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Mexican exchange student returns to his American family 39 years later
By Ed Runyan
CHAMPION
Ignacio del Rincon, a foreign-exchange student from Mexico, was supposed to stay with the Makosky family of Champion only four months starting in July 1975, then switch to another family for four months and then a third.
But something happened during the months the young man from Celaya, Guanajuato, central Mexico, spent here. He grew attached to the family of eight — especially, as it turns out, to their 4-year-old, Johnny.
Del Rincon says it may have had something to do with the challenging nature of his arrival — his first trip in an airplane, by himself, at a time when there were not many Mexicans in the United States. When his flight arrived in Akron, there was no one there to pick him up.
He had a phone number, which he called, and a ride was arranged to bring him the rest of the way to Champion, where he met the Makoskys — John and Rose and six children, the closest in age to him being Joey, three years younger, and a girl, Vikki, one year younger.
For del Rincon, who knew very little English, that day was a whirlwind.
“I arrived to this huge house full of kids,” he said recently while sitting in a Champion restaurant, where the now-58-year-old del Rincon and his wife, Alejandra, were surrounded by four of the six Makosky children and their father at the start of a weeklong reunion.
Sometimes foreign-exchange students buddy up with a family member of the same sex and age, but Joey wasn’t that close in age. Instead, Ignacio hit it off with Johnny. Ignacio, who quickly acquired the nickname “Nacho,” found it easier to learn English from the preschooler than from many others.
“He was very patient with me,” Ignacio recalls. “He didn’t care about my bad English.”
Ignacio attended high school in the fall at Warren John F. Kennedy. John Makosky, who now lives in Campbell, spoke to the Rotary Club after four months about Ignacio’s next placement.
But the Rotary Club didn’t have another placement yet, and Johnny wanted Ignacio to stay. So he stayed.
“I was very happy with them,” del Rincon said of the Makoskys. “I didn’t have to start all over again.”
He ultimately succeeded in his goal of improving his English skills.
In fact, one of the teachers at Kennedy praised him when he scored the top grade on an English test late in the school year.
“Ten months ago, he couldn’t speak English, and now he gets the best score on the English test,” del Rincon remembers the teacher saying in front of the class.
He received a college education in Mexico and later went into human resources. He’s now human-resources director for Fisher and Paykel Healthcare in Tijuana, Baja California, Mexico.
He credits his time in the United States for teaching him the English skills he needed to succeed in his career. His younger sister and brother also came to stay with the Makosky family for simlar reasons.
“I could not be where I am now” without the foreign-exchange experience, he said. “The main goal was to learn English. I had great teachers.”
Del Rincon said the Makosky household was a fun place to be, in part because everyone treated him like a member of the family, which included good-natured ribbing about the way he pronounced lots of words.
“The first time I went to Burger Chef [a restaurant the Makosky family operated], I had never even had a hamburger before,” del Rincon said, pronouncing the word burger differently than Americans generally do, producing a chuckle from Joe. “And they taught me how to eat it.”
Vikki Makosky Pavis says she has good memories of her junior-class prom, despite getting “stood up” by her original date. The family found a green jacket for Del Rincon, and he accompanied her instead.
But the most-enduring part of that year was the friendships that developed between him and the Makosky family. Vikki said she thinks the reason is that her parents “don’t know strangers. They treat them like they are part of the family.”
Said Johnny, “All of my friends, they wanted to be at my house. They were jealous of my family.”
Del Rincon has been back a few times since 1976 but learned last fall that Rose was ill.
“I called her and was able to talk to her, and I decided to come and see them as soon as possible. I said, ‘Hold on and wait for me until Easter,’” he said. She died Dec. 26. The del Rincons arrived in Champion the Saturday before Easter.