In memory of Gary Gainsforth
Gary Patrick Gainsforth, the English language translator for many of FederUnacoma's activities, particularly the pages of Mondo Macchina, passed away in recent months.
Love, dear and classical music were the words and soundtrack of the hundreds of phone calls exchanged over the years. He had epic arguments with the computer with which he would have liked to establish a human contact, as he did with everything around him.
Born in 1937 in Nebraska (USA), he had an adventurous adolescence and youth that took him wandering the world, from the Caribbean to Europe, working in the most diverse jobs: from hospital porter to bartender on John Wayne's yacht.
He arrived in Rome in the 1960s and taught English in schools before landing in the 1970s - after a period back in the USA and Canada - at the English Desk of Ansa where for decades he told the Anglo-Saxon-speaking world the facts of our country, loving it deeply, but always contesting what he thought was wrong.
A likeable man, gifted with great irony, with a straight back and a strong sense of civic duty that he never stopped exercising by constantly pointing out to the relevant bodies anything that was not right or did not work.
This coming Spring, his family will honour his wishes, taking him back to the waters of the Pacific on the Oregon coast where he lived intensely as a young man and from where he left to build the life he wanted.
To Nuala - 'dear wife' - and to his children Sarah, Emma, Liam and Patrick, the family he had wanted and loved so deeply, go the feelings of deepest sympathy and participation of all the FederUnacoma staff and in particular of the Mondo Macchina editorial staff, who shared with him a very long stretch of professional and personal life, marked by the courtesy and kindness that made him a gentleman from another time.
