Puente tito biography of barack

Born Ernesto Antonio Puente, Jr., on April 20, 1923 in New York City's Harlem Hospital, Puente was one of three children of Puerto Rican immigrants Ernest and Ercilla Puente.

Puente tito biography of barack

His siblings both suffered untimely deaths while still children—brother Robert Anthony at the age of four from a fall from a fire escape and sister Anna in her teens. Raised in the Hispanic section of Manhattan known as Spanish Harlem or El Barrio, Puente gained the nickname Ernestito—Little Ernesto—because of his short stature.

He soon became known simply as Tito. While his father worked as a foreman in a razor-blade factory, his mother stayed home to raise Puente.

Puente tito biography of barack obama

It was she that first noticed his musical leanings and enrolled him in piano classes at the New York School of Music when he was just seven. By ten, she had switched him to twenty-five cents-an-hour percussion lessons. "I was always banging on boxes, on the window sill,"