up in the United States on national news. Cito told me later that when they ran the piece it was very well received, and they even got some letters. He told me about one letter from a waitress in St. Louis who wanted to come down to live with me. I got upset with him because he never got her number or address.
Years later at my 20th high school reunion, many of my old friends told me that they had seen the spot on television. They told me that they told their friends, "Did you see that crazy guy in the jungle on the news? I went to high school with him."
Cito had grown up in the Canal Zone and now lived in Panama City. He would come down to the house in El Real and just pop in, unannounced. He would bring with him a cheap bag of nondescript beads. The first time he brought them I asked him what they were for; he told me that he was going to trade them with the Indians for baskets and wood carvings. I thought he was nuts. When he pulled out the beads at Union Chocó I couldn't believe the reaction of the Chocó Indian women. They were willing to trade anything they had for Cito's beads. I learned the lesson that there were some things that were more important to a Chocó woman than money.