Centenarian wasn’t afraid to try anything

It took 100 years, but Lou Pinto left nothing undone.
He grew up hardscrabble and poor in Hell’s Kitchen, in the long shadow cast by professional baseball’s famous Bronx Bombers, the New York Yankees of the 1920s. He played a little major league ball himself. He raised a family. He retired. He moved to Charlottesville and re-established his life as a sportsman and a volunteer.
Last week, only three months after reaching his 100th birthday, he moved on again, leaving this life for what comes next.
“What I’ll always remember him for is the way he gave of himself. He was always smiling, always positive,” remembered Liz Courain, volunteer coordinator at the University of Virginia Medical Center, where Mr. Pinto offered his services for nearly a quarter of a century. “He was just a tremendous bright spot in our lives.”
Mr. Pinto always looked on the bright side and found positive messages in things others might consider failure.
Seeking the future
Bumped out of work by the Great Depression, Mr. Pinto and a buddy hitchhiked to Florida in the pre-interstate era, to try out for the Cincinnati Reds baseball club. It was a kid’s dream come true.
“I played on several local teams and we had our games on weekends,” Mr. Pinto told David Maurer of The Daily Progress, back in 1990. “The week couldn’t go fast enough for me. I could be sick or whatever, but it didn’t matter. Nothing could keep me from playing.”
Being a roaring success was not as important to Mr. Pinto as doing his best. He learned that while playing minor league ball in the Depression.
“I always wanted to be a pro baseball player, but I found out to play in the pros, you have to have something extra. Being average doesn’t make it. But, if I hadn’t taken that shot I’d probably be thinking today that I could have made it,” he said. “OK, I didn’t make it, but so what? I had my opportunity, a grand opportunity.”
Not being afraid to lose didn’t make him afraid to win, however. He excelled at tennis in his age group and, after aging out of most of his competition, did well against those decades younger.
‘You have to try and do it’
Time, however, treats everyone like a fool. Upon turning 100, Mr. Pinto trimmed his busy schedule, giving up his tennis game and retiring from volunteering. In his honor, the UVa urology department named the employee break room after him. He stayed active up until he contracted the pneumonia to which he would succumb.
“If there’s something you want to do, you have to try and do it,” he once told me as we sat in the library at the Senior Center, one of Lou’s favorite hangouts. “I’ve done a lot of things, or at least tried them. I’ve never regretted anything I tried and I’m trying to make sure I don’t regret anything I didn’t do. It’s not the years in your life but the life in your years that matters.”