Anecdotes, personal history reveal private side of late bishop

● He often told a favorite story about a trip he took to a very small and remote village on the Tohono O'odham Reservation about 20 years ago. He drove there in a shiny new car that had been loaned to the diocese and attracted the attention of a boy in the village. Moreno asked him, "Do you like that car?" and got no answer, just a shy smile. Then he told the boy a kind friend had let him use it, and asked him, "Would you like a friend like that?" And the little boy said, "No, I'd like to be a friend like that." The bishop loved that answer, said his longtime friend and colleague Fred Allison.

● He was an enthusiastic sports fan and faithfully watched his beloved Los Angeles Dodgers, and also the University of Arizona Wildcats and the UCLA Bruins.

● He told the Arizona Daily Star in 1987 that his father, Antonio Moreno, left his family and the farming community of Hacienda de San Martín in Michoacan, Mexico, as a teenager. At the time, young men in Mexico were being recruited into the military to persecute the church, Moreno said.

● As a sixth-grader, Moreno worked alongside his father at a citrus-packing plant and in orange and walnut groves surrounding Fullerton and Placentia, Calif., where he grew up during the Great Depression.

● He earned a bachelor's degree in business administration from UCLA in 1953, where he was one of just 11 Mexican-Americans in the entire school at that time. While making his decision to enter the priesthood, he noted that only six Mexican-Americans had ever been ordained in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. "I wondered why. I investigated the need for priests and the idea of the priesthood. I entered the seminary with doubts and fears. Studies were difficult, but God's help was great," he later said.

● Summing up his philosophy as a bishop in 1976, Moreno, then auxiliary bishop for the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, told a group of young people: "I am here to listen. I intend to say very few words. I want instead to listen, to hear you, your anxieties, dreams and problems."