In 1952, Lucienne Sanchez was working for the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Manhattan when a monk showed up to present a slide show on West Africa, part of an effort to recruit volunteers to serve in a Liberian mission.
“By the end of that slide show,” recalled Sanchez, “I said, ‘When can I go?’ It was an epiphany. It changed my life. I was supposed to go to Africa.”
She did go, on her 26th birthday, sailing to Liberia to work in a rural Episcopal mission that lacked indoor plumbing and was so far into the bush that it was accessible only by a 23-mile walk. “It was very primitive,” said Sanchez, “but essential to the villagers who lived there. My job was to keep it running.”
When she returned to New York five years later, she not only had a firm sense of purpose – to serve others, especially children—but an adopted son of her own.
I had had a vision, a dream, in which a voice told me that I would get a baby,” Sanchez said of the sickly infant whose mother died in childbirth. “Not give birth to a baby, but get a baby. This was the baby. It was destiny.”
As she celebrates her centennial year, leading to her 100th birthday in August, the Coconut Grove resident is pausing to look back at a long and eventful life of travel, adventure and service.
“I tell people I’m going to be 100 because I don’t believe it myself,” she said. “Most of the time, they ask what’s my secret. I don’t have a secret. But people are hoping I do.”
Said Hank Sanchez-Resnik, a well-known community activist and Lucienne’s husband of 54 years: “She’s wise enough to know that vanity is a sin, but vain enough to not pay too much attention to that.”
“Lu is a miraculous powerhouse,” said businessman Ben Glatzer, a Gifford Lane neighbor. “She and Hank are nothing short of treasures.”
Lucienne Sanchez, called Lu, was born in Yonkers, N.Y., one of six children. Her mother was a New Yorker and her father a native of Camagüey, Cuba. He died when Sanchez was five, and her mother supported the family as a seamstress and caterer.
Sanchez did well in high school but a career counselor urged her to abandon any designs on further academic success and go to beautician’s school. “I never talked to him again,” she said.
The years in Africa proved to be her higher education. There she learned to be a midwife, an office manager, a paymaster and a chief of staff, running the business side of the Holy Cross Mission, which, until recently damaged in a civil war, stood as one of the premier high schools for students from several West African countries.
“My college was the five years I spent there,” said Sanchez.
Back in the U.S., Sanchez was working at Columbia University in the early 1970s when she met her future husband at a friend’s house.
In some respects, Hank Resnik and Sanchez could not have been more different. He was raised in a Jewish family on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. His father, Howard Resnik, was a Yale Law School graduate who worked in finance; his mother, Muriel Resnik, was a novelist and playwright, the author of Any Wednesday, a Broadway hit made into a movie starring Jason Robards and Jane Fonda.
Hank prepped at the prestigious Trinity School, on the Upper West Side, and then went to Yale for undergraduate and graduate degrees. He is also more than 13 years younger than Sanchez.
Yet they proved to be a match.
“All the women I had been dating were from the Ivy League,” recalls Resnik. “But here comes this woman who never went to college. And I realized she was way ahead of women who went to Vassar or Radcliffe. She had had an unconventional education and developed a lot of wisdom and depth that others never get.”
They fell in love and married in March 1972.
“My family was not thrilled at first, but they tried hard to go along with this,” said Resnik, 85. “We were at a family wedding in Pittsburgh and I remember saying to my father, ‘You thought I’d marry a Jewish princess, didn’t you?’ Well, I didn’t.”
“No,” he said. “You married an African queen.”
In the course of their marriage, Lucienne and Hank Sanchez-Resnik (their married name) lived in San Francisco, Rome, Paris, Berkeley and Key Biscayne before settling in Coconut Grove in 2013.
They remain avid world travelers, meeting their advancing years with energy and curiosity. In addition to Miami, the couple will attend birthday celebrations in Lu’s honor this year in Washington, D.C.; New York City; Virginia Beach, Virginia; Portland, Oregon; Berkeley, California; and Paris. France.
Over the years, Lucienne has worked as a travel consultant, served on a police review commission, and volunteered cuddling infants in a neonatal clinic.
Hank has worked as a freelance journalist, editor and filmmaker, and has also been a vocal advocate for bicycle safety. Shortly after settling in the Miami area, he founded Bike Coconut Grove, served on the county’s Bicycle Pedestrian Advisory Committee, and co-founded Friends of the Commodore Trail.
Hank also founded a community newsletter, the Coconut Grove Spotlight, which was sold in 2024 for $1 to Miami News Trust and transitioned into an independent nonprofit news site. He remains an occasional contributor to its opinion section.
The couple’s lives have not been without tragedy. Their African-born son Anthony, a counselor who played jazz piano and attended Texas Southern University on a football scholarship, died of throat cancer in 2022. Some of his ashes were returned to Liberia to be buried.
Two other adopted children also died prematurely.
Lu and Hank maintain close ties with five other children they mentored and who became like family as they grew up and started families of their own.
“We are very social people, and we wanted more kids. Without any real plan, we started expanding our family by connecting with people who needed some kind of parenting,” said Hank.
Vivian Gold, a psychologist who now lives in Los Angeles, knows Lu from her time at Columbia. “She became a dear friend right away,” said Gold, who was matron of honor at the couple’s wedding. “A lot of fun, a great dancer and she knows how to host a party.
“Together, she and Hank find a way to be a part of the community. They are community builders.”
Over the years, Hank and Lu have biked all over the U.S. and Europe. Hank is still pedaling. Lu, recently sidelined by a hamstring pull, hopes to be back in the saddle soon.
“People often say to me, ‘You’re an inspiration,’” said Lu. “Maybe that’s my secret: I’m an inspiration. If so, I’m glad.”
This story was originally published in the Coconut Grove Spotlight, a WLRN News partner.
