Local

A lifetime of helping his neighbors

Lisa Socarras ¦ for The Catholic Herald

Richard Quintana, a member of All Saints Church in Manassas, is a retired Air Force captain and volunteer for the St. Vincent de Paul Society.

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All Saints parishioner Richard Quintana, former vice
president of SAIC (Science Applications International
Corporation) in McLean, had a successful career in the U.S.
Air Force and the private sector while serving in charitable
organizations.

As a captain and computer systems analyst, Quintana’s
achievements include involvement in the development of
computerized mission control. He was assigned to the Pentagon
and was a member of the Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency (DARPA) team that worked on a network that tied
several universities together to share resources. They
started a program that was called “The Worldwide Information
Network” in 1969-70.

“The group of people I worked with did invent the Internet,”
Quintana said.

Since his retirement in 2010, Quintana has devoted his life
to full-time charitable service. He has served on the
diocesan Catholic Charities Board of Directors for 15 years;
volunteered for the Society of St. Vincent de Paul for 25
years, including serving as past president of the diocesan
chapter and past president of his parish group; led the
Bishop J. Louis Flaherty Assembly No. 1678 Council of the
Knights of Columbus as commander for 25 years; served as
chair of the All Saints Peace and Justice Commission for 10
years; and has worked as assistant to his wife, director of
pastoral care at All Saints, for the past five years.

Quintana is involved in immigration issues and was
instrumental in bringing Hogar Immigrant Services to his
parish, where 40 percent of the members are Latino. Along
with his family, he is a Medical Missionaries volunteer,
traveling with his physician daughter and his sons to Banica,
a missionary partnership between the Diocese of Arlington,
and the Diocese of San Juan de la Maguana, serving poor
people in rural areas of the Dominican Republic on the
Haitian border.

As a Society of St. Vincent de Paul volunteer, Quintana
ministers to those who are needy and suffering on a daily
basis. As part of their emergency services program, he drives
sick individuals to treatment at University of Virginia
clinics in Charlottesville, including for chemotherapy and
MRI procedures that are cost prohibitive in Northern
Virginia.

“You learn that it’s a venue for doing what we were told to
do. Love your neighbor and serve them,” he said. “It is
rewarding. Sometimes you see impossible situations and you
are able to set things straight.” Quintana volunteered on
weekends and evenings until he retired five years ago. Now
it’s seven days a week.

When his wife, Gillian, became involved with the All Saints’
chapter of the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, he would
accompany her on home visits within the parish. Those needing
help would leave a message, then a coordinator would assign a
volunteer to follow up with a visit to determine need.

“It’s full-time in the sense that you are on call,” Quintana
said. He recently had four cases, some of which took 30
minutes, while others a few hours.

The needs are typically rental assistance, utilities, food,
transportation, medication, furniture or clothing. The
church’s poor box collection funds St. Vincent de Paul.

A family tradition

Actively serving others was part of Quintana’s upbringing and
Catholic identity.

“Jesus gave us one Commandment and that was to love one
another,” he said. “And He went beyond that to say to serve
one another.

Quintana grew up in a Catholic environment in Longmont, Colo.
It was a family tradition to help those around you.

Tradition was that families belonged to brotherhoods, or
communities, and whether they had a priest or not, they would
have a chapel. Families grouped together and supported each
other. He said that landowners were responsible for the
people that lived on their land.

His mother died when he was 7 years old. The family moved to
Green River, Wyo., where his father found railroad work.

After graduating from high school in 1957, Quintana joined
the U.S. Air Force and was stationed in California,
Mississippi and England, where he met his wife Gillian.

“I met her at a summer parade in late June in Northampton,”
he said. “There was a fund drive for the hospital. I followed
the parade up to the park where it ended. There was an
oom-pah band and people started dancing. So I noticed three
girls and I asked one of them to dance, and we have been
dancing ever since.”

It was the big band era, and there was a ballroom dance hall
featuring live bands in Northampton. Foxtrot and Jive were
popular.

“I asked her if she went there,” he said. “She said ‘yes’,
she’d be there on Saturday, and she was.”

“If you grew up in a Spanish family, there would be dances at
least once or twice a month and everybody danced,” he said.
“You danced with your aunts. You danced with your cousins and
neighbors. It was something that I grew up with.”

Gillian liked to dance, too. He was 19 years old; she was a
year younger, and they were married in 1958, a year after
meeting.

Gillian was not Catholic but had attended a Catholic high
school run by the Sisters of Notre Dame in Northampton.

After moving to Cheyenne, Gillian joined the Catholic Church.
As an enlisted airman, Quintana received radio technician
training and worked at an air control base. He started
attending college classes, meeting his general requirements.
The family stayed in Cheyenne until 1963.

Quintana was sent to Madrid to work on military aircraft
missions flying to Vietnam. He was promoted to the command
post to work with the communications that supported mission
control. After four years there, he gained the opportunity to
attend the University of Colorado to study computerized
mission control. From there, he was sent to the Pentagon.

The Quintana family, which now included seven children, moved
to Dale City and joined Holy Family Church in the early
1970s.

“We were in Holy Family before they had a church,” he said.
“Our house was two blocks from the school that they started
meeting in.”

At the Pentagon, he worked in the Worldwide Military Command
and Control System.

“It was just being developed when I was sent there,” he said.
“In 1973, there was a group of military officers and
civilians that were sent to develop the architecture of that
system. I was the computer expert that was sent.

“When you are involved at a very low level in that business
and you are controlling missions directly and you’re talking
to the pilots, when you move up to where they are trying to
describe how that should be done, you understand it better
than anybody,” he said. “During the evolution of that system,
I was able to contribute quite a bit.”

In 1977, he was sent to Montgomery, Ala., for two years to
work at the Logistics Management Center for the Air Force. It
was a think tank designed to bring new technology into
logistics processes, a system that introduced barcodes to the
logistics process in the Air Force.

He was now a captain, and after 20 years of military service,
ready to retire. A co-worker at the Pentagon had retired and
gone to work at System Development Corporation in McLean. He
offered Quintana a job. The family, now six sons and three
daughters, moved to Manassas and joined All Saints Church.

Parishioners ever since, the family strives to live their
Gospel values. Quintana said that his prayer is a constant
dialogue with God, something that he has tried to teach his
children and his 22 grandchildren, to talk to God in their
own words.

Much of his time is spent helping immigrants with problems
they face in Northern Virginia. He said more volunteers are
needed to assist immigrants who face many obstacles.

“We need more people that understand their situation,” he
said. “The important thing is to be able to say, no matter
what, we answered God’s call.”

Socarras is a freelance writer from Annandale.

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