Mark Twain might be amused at his pairing in Muscatine with Norman Baker on a Mark Twain Overlook historic site sign

If Sam Clemens (Mark Twain) were to return to Muscatine, Iowa, where he helped brother Orion put out the Journal in the early 1850s, he would find reminders of three fascinating economies in the Mississippi River town’s history.

The Laura Musser Mansion, now part of the Muscatine Arts Center, recalls the mid-1860s when the Musser and other families grew wealthy by harvesting nearby forests and making Muscatine into a significant lumber city.

The H. J. Heinz plant, the first Heinz plant built outside Pittsburgh, was completed in 1892 at a cost of $4,000. Today’s plant employs about 400 workers and still takes advantage of the local soil, ideal for growing tomatoes, watermelons and other fruits and vegetables.

The Button Factory Woodfire Grille, housed in an 1890 riverfront building, represents an industry launched by John Frederick Boepple in 1891 when he discovered that the Mississippi’s mussel shells could be cut into mother-of-pearl buttons. By 1905 nearly half of Muscatine’s workforce produced 37% of the globe’s buttons, earning the city the title of “Pearl Button Capital of the World.”

But Twain would be most intrigued perhaps by how Muscatine chooses to celebrate him. At the site of an early Muscatine Journal building—now the MVP Lounge, which advertises $10 All-U-Can-Drink beer nights–there’s the usual Twain-was-here plaque.

At the Mark Twain Overlook for viewing the Mississippi, however, a historic site sign pairs Twain with Norman G. Baker (1882-1958), a self-proclaimed doctor who operated a local “hospital” and high-wattage radio station KTNT (“Know the Naked Truth”), claimed a cure for cancer and served time at Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary for mail fraud.

Twain might also smile at his quote that Muscatine chooses to celebrate on that sign—about the community having world-best sunsets—not his statement in an 1855 travel piece he wrote from St. Louis for the Muscatine Journal that local sunsets were second best, behind a Chinese sunset in a St. Louis painting.

Twain might laugh, too, at a two-story-tall Twain puppet in the lobby of Pearl Plaza, a downtown shopping center. The giant Twain was made by dozens of volunteers from chicken wire, cotton batting, sheep wool, plastic tubing and recycled paper from the Muscatine Journal, where Twain had his early travel writings—eight letters from Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and St. Louis—published in 1853-55.

This two-story Mark Twain puppet fills the lobby of Pearl Plaza, a downtown Muscatine shopping arcade

The letters remind me of the worst and best of Twain and of our 14,063-mile van trip around the United States. Twain’s Muscatine Journal letters represent his ignorant, racist youth. The letters disparage Jews, Native Americans, Catholics and abolitionist U.S. senators; they celebrate three senators—Henry Clay, John C. Calhoun and Daniel Webster—who helped pass the Fugitive Slave Act.

Though Twain never accepted Native Americans, his faith in slavery as “right, righteous, sacred” and his nativist criticism of immigrants changed dramatically. He evolved over decades into a progressive writer on the right side of history, into the “Lincoln of our literature.”

During our three-month Twain trip around America we heard about the worst of America. In Idaho, a state that has attracted white Californians running away from diversity, Margie Laughlin described conversations with whites who wanted a president who looked like them and wished President Obama dead.

But the Muscatine area, said Rusty Schrader, the 42-year-old news editor of the Muscatine Journal, sees diversity “more as an opportunity than a challenge.” Muscatine (in the 2000 census, 20% Hispanic) and neighboring small towns with chicken and turkey processing plants, Columbus Junction (39% Hispanic) and West Liberty (40% Hispanic), have embraced diversity, Schrader said.

That, however, has not freed these communities from a problem faced today by much of America. “Poverty has become a big issue,” said Mary L. Wildermuth, 60, executive director of the Muscatine History and Industry Center.

“The community is changing,’ Wildermuth explained. “Over 50% of the students in our schools today are receiving free or reduced lunch.” She worries that many families will not be able to earn enough to provide their children with the post-secondary education required for employment in the highly technical Muscatine manufacturing workplace.

Loren

Twain insisted that a visitor always found Chicago a novelty, completely unlike the Chicago from a prior visit: “It is hopeless for the occasional visitor to try to keep up with Chicago—she outgrows his prophecies faster than he can make them.” The small town of Chicago (1850 census: 29,963) morphed into a major metropolis in less than two generations (1890 census: 1,099,850).

Despite Chicago’s rapid growth, the city remained an inconsequential place to Twain. In August 1853, Chicago was a train-stop town for Twain on the way to someplace else. After a 26-hour layover in Chicago he hopped a train for the next leg of his trip east to New York.

Chicago’s population boomed later in the century; the city started in 1890 its 94-year run as the nation’s second city, to be overtaken finally by Los Angeles in 1984. But even as an immigrant-rich (40 percent immigrant by 1890), meatpacking and manufacturing industrial powerhouse, Chicago left Twain unimpressed. It remained for him little more than a train-stop town.

Writing as Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass in 1856, he dismissed the city as high-priced hell: “When you feel like tellin a feller to go to the devil—tell him to go to Chicago—it’ll answer every purpose, and is perhaps, a leetle more expensive.” Almost four decades later Twain used a Pudd’nhead Wilson maxim to again deflate the city and its citizens: Satan says, “The trouble with you Chicago people is, that you think you are the best people down here; whereas you are merely the most numerous.”

Twain’s equal as Chicago’s censurer came a century later in the unlikely form of New Yorker writer A. J. Liebling, a disheveled monument to gluttony. His navel peeking through unbuttoned shirts, his gout-ridden walk reduced to a hobble, he proved that a bowling-ball bald, spectacles-wearing, 246-lb. sumo wrestler-shaped man could write like the most celestial of angels about almost anything—the press, war, boxing, food, politics, even Chicago.

Liebling was the first writer, after Twain, whose complete writings I felt I had to collect and read in college. His scarce Second City (I paid $15 in 1962 for a book originally priced at $2) reveled in cataloguing Chicago’s second-class status, based on almost a year in 1949-50 he lived there and a return visit in May 1951. Physically, Chicago struck Liebling not as a great city but as an endless succession of dingy mill-town main streets.

Those who see themselves as Chicago’s leaders flee the city after work to aseptic suburbs like Oak Park to the west and Evanston to the north, he wrote. They leave behind them each evening “the exiguous skyscraper core and the vast, anonymous pulp of the city, plopped down by the lakeside like a piece of waterlogged fruit. Chicago after nightfall is a small city of the rich who have not yet migrated, visitors, and hoodlums, surrounded by a large expanse of juxtaposed dimnesses.”

Liebling echoed Twain as to Chicago’s status as a train-stop town. After World War II, when Robert R. Young, the Chesapeake & Ohio Railway chairman, started a campaign of newspaper ads calling for through passenger trains (“A hog can cross America without changing trains—but YOU can’t”), Liebling interviewed Ernest L. Byfield, a worried partner in several Chicago hotels. “If they ever have through trains, nobody will stop here,” Byfield said.

Chicago lacked excellent newspapers, restaurants, sports teams, and theater. “As a theatrical center, it is outclassed by Oslo, which has a population of four hundred thousand [vs. Chicago’s 3,620,962 in 1950],” Liebling wrote. “It is not considered smart to admit having seen any play in Chicago, because this implies either (a) that you haven’t seen the real play or (b) that you haven’t the airplane fare [for New York] or (c) and possibly worst of all, that you are indifferent to nuances and might, therefore, just as well go back to Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, where you went to high school.”

Liebling admitted that Chicago was first in several categories, but those were its strip-tease joints, gang killings, segregation (immigrant groups as well as races tended “to coagulate geographically”), and corruption. Bob Merriam, an honest, good-government alderman, told Liebling almost proudly, “Chicago is unique. It is the only completely corrupt city in America.” When Liebling responded that he had heard other cities so described, Merriam said defensively, “But they aren’t nearly as big.”

Liebling mocked the University of Chicago as “the only large university that awards a liberal-arts degree for an undergraduate course that starts after the second year of high school and ends after what would anywhere else be the second year of college. As a result of this generous stand, the University of Chicago’s undergraduate college acts as the greatest magnet for neurotic juveniles since the Children’s Crusade.”

A student told Liebling that “the strong point about Chicago is it’s the only university where you can hold a full-time daytime job and still get your B.A. You don’t have to go to class at all. Just read the Great Books and work up a line for the comprehensive examination at the end of the year.” If the university’s next chancellor after Robert Maynard Hutchins should decide to accept candidates out of the third grade instead of the tenth, Liebling says, “he will probably be hailed on the Midway as an even greater educational innovator.”

Liebling’s biographer Raymond Sokolov said Liebling’s outrageousness—his “aggressively classless, democratic style” of writing “that preened itself on its lack of respect for distinctions of high and low”—recalled Twain’s mixing of “sophisticated thoughts and skills with a wisecracking country manner.”

Sokolov described Liebling as “Twain’s mirror image.” Liebling was “a city slicker plunked down in the boondocks…who affected the speech and outlook of an urban street person,” Sokolov wrote. If only Twain and Liebling were present today to take on Chicagoans’ depiction of their hometown as not only a great American city but also a great global city. A 2012 Global Cities Index developed by A. T. Kearney and the Chicago Council on Global Affairs ranks Chicago seventh in the world, ahead of Beijing (14th) and Brussels (9th), Singapore (10th) and Shanghai (21st).

It’s not hard to imagine Liebling and Twain delighting in Chicago’s current status as the U.S. city with the most corruption, the third highest taxes, long commutes and lousy weather—qualities that caused Forbes to feature Chicago in an annual report titled “America’s Most Miserable Cities.” Global city? Liebling and Twain might prefer to label the Windy City a world-class windbag.

Loren Ghiglione

Alyssa Karas, Dan Tham and I piled into the backseat of John Ghiglione’s white, 2002 Saturn for the drive to the Seattle home and famous-for-a-day garage of his father, Dr. August J. Ghiglione, who served as Italian consul in the Pacific Northwest during World War I and doctor to Seattle’s Italian-Americans from 1905 to his death in 1949.

The garage became famous in 1910. When the Mafia-style Black Hand tried to shake down members of Seattle’s Italian community, Dr. Ghiglione aided police in breaking up the plot. For a time, Dr. Ghiglione traveled with a body guard and carried a gun in his car.

On this night, he put his Pope-Hartford in the garage at his home, 333 30th Avenue South, and retired for the evening. Normally he would have made house calls after dinner, but his wife, recently discharged from a hospital, felt ill. So he stayed home.

Shortly after midnight the garage exploded. The house’s kitchen door blew open, the house’s windows&mdas;and the windows of houses four blocks away—shattered. Footprints near the garage indicated two men had placed the dynamite, but bloodhounds were unable to follow their trail beyond 29th Avenue. An investigation by Joe Bianchi, an Italian-American detective, went nowhere.

Dr. Ghiglione later told the press that he did not believe the dynamiting pointed to the Blank Hand. “There never was any notification or warning of any impending danger,” he said. He concluded that the bombing was the work of relatives of a Seattle man who was killed by a local police officer. The relatives thought Dr. Ghiglione, as the Italian consul, had been bribed to block the prosecution of the slayer.

When John Ghiglione, Dan, Alyssa and I arrived at the doctor’s address, we were disappointed to see that his garage, rebuilt after the dynamiting, no longer existed and that his three-story house had been carved into five apartments. The building’s front door was locked, but luckily one of the tenants, Carly Reiter, 37, a teacher at Seattle Girls’ School, was walking her 10-year-old cat, Coyote George the River Pig.

A decade earlier, Reiter, a fan of Mark Twain’s Huck Finn, had taken a 2,500-mile, 121-day solo canoe trip down the Mississippi, from Bemidji, Minnesota, to Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Along the way, she happened to stop at a bar. A five-week-old kitten climbed out of a farmer’s milk crate into her lap. Reiter took the cat aboard her canoe where it promptly walked into the water.

But Reiter and Coyote George the River Pig survived the Mississippi and the lecher who told Reiter, “I really like redheads. Their boobs make me perky.” Virtually all of the other people Reiter met along the Mississippi, she said, treated her with respect. Many offered her a free meal and a place to shower and sleep overnight.

Reiter showed us her two-room, $900-a-month apartment in space that once had been second-floor bedrooms in Dr. Ghiglione’s home. She brought out a book of photos from her Mississippi River trip. (Some of the photos are part of Dan Tham’s video interview of Reiter.)

Reiter also introduced us to next-door neighbor Casey Meehan, 27, a fundraiser for nonprofits who shared a four-bedroom, two-bath, $1,700-a-month, second- and third-floor apartment with three other young people.

Reiter described the apartment as a communal house: “We’re using what we need to use—need, not want” to use. The members of the commune did not heat common areas; each person used a small heater in his or her bedroom. They also were composting and starting a garden on the back porch.

August J. Ghiglione during his student days in New York City

Meehan’s description of her community made me think of a different kind of community associated with the building—Dr. Ghiglione’s world from a century earlier. As a student at Columbia University’s medical school he took his bicycle from his home in an Italian-American section of Staten Island aboard the ferry to Manhattan.

There he rode his bicycle to Columbia’s medical school or Columbus Hospital on East 20th Street. He interned at Columbus, run by Mother Supervisor Francesca Xavier Cabrini, the first American canonized by the Roman Catholic Church. Columbus served New York’s Italian-American immigrants.

Estelle "Stella" M. Skinner, who married Dr. August J. Ghiglione in 1905

Dr. Ghiglione’s parents had taken into their Staten Island home Estelle “Stella” M. Skinner, following the early death in an accident of her parents. Skinner and her brother had inherited, Dr. Ghiglione’s children recalled, a piece of property that later turned out to be Coney Island. Dr. Ghiglione graduated from medical school in 1904 and his old-world mother, Maria, arranged his marriage to Stella on Nov. 8, 1905.

Dr. Ghiglione and his new wife moved later that year to Seattle where he established a private practice that served the city’s small Italian community—3,454 residents by 1910—primarily truck gardeners and laborers from southern and central Italy. They lived in neighborhoods with nicknames like “Garlic Gulch.”

They dug sewer and water-main ditches and drove garbage wagons for the city. They also worked at construction sites and in railroad yards and mills. Orly Alia recalled an uncle who stacked 95-pound bags of cement from a rapidly moving line, 10 hours a day, seven days a week. “They were machines,” Alia said. “They wore themselves out and they were gone by the time they were 60.”

Dr. Ghiglione spoke the patients’ Italian dialects, wrote out prescriptions in English or Italian, depending of the patients’ first language, and conveniently forgot to charge patients who lacked the money to pay.

Daughter-in-law Hazel Rispoli recalled: “The old family doctor. He came to your house and never got half the money owed him. The Italians all went for him. They were all poor. You didn’t ask for payment [from them]. It always was, ‘Pay when you can.’”

Dr. Ghiglione developed a reputation as a surgeon who succeeded where others had failed. Ten-year-old Jim Dijulio was brought to him deathly ill. Dr. Ghiglione’s surgery saved his life.

PHOTO

Dr. Ghiglione was elected staff president at Providence Hospital and Columbus Hospitals and president of the Seattle Academy of Surgeons. Despite his success, he operated reluctantly, especially when the diagnosis called for amputation, said niece Marie J. Wilham. “I remember his telling me that if I ever was told an operation was necessary to check with three doctors first.”

Dr. Ghiglione’s father, despite his success in business, had one regret: He never had obtained an education. He spoke English with a Ligurian accent. He saw the clubs that other Seattle businessmen joined as beyond his reach. Dr. Ghiglione more than compensated for what his father perceived as his own failings.

Dr. Ghiglione assumed leadership positions in a variety of civic organizations. He was especially active in the Italian-American community. Maybelle Lucas, his daughter, recalled, “There couldn’t be an Italian picnic that he wasn’t invited to.” He was a member of the Knights of Columbus and the only honorary life member in Seattle of both the Sons of Italy and the Italian Club.

During World War I, while carrying on his medical practice, he served as Italian consul for a region that eventually included Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Montana. He was active in sending 3,000 Italian subjects—who were required to enlist at age 20 for three years of service—to join Italian forces against Austria-Hungary before the United States entered the war. He was decorated twice by Victor Emanuel, Italy’s king, for his war work. He was knighted Cavaliere, and later Cavaliere Ufficiale della Corona d’Italia.

When George E. Ralston disparaged Italian, Chinese and Japanese immigrants in the Seattle Times in 1912, Dr. Ghiglione attacked Ralston’s “ignorance” and “misinformation.” He dismissed Ralston’s call for restrictions in foreign immigration as amounting to “air bubbles” and defended immigrants’ patriotism. He dreamed of an America enriched and enlivened for generations to come by its immigrants.

The excerpt from Dan Tham’s video of our interview of John Ghiglione focuses on his father, Dr. Ghiglione. The excerpt reminds me of lines from a Maya Angelou poem: “Know that history holds more than it seems/We are here alive today because our ancestors dared to dream.”

Loren Ghiglione

One day, an elderly Vietnamese man walked into the office of Người Việt Tây Bắc. He wanted to place a classified ad in the largest and oldest newspaper for Vietnamese immigrants in Washington.

Julie Pham, 33, remembers that day. She is the managing editor of Người Việt Tây Bắc, which literally translates to “Vietnamese People of the Northwest,” a Seattle-based biweekly that’s been in business for 25 years.

The man ran the ad only once. Pham remembers what it said: “Dear Mr. So-and-so, you left your luggage in my house for months now and I need you to remove it.”

Once the paper got into the hands of the Vietnamese community in Seattle, those who knew Mr. So-and-so kindly reminded him of his luggage.

“People are really hungry to feel connected,” Pham said. “I look around and I see that the need for news is growing. There are constant streams of immigration. And they turn to the newspaper to help them understand and acclimate to the world here.”

For Pham, her family’s newspaper stokes a sense of community for the third largest Asian population in the state. It also supported her and her brothers through college. Since Pham was 8 years old, her father, Kim, has been running Người Việt Tây Bắc, an offshoot of the national Người Việt newspaper headquartered in Orange County, Calif.

Pham is charming woman with a ready smile and a well-placed beauty mark. Her speech is thoughtful and her tone business-like. By her own description, she is a businesswoman first, a reporter second. Sitting down with her, it’s evident that economics are on her mind. She is conscious of the economy and the forcefulness of her words, as well as the profit margins of the newspaper. She says things like “capacity building,” “fruitful partnership” and “shoe-string budget.” Content must be “scalable,” business can be “slippery.”

Before all of this, when she was just two months old in 1979, her family decided to flee Vietnam. Pham’s parents tell her that she cried a lot during the escape, but other than the fact that they were hungry, thirsty and unsure of what was going to happen next, her parents never talked much about their experiences as boat people.

Her father delivered pizzas and her mother worked as a dental assistant for their first few years in Seattle. Her father eventually realized that he didn’t like working for other people and that he wanted to have his own business. With the influx of Vietnamese boat people in the Pacific Northwest, he had an idea.

“The Vietnamese community is the most linguistically isolated,” Pham said, “with the highest percentage of limited English proficiency. The newspaper links people with news of their homeland, of Vietnam, and also with local news, so they can understand their new homeland as well.”

Since 1986, Người Việt Tây Bắc has been serving that function, plying the community with everything from news of business openings to dentist recommendations to classified ads subtly asking for the removal of luggage.

The paper also helped shape Pham’s business acumen.

“I always say I got my real-life MBA by working at the newspaper,” Pham said.

Her educational pedigree doesn’t end there. After graduating from UC Berkeley in 2001, Pham received a Ph.D. in history from the University of Cambridge in 2008, as a Gates scholar.

“I learned how American I was by being abroad,” Pham said. After moving to the UK for her doctorate degree, Pham spent time living in France, Germany and the country she left as an infant.

“When I lived in Vietnam, I was constantly getting stood up,” Pham said. “People would cancel last minute all the time and it was driving me crazy. I felt disrespected.”

Later Pham learned from a Vietnamese friend that they weren’t being rude, but that they just wanted her to think something came up at the last minute and they had no choice but to forgo meeting her.

In the UK, she noticed that Americans perceive distance differently than the British do. “When Americans ask how far it is from Seattle to Portland, I could say, ‘It’s a three-hour drive. It’s an hour flight.’ But in the rest of the world, they’ll actually tell you by distance. How many kilometers it is. And that means nothing to me.”

“It’s just different ideas of respect and time,” Pham said.

Pham is sympathetic to second-generation Vietnamese-Americans. In her own experience, she did not really start engaging with Vietnamese culture and understanding her parents on a deeper level until she learned Vietnamese after college. Hers is an American experience, more than it is an immigrant one. By anyone’s measure, Dr. Julie Pham has achieved something that is singly Western, though she acknowledges that it stems from her parents’ hard work and willingness to take risks.

“At the end of the day, ethnic media, they’re all businesspeople,” Pham said. “They’re all immigrant, refugee, minority entrepreneurs.”

Dan Q. Tham

Here is a look at our day in Seattle’s most famous market.

Video by Dan Q. Tham

Giuseppe Tony Tran in New Orleans, Lousiana

On the fortieth anniversary of the Fall of Saigon, Vietnamese immigrants and their children gathered alongside Vietnam War veterans to reflect on the dramatic events that forever changed both of their destinies—the siege of South Vietnam’s capital, the evacuation of American soldiers returning home from intractable defeat, the Southeast Asian boat people fleeing communist takeover. In the Vietnamese diaspora, it’s referred to as Ngày Mất Nước, the day we lost our country.

But in New Orleans, the Vietnamese community commemorated forty years since April 30, 1975 a little differently.

“Everywhere else, they were mourning,” said Giuseppe Anthony Tran. “Here, we celebrated forty years of success.”

To hear Tran describe his experiences during those forty years is to witness breathtaking resilience, moxie, and a shining humor wholly unexpected given the circumstances. The combination has worked out quite nicely for the Vietnamese man with an Italian name. It’s kept him alive. It’s taken him from one delta to another, from fields of jasmine rice to fields of Jazzmen rice, a local variety of the aromatic grain that’s advertised as music for your mouth. “It tastes better than jasmine,” Tran said with a laugh.

He was born in the Year of the Dragon, 1964, to a family of rice farmers in Hà Tiên, a beach town at the southernmost tip of Vietnam.

During his childhood, an unexploded shell jutted out from the ground right in front of his house. Every day, the little boy, then known as Toan (Vietnamese for “safe, secure”), would touch the shell with wonder.

Tran didn’t know it would explode one day. “The war became something that was familiar to the people. To the point that we weren’t scared as much.” The soundtrack of “the bombing and the guns and everything” accompanied Tran’s entire childhood spent in wartime, until April 30, 1975, when a tenuous peace was reached.

At the age of 16, like a Vietnamese Huckleberry Finn, Tran decided to flee the country on a raft with eleven other young Vietnamese—total strangers, most of them teenagers. “My mom saved a lot to put me on board,” Tran said, “I would say equivalent to 400 dollars. That’s a lot in Vietnam in the 80s! We were poor as any other citizen.”

He was the youngest of seven siblings, just two years shy of military age. He would either leave the country now, or never have the chance again. “Living under the communists, you get the feeling that you don’t have another day to live,” he said. “Everything is controlled. That’s why I told my parents, I don’t see any future here.”

He left on the night of April 30, 1981, while the communists were celebrating six years since the end of the war.

“Officials and police and everyone in office were getting drunk and having a party. I used that moment to escape on a raft,” Tran said. He didn’t know whether he would ever see his mother again.

The plan was for the tiny, 25-foot raft to transport more than a hundred people to a bigger boat. Docking at the mouth of the Mekong River, a vital channel the color of caramel, they waited for the bigger boat to come and take the passengers away from Vietnam. But no boat ever showed up. As night gathered, so did a crowd of eager escapees. Finally, the twelve pulled anchor and left on the raft.

Tran saw many people pull up in smaller vessels to get onto theirs. “If we waited another second, we would have been overloaded with people,” Tran said. “The minute we started the engine, it made so much damn noise. Like a lawn mower. Officials heard it and started firing at us. On that night, the 30th, we left with eight big holes in the raft. We had to plug the holes with our shirts.”

Tran prayed that the raft would float in one direction: away.

It was everyone’s first time at sea. No one knew how to properly maneuver the raft. There was no compass, no map.

By night, they faced heavy storms. By day, the sun fried their skin into “rice paper,” Tran recalled.

Once in a while, they would see a boat in the distance, but the engine wasn’t strong enough to take them there in time.

Four times, Tran said, Thai pirates came, seeking women and valuables. A little girl, eleven or twelve years old as Tran remembers, was on board the raft. When the pirates first came, Tran knew they would be after her.

“To protect her, I took a big can of engine oil and dumped it on her,” Tran said. “She looked really filthy and so when the pirates looked at her, they said, ‘Just forget it.’”

He started fantasizing about land. “After a day or two on the vast ocean, you don’t see anything but the blue sky and the water. And the waves were so huge, you didn’t think you were going to survive,” he said. A devout Roman Catholic, Tran began reciting the last rites each night before sleeping.

Finally, early on the morning of May 5, 1981, their fifth day at sea, Tran saw a seagull in the open sky. He knew from his childhood spent by the sea that when you see birds, land is near. “I have never experienced that happiness when you see birds on the ocean. It was so wonderful.”

Eventually, they landed at the border between Malaysia and Thailand. Although it was a poor village in the province of Narathiwat, it was not Vietnam.

For a month and a half, the twelve combed the beaches, caught any game they could find, begged villagers for food, and climbed fruit trees that Tran said were “high as hell, man! They took hours to climb.”

Once word spread that a group of Vietnamese refugees had arrived in the village, the government of Thailand took them in, placing the group in the Songkhla Refugee Camp. At this point, Tran had no shirt, no shoes, and no money.

UNICEF sheltered the tens of thousands of refugees at Songhkla and supplied them with barely enough food and water. Tran started craving meat and certain comfort foods.

“When you’re hungry, you come up with all sorts of crazy ideas. I dreamed that one day I would fry an egg as big as a blanket,” Tran said. “I would cover myself up and eat at the same time.”

Tran volunteered to work for the UNICEF office. One day when he was cleaning up, he found a magazine.

“I was so happy,” Tran said. “So I grabbed it. Actually I stole it.” In his hands, Tran held an older edition of a Vietnamese magazine from New Orleans.

Tran took the magazine back to his tent to show his friends. As he flipped through the pages, he happened upon the name of his older brother, Tuong, an ordained priest, who had fled Vietnam for the U.S. in 1975. Tran hadn’t heard from him in more than six years. As he held the magazine in his hands, Tran learned that his brother, Tuong Cao Tran, was the editor of Dân Chúa, which he had started in the late ‘70s to connect Vietnamese Catholics living in the U.S.

Not believing his luck (“Recognizing my own brother’s name in the magazine was like hitting a jackpot,” Tran said), he wanted to send his brother a letter, but he had no money for paper, stamps, or a telegram. “So I asked a priest for a small sheet of paper. I wrote, ‘Please help me’ and an address and that’s it.” The priest mailed the letter for him.

Within two months, Tran received a letter from his brother with a $20 bill enclosed. He learned that Tuong had served and helped settle the very first Vietnamese refugees to arrive in Louisiana. Tuong also assured Tran that he would contact their mother to let her know that her youngest son made it to safety.

“It was so huge,” Tran said. “My life started from there.” Wielding the American money with pride, Tran bought “a whole lot” of eggs. That night, for dinner, Tran fried all of the eggs but could eat only a quarter of them. “I couldn’t take it anymore, you know?” Tran laughed. “I choked on the eggs.”

After two years of statelessness, Tran immediately started making plans with his older brother to come to the United States. Tuong, however, was a priest, and wasn’t allowed to take in another person. He asked an Italian-American couple he knew through Catholic Charities to co-sponsor Tran.

Francisco Giovanni and his wife, Evelyn, who resided in Chicago, took Tran in, named him Giuseppe Anthony and put him through high school and college. “That’s why I’m in love with Italy,” Tran said. “I’m an Italian-Vietnamese living in America!”

“Coming to America was like a leap into heaven,” Tran said. Every day, in his new country, Tran took the bus to the library and borrowed an armload of books to read, even though he understood little at first. “Education is something that my parents and godparents wanted for me,” Tran said.

At first, learning English for Tran was the “most troublesome.” One day during his first winter, Tran took a walk around downtown Chicago. As he approached a pedestrian crossing, he couldn’t understand the “DON’T WALK” sign on the crosswalk signal. So he hopped on a bus and immediately asked to be dropped off as soon as the bus crossed the road. Looking back on that episode, Tran guessed that the bus driver probably “cursed me for such a stupid action.”

But he was determined. After Tran graduated from Brother Martin High School in 1984, he joined St. Joseph Seminary College in Covington, Louisiana, and earned degrees in philosophy and psychology. He moved on to Notre Dame Seminary in New Orleans and trained for the priesthood, which he would leave in order to focus on bringing his family over to the U.S. from Vietnam.

Tran eventually settled in Village de l’Est in New Orleans, a neighborhood known for its Vietnamese community. The river in the “Village of the East” is crowded with lily pads. The soupy air circulates languidly around the signs in Vietnamese for restaurants and grocery stores, attorneys and dentists, Catholic churches and Buddhist temples. Many of the men living there are fishermen or shrimpers by trade. In Village de l’Est, there’s the distinct feeling of quê hương. Homeland.

The immigrant population liked the area, because it so resembled the country they had left: the tight-knit community and the sub-tropical climate, the landforms and the faces, the familiar food and the language spoken.

“The unity is there,” Tran said. “It’s lovely.” He’s been to other Vietnamese communities in Texas and California, but nothing compared to Village de l’Est.

In 2000, Tony Tran went back to Vietnam for the first time in almost twenty years. His mission was to bring his mother back to Louisiana.

On the flight into Tan Son Nhat Airport, Tran noticed the yellow rooftops of Saigon. They looked rusty. The airport’s runway was overgrown with weeds. He found no attachment to the country of his birth.

“When the plane landed, my heart was pounding,” Tran said. “I didn’t know what was gonna happen next.”

He found out that every step to get to his mother was a paying process—bribe an official here, placate an officer there with cold, hard cash. Tran paid a couple authorities $200 each to accompany him on his mission. “They followed me like the FBI,” he said.

He had learned that his family now lived in Biên Hòa, just outside of Saigon. He walked into his mother’s house and surprised her. “It was quite an experience,” Tran recalled. “I’m glad that she didn’t faint!”

At the end of his one-week visit, Tran told his mother that he would do everything in his power to bring her over to the United States. And he did. In 2007, Tran went back to Vietnam again to bring back his father’s remains in a tiny basket that fit into his carry-on luggage.

At the time of the interview, his mother was 94 years old and lived in New Orleans’ West Bank and his father was buried there as well.

In 2005, Hurricane Katrina made landfall in New Orleans.

For the Vietnamese community that had gone through so many experiences of exodus and relocation—from north to south Vietnam, from Vietnam to refugee camps, from those camps to America—Katrina was yet another experience of moving from one place to another.

“The city was shut down,” Tran recalled. “This was not something that happened in Vietnam or in the refugee camps. It happened in New Orleans, in the United States of America.”

It took Tran 28 hours to reach Dallas, Texas from New Orleans. It’s a trip that normally takes eight hours.

As Tran told it, two weeks after the storm, the displaced Vietnamese “came right back and fixed their homes. We shoveled out the mud and picked up. Cleaned up. Came back strong.”

Tran served as the parish coordinator of the Mary Queen of Vietnam Church. He was a community leader and the assistant to Rev. Dominic Nghiem. His wife, whom he met in 1994 at the library, was a nurse. Together, they had two boys—Mark, a student at Loyola University, and Tri On (Vietnamese for “grateful”), a sophomore in high school.

As for his companions who fled Vietnam with him in 1981, Tran told me one lives in Norway, another in the Netherlands, and the rest live in the United States. The little girl is now a married woman living in California. She called Tran in 1992 and asked him if he remembered her.

There’s a plot of vacant land across the street from the Mary Queen of Vietnam Church in Village de l’Est. Tran said the church has just broken ground there to build a cultural center and recreational park on the 28 acres. If all goes according to plan, it will be completed by 2017 and serve as a gathering place for the more than 10,000 Vietnamese living in New Orleans.

Over a meal of Vietnamese food at Ba Mien Restaurant, Tran said, “With my life, I feel I had more than I wished for. Looking back on the journey, everything was a blessing all along.”

On Thanksgiving Day in 2011, Tran found out he had spleen cancer.

“Kind of ridiculous, huh?” he said.

For the first eight months, he underwent “all sorts of treatment, testing, radiation, chemo, medical examinations,” he said, “now I’m on pills.”

Tran said the cancer caused a terrible growth on his skin. “It felt like leprosy. I was so worried,” he said. His doctor told him she had never seen anything like it.

Despite, or maybe because of, his experiences, from war to escape, cancer to Katrina, Tran insisted to me that there is nothing to be afraid of, that there are all sorts of reasons to be happy.

“I try not to take everything seriously,” he said. “It’s a life-changing experience. I’m taking it easy with everything, while I still have another day to live. So what the heck, this is just a little cancer, huh?”

Video and text by Dan Q. Tham

Frank Ghiglione

After a day in Calaveras County, home to the world-famous frog-jumping contest inspired by Mark Twain’s story, we drive west to the island of Alameda, California, to interview Frank Ghiglione, who has his own frog-jumping story. He tells us the story over dinner at Gold Coast Grill, a comfortable, old-school Alameda restaurant where he eats at least weekly. “If I didn’t show up on Thursday,” Ghiglione jokes, “they would have thought I died.”

Five years ago Ghiglione and friends bought several Alameda frogs to enter in the Calaveras County contest. What were their names, I ask, thinking the names might rival that of record holder (21 ft., 5 3/4 inches) Rosie the Ribeter. Ghiglione quips, “Losers is what I call them.”

The Alameda frogs, he says, had no chance against behemoths from Africa. It was like pee wee football players—70-pound first graders—facing off against NFL All Stars. “My frog,” he says, “almost had a heart attack.”

But I want to talk to Frank about family, not frogs. The first generation of my immigrant Ghiglione family—Angelo and Maria—came to the United States from the Genoa area around 1870. Frank Ghiglione’s grandparents—Angelo (1873-1944) and Mary (1883-1953)—came from the Genoa area a decade later, recalled Louis, the youngest of their seven children, during a 1979 telephone interview. “He was a laborer who worked as a truck farmer 20 hours a day,” Louis said of Angelo, his father. “Then he bought a share in the property [a truck farm in Alameda], and later he bought the whole thing.”

Angelo Ghiglione and his produce cart

The two Ghiglione families followed different careers—pasta making vs. farming—but they and many of their descendants have insisted on starting their own businesses and being their own bosses. Angelo sold his farm’s beans, squash, tomatoes and other fruits and vegetables from his cart. Later he bought two San Francisco apartment houses and developed Oakland property, naming streets after the first four of his seven children. Many of those children began businesses in other fields. Why do so many immigrants and their children and grandchildren become entrepreneurs?

Frank, grandson of Angelo and Mary, is a good person to ask, because he owns Rodgers Trucking of San Leandro, California, which employs 168 people. At first he answers my questions with jokes. Ask him how long he has been wed to his wife, Winifred, and he says almost five decades, but claims actress Meg Ryan has been his girlfriend for years. “Unfortunately,” he adds, “we’ve never met.” Explaining the success of his marriage he says, “There are two theories to arguing with women. Neither one works.”

Angelo Ghiglione and his produce cart

Frank did not inherit his trucking company. Frank C., his father, “the picture of health,” who worked as a pipe fitter on Navy ships and then started The Club BaBaLu cocktail lounge with a brother, died of a cerebral hemorrhage at age 42. So Frank, while a student at the University of San Francisco, worked summers at Southern Pacific Motor Trucking and agreed to work at the trucking firm following graduation for five years in exchange for the firm’s paying for his last year at USF. By age 32—“young enough to be dumb enough to do it”—he bought his own trucking company.

Frank exhibits many old-world values. He celebrates his wedding on Columbus Day, gives generously to Alameda city youth and other charities, regularly visits family graves at Holy Sepulchre Cemetery in Hayward (“I spend $7,500 a month on flowers”), enjoys the memory of learning to play the accordion “because it was an Italian thing” and describes growing up with his stern, single-parent mother as “fortunate.” Some of those old-world values may explain his entrepreneurial streak. At 74, he jokes about his hours at work—“half a day everyday—5 to 5.”

Hard work, however, does not alone explain his success. He says the Ghiglione always have insisted on being independent—on not relying on others to sustain them. He, like his immigrant grandparents who risked virtually all by coming to the United States, takes risks. But reasonable risks. In the ‘80s he and four partners, including George Spanos of Stockton, invested $250,000 each in the purchase of Stockton’s Weber Ranch and built 140 homes there that sold well. His fondness for automobiles, beginning with a ’38 Chevy, shows in a collection of 33 favorite cars jammed in a warehouse that has a relevant sign next to its door: “Caution: Adults at Play.” Such impeccably restored cars—including a 1935 Auburn Speedster—have been known to appreciate in value.

Gas pumps from Frank Ghiglione's car collection

Frank Ghiglione, in typical fashion, refuses at first to provide a straight answer to a question about his life today. “All my days are wonderful,” he jokes. “Nothing ever goes wrong in business.” But he leaves the impression that wonderful days far outweigh woeful ones.

Loren Ghiglione

The Mormon temple in South Jordan, Utah

Of all the cities and towns on Mark Twain’s route west that we visited, Salt Lake City honors him least.

The city’s magnificent main library, a 240,000-sq.-ft., five-story-tall curved wedge-shaped beauty by Moshe Safdie and other distinguished architects, celebrates a variety of authors. Its café is named for Hemingway, its bookstore features Poe, its newsletter carries Shakespeare on its front page. But Twain is nowhere to be seen.

Am I surprised? No. In a city that invites humor (a local beer, Wasatch Polygamy Porter, advertises “Why have just one!”), Twain took aim at The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints or Mormons. He questioned the Mormon Bible (“half modern glibness, and half ancient simplicity and gravity”) and “valley tan,” a whiskey-like invention of Mormons, who were not supposed to drink.

Though he praised the industriousness of Latter-day Saints (“no loafers perceptible”) and their extraordinary health (the town’s lone doctor had few customers), Twain joked about planning to lead a great reform to end polygamy, until he saw Mormon women.

“The man who marries sixty of them,” Twain wrote, “has done a deed of open-handed generosity so sublime that the nation should stand uncovered in his presence and worship in silence.”

Twain also observed that Utah locals, not just Mormons, despised outsider “emigrants” such as Twain—“low and inferior sort of creatures.” As attractive as Salt Lake City is today, even a white Protestant male feels he is an outsider amidst all of the suit-and-tied, fresh-faced, wrinkle-challenged Mormons (in 2007, Forbes ranked Salt Lake the most vain U.S. city, based on cosmetics sales and number of plastic surgeons per 100,000).

In fairness, though, while Utah is 62 percent Mormon, Salt Lake is minority Mormon, with Hispanics (22 percent), Asians, Pacific Islanders, Native Americans African Americans and gays a presence (Salt Lake ranks third nationally among mid-size cities for gay and lesbian couples).

But the Salt Lake area does not feel like it’s the tolerant New York or New Orleans of the West, as I am reminded during an interview with Natalie P. Sheppard, 54, a black Mormon whom Twain would have enjoyed had he lived into the 21st century.

Mormon Natalie Sheppard

Twain’s memorable “A True Story, Repeated Word for Word as I Heard It” captures the voice of a feisty, Sheppard-like black woman, introduced as 60-year-old Aunt Rachel. The tale reportedly reproduces the dialect of Mary Ann “Auntie” Cord, born a slave in 1798, who became a cook at the Elmira, New York, farm where Twain wrote many of his most important books.

Making kitchen small talk, Twain asks, “How is it that you’ve lived sixty years and never had any trouble?” The black woman answers by recalling her husband and seven children being taken from her by slave owners, her years of loneliness and longing for them, and her reconciliation with her youngest child 13 years later. She ends with bitingly ironic words: “I hain’t had no trouble. An’ no joy!”

Twain’s “True Story” comes to mind as I interview Sheppard, a black Mormon family therapist for Utah’s Department of Human Services and mother of six children (including three from a 23-year-long second marriage). Sheppard has her own true-story tales of trouble.

Long before Sheppard became a Mormon, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints discriminated against blacks. A few African-American men were ordained as Mormon priests in the 1830s and 1840s (ordination normally occurs as a matter of course when boys reach age 12, as long as they meet “worthiness” standards). But the teachings of Brigham Young kept African-American men out of the priesthood from the mid-19th century until 1978. Sheppard’s troubles, however, have gone beyond the church’s history of discrimination.

Not long after moving from Cincinnati to Salt Lake City, she drove with Ronnie, her seven-year-old son, to a gas station. While he stayed in the car she prepared to pump gas. A car filled with young white men in tuxedos arrived on the other side of the pump. One of the men, Sheppard recalls, “tried to take the pump out of my hand and I said, ‘Really? Seriously?’”

“He said, ‘You dumb little black nigger, give me the pump,’” Sheppard recalls. “And so I took the pump and I squirted him. I squirted the gasoline all over him. And his friend started getting out of his car—and I squirted him too. And they just kept using the N-word.”

Sheppard returned the nozzle and hose to the pump stand, got back into her car and, as she was about to drive away, shouted, “You just better be glad I don’t have a match.”

Other tales of trouble involve her children. Natalie J. Sheppard, her daughter, “a straight A student,” experienced racism at Utah State University. As a black Mormon, Natalie J. “is struggling with the church,” her mother says. “People treated her bad.”

Natalie P. Sheppard’s son Ronnie was told by a seminary teacher that, as a black Mormon, he would “never be anything in this church.” His mother consulted leaders in Genesis, an organization of black Latter-day Saints, who helped her confront the seminary’s leadership. The teacher was fired. Sheppard says her son has abandoned the church. “And his family isn’t LDS,” she adds.

But Sheppard remains a committed Mormon. And she has adopted less confrontational ways of dealing with racism. She came to the church, she says, as an angry black woman from the ‘hood. “I was ghetto. I recognized that I needed to learn and that there were changes that needed to occur in my life.” She earned a university degree and became a licensed clinical social worker.

She remembers, as a therapist for Child and Family Services, calling on a dysfunctional white family for a court-ordered family therapy session. The husband told her, as she stood without an umbrella in heavy rain at his front door, “I don’t let your kind in my house.” Sheppard quietly talked herself inside and, over time, helped the husband and his wife regain their children from foster care.

Destinae, a younger Sheppard daughter who was 4 or 5 at the time, was playing with a girlfriend when a girl new to the neighborhood joined them and said to Destinae’s friend, “If you’re going to play with her I can’t play with you because she’s just a little black nigger.” A neighbor suggested that Sheppard visit the new girl’s parents to confront them.

“I’m not going to do that,” Sheppard said. The next Sunday she spoke at the local Mormon church’s testimony meeting: “I talked about what had happened to my daughter and how sad it was to me because I had a son who was very inactive in this church due to the same behaviors that happened 20 years ago. If you’re all who you say you are and you’re walking in the footsteps of Jesus Christ, none of my children should ever have to experience that again.”

After the meeting, a man came up to Sheppard with his daughter. Sheppard recalls: “He said, ‘This is my daughter Izzie and she is the one who offended your daughter and she really doesn’t know what that means. And we really wanted to come to your house to talk to you and Destinae and straighten it out.” The father and daughter did visit, Sheppard says. “She and Destinae are friends off and on now.”

Racism is alive everywhere, though more subtle among Utahns, Sheppard says. “They will smile and grin at you, and you may learn later that they called you some kind of name. But you have to be a better person. In order for that mindset to change, in order for things to be better for your children, you have to learn how to act in a situation instead of reacting to it. And that’s the reality.”

Loren Ghiglione

A plaque dedicated to the Japanese imprisoned Arkansas during World War II

After a full day of interviewing at Louisiana State Penitentiary, we shot north toward Arkansas through Louisiana towns with memorable monikers: Tallulah (not named for the actress), Water Proof and Transylvania (an enormous black bat adorns its water tower).

We took a left off Route 65 on S. First Street in McGeehee, Arkanas, to see a tiny reminder of a gargantuan failure in U.S. history. For a year during World War II tens of thousands of law-abiding, Japanese-American U.S. citizens were rounded up on the West Coast and imprisoned at camps near McGehee and Jerome, Ark.

Three enormous billboards, huge white letters on black background, greet us along First Street. The first: Jesus is coming soon. The second: Jesus IS coming soon! The third: Are you ready to meet Jesus?

I suspect not, but I was ready for a city park that houses a large human sun dial, an even larger monument to U.S. war veterans and a small memorial plaque that explains the presence of a Japanese water garden. The plaque euphemistically describes the thousands of Japanese Americans’ imprisonment as a relocation.

In Pine Bluff, Ark., we visited briefly with a friend of mine from 1986, Bobbie Harville Crockett, a communications specialist at the agriculture school of the historically black University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff. We reminisced about the six African Americans who made up almost half of the reporting staff of the Southbridge (Mass.) Evening News, during Crockett’s time there.

Three of the six still work at newspapers. But Crockett traded in long, irregular night-and-day newsroom hours for a regular schedule that made it easier for her to raise her son, who is now 14.

We push on to Little Rock to make a late-afternoon interview that will help us understand race in a city made famous in the fall of 1957 for the integration by nine black students, under escort of armed troops, of Central High School. We had hoped to video interview Spirit Trickey, daughter of Minniejean Brown, one of the Little Rock Nine, but Trickey is road-tripping through Canada; we arrange to interview her by telephone about her play on the school’s desegregation when she returns to Little Rock.

But we were lucky on short notice to land an interview with Adjoa A. Aiyetoro, director of the new Institute on Race and Ethnicity at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. She described the Institute’s plans, including an ambitious research project on institutional racism in the Arkansas legal system.

Adjoa A. Aiyetoro, director of the new Institute on Race and Ethnicity at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock

After our interview, Aiyetoro showed us what she called a “graffiti board.” More than 200 students had stuck favorite quotes about addressing racism and other challenges on the board, which is titled “Face It To Fix It.” Mark Twain joins Martin Luther King Jr., Bill Cosby, Maya Angelou, Abraham Lincoln and Muhammad Ali among the most quoted.

Many quotes encourage action. Ali: “Don’t count the days, make the days count.” Margaret Mead: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

But Margaret Atwood is the most quoted for these words: “I hope people will finally come to realize that there is only one ‘race’—the human race—and that we are all members of it.”

Loren Ghiglione

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The road to Unionville

Unionville

Mitzi and David Jones, owners of Old Pioneer Garden

Unionville

Unionville

Unionville

Unionville

Unionville

Unionville

Unionville

Unionville

Old Pioneer Garden, our bed and breakfast

A dead cow next to the road

To get to Unionville, Nevada, where Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) tried prospecting for silver and gold, we drive south for 17 miles from Interstate 80 along desert-like, brush land marked by yellow “Open Range” road signs, illustrated with the image of a bull, each sign topped by two fluttering red warning flags. After three miles, I see a dead black cow, with a dead coyote nestled next to it, lying along the road.

Eventually we turn right on a gravel road to head three miles up into a canyon that becomes the ghost town of Unionville, where animals now far outnumber people. Mitzi Jones, 87, and her son, David, 62, who have three dogs, four cats (two indoor, two outdoor), 25 chickens and a gaggle of goats and lambs, put us up in a charmingly restored circa 1861 guesthouse. The front two rooms (Twain reportedly ate dinner in the rear one) have two-foot-thick adobe walls.

Twain’s Unionville consisted of eleven cabins and a liberty-pole, five cabins on one side of the mountain crevice, and six on the other. A state historic sign marks “the remains of Mark Twain’s cabin.” But the Joneses say he actually lived in a nearby dugout.

He built it, as he writes in Roughing It, “in the side of the crevice and roofed it with canvas leaving a corner open to serve as a chimney, through which the cattle used to tumble occasionally, at night, and mash our furniture and interrupt our sleep.”

Twain tried shoveling, scratching with a pick and sinking a shaft but soon quit prospecting, having learned that what glittered was quartz and other ordinary metals—“that nothing that glitters is gold.” A stranger to Unionville, Twain wrote, “would have supposed he was walking among bloated millionaires.” But life in Unionville really was “a beggars’ revel.”

We eat dinner with the Joneses, two out-of-town friends and a neighbor, Frank McCuskey, 69, a transplanted Texan who retired in his 50s from teaching shop in the nearby Winnemucca, Nevada, school system.

McCuskey describes the danger of driving at night in the valley below, where people test the road’s 70 mph speed limit and, in the process, kill or maim not only cattle but also bears, antelope and deer. The Joneses, with a rifle standing near their front door, recall a cougar’s attack on a half dozen of their lambs and goats. After the cougar killed the goats and lambs, he was treed and shot to death.

The conversation reminds me of a time I would rather forget—of living with my mother, uncle and aunt in the California desert for three years in the late 1940s. Rattlesnakes coiled in the shade next to our back door, a coyote killed my wired-hair dachshund, Suzie, and my aunt later shot my uncle to death.

Despite remembrances of death, the next morning, in the quiet of dawn, it’s hard not to be mesmerized by the golden light of the rising sun, the elegance of the tall, thin poplar trees, the delicate dance of strolling quail and the glisten of the icicles hanging from tree branches.

Items the Joneses have collected also remind us of a fascinating past. They have copies of local newspapers from the 1860s and 1870s and of the 1870 census, which lists dozens of Chinese working as laborers, cooks and house servants, and a 26-year-old Irish woman, Elisabeth Lee, working as a prostitute.

After serving a gargantuan breakfast of scrambled eggs, baked apple, French toast and oatmeal with walnuts and raisins, the Joneses show us two boxes filled with an opium tin; a hard block of opium embossed with a Chinese character; old marbles, some beautifully decorated; arrowheads; a rusted nineteenth-century pistol, a small, painted children’s iron figurine; and rock-hard ammonites, sea creatures from 200 million years ago.

Loren Ghiglione

The Territorial Enterprise Museum in Virginia City, Nevada

We race west across Nevada and California to find places where Mark Twain worked, and we find, instead, places he sort of, kind of, well, he didn’t work.

In the freezing basement of a Virginia City, Nevada, gift shop, on the mining town’s main street we walk around the Territorial Enterprise museum, complete with a painting and pictures of Mark Twain. Except Twain wrote for the Territorial Enterprise when it was located in another Virginia City building that no longer exists. But we do see Mark Twain’s desk and a table where reporters ate, wrote and slept. The museum sign by the table reads: “Yes, Mark Twain slept here, too.”

In Carson City, Nevada, we visit the capitol, except that this capitol, built in 1870, was completed after Twain wrote from Carson City about Nevada’s capital politics for the Territorial Enterprise. But State Controller Kim R. Wallin shows us her desk, which President Lincoln supposedly gave to Nevada’s governor upon statehood (and where Twain supposedly sat).

We also pose in Governor Brian Sandoval’s outer office in front of a sculpture titled “Roughing It Mark Twain” and accept commemorate Sandoval coins that we take to flipping, heads or tails, to decide important life decisions like who will be stuck driving the van for the next two hours.

Near Angels Camp, California, we visit a cabin on Jackass Hill Road that commemorates the presence of Twain and his story-telling buddies, Jim and Bill Gillis and Bill Stoker, during the winter of 1864-65. A plaque says that Twain, while living on the hill, “heard the story of the ‘Jumping Frog’ in an Angels Camp saloon. His version would transform his life.” Except that this cabin was built in 1922, more than a decade after Twain’s death, and restored in 2002-05 by the Sonora Sunrise Rotary Club.

One of a road trip’s greatest thrills is to discover what you are not searching for…and to find it even more fascinating than what you originally were seeking. We were planning to visit the Angels Camp Museum to view its exhibit about Mark Twain and the local story that made him famous, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.” But the museum was closed for the season, and Museum Director Craig Hadley was out of town.

Fortunately for us he arranged long-distance for Susan Rudolph, the museum’s archivist, to give us a tour not only of the museum’s Twain exhibit but also of its collections about early Angels Camps and the area’s mining industry.

The Angels Camp Museum displays old mining equipment, like this waterwheel.

The museum’s extensive mining collection includes everything from a three-story-tall waterwheel, to a rocking chair made of a gunny sack for its back and a wooden Hercules Powder dynamite box for its seat, to The Monster, a giant, cannon-like iron nozzle used in hydraulic mining. That form of mining, reportedly the largest and most destructive, so polluted rivers and streams that it was outlawed in 1884.

As interesting as we find the exhibits, Rudolph’s tales about local residents, those excluded and included from living in town and working in the mines, prove even more fascinating. Rudolph, 49, a Pasqua Yaqui Indian on her mother’s side, tells of the Mi-Wuk Indians, area residents for thousands of years, forced to live on a reservation near Eight Mile Road, and of the Mexicans, also required to live on the town’s outskirts and excluded from working in the mines. Whites felt Native Americans and Mexicans “worked too cheap,” Rudolph says. Chinese were allowed to settle in town and mine. They mined scientifically and systematically, successfully reworking creeks, writes Judith Marvin, “after Euro-Americans had removed the more readily available gold.”

Susan Rudolph shows us an antique cage in the museum's archives, which was used to transport jumping frogs

Given the history of my great-grandfather Angelo Ghiglione, who came to the United States from near Genoa, Italy, in 1872, I am surprised to learn from Rudolph of Genovese immigrants coming to this remote mountain mining town at roughly the same time. Rudolph takes us to the museum’s archive to show us the remains of an exhibit about the Airola, Bolleri, Cassinelli, Cerruti and Lagomarsino families and other local Genovese who, after trying mining, went into law, government and business. “They made a lot of money off those miners,” Rudolph said.

A photo, circa 1890, shows the Main Street merchandise store of John Peirano and his wife Julia. When John died, Julia took over the store. When she died, the town shut down to attend her funeral and mourn their loss.

James Romaggi made a princely $30,000 in five months from mining, then developed a 100-acre farm and, using his stone-mason skills, built a bar/card room/stagecoach stop. That building is the subject of a foundation formed in 2002, “Save the Romaggi Adobe Foundation.”

The Angels Camp Museum has saved the historic Sam Choy building—a merchandise store from 1860 to 1892—and plans to use it to emphasize the cultural diversity of Calaveras County, which was home to 3,000 Chinese by 1860, and to create a special exhibit on the Chinese immigrants of Angels Camp.

Loren Ghiglione

Ben Jaffe, creative director of Preservation Hall Jazz Band in New Orleans

I am listening to an intense, muscular Ben Jaffe, 40, creative director of Preservation Hall Jazz Band, talk slowly and thoughtfully about his New Orleans, his brow furrowed, his sprouting Jewfro tied behind his head. But my eyes see Allan and Sandy Jaffe, his father and mother, who moved to New Orleans in 1961 and founded Preservation Hall, as Ben says, “to create a dignified environment where these aging African-American musicians could carry on a tradition that was slowly disappearing without anybody’s notice.”

I arrived in town shortly after, in 1965, to spend my summer days as a law student researching the case of two New Orleans African Americans who had been on death row at Louisiana State Penitentiary for 14 years. I spent my nights listening to the Preservation Hall band. Sandy Jaffe, seated at the hall’s front gate with a basket in her lap, charged me only 50 cents.

For that “student rate” I not only heard Allan play tuba with trombonist Jim Robinson, clarinetist George Lewis and other African Americans in their 80s and 90s but I also entered the Jaffes’ French Quarter world of, in Ben’s words, “thinkers and outsiders and poets and musicians and artists and wheeler dealers.”

What a wonderful world it was—bespectacled Bill Russell, 60, ragtime violinist, modernist composer, and leading historian of New Orleans music (who wrote to me on Embalming Fluid Company stationery and fixed friends’ violins for free) and potbellied Larry Borenstein, 46, the art dealer who added jazz performances to his art gallery, created a world market for Pre-Columbian art (don’t ask how he got the art out of Mexico) and encouraged painter Noel Rockmore to document the Preservation Hall musicians.

How does Jaffe explain that world, not the world of boozing and barfing tourists on Bourbon Street, but the racially tolerant, inviting New Orleans of Preservation Hall? He sees New Orleans as a city of French, Spanish, African and Native American culture, food, music and architecture that just happens to be in the Deep South. “We’re really the Northern Caribbean.”

“Our pleasure bar is much higher here than in any other city that I know,” he adds. “We’re very serious about enjoyment.”

Preservation Hall, New Orleans, Louisiana

He grew up in the Quarter, lived two blocks from Preservation Hall and spent his early life listening to—and learning—traditional New Orleans jazz. He became a part of a largely African-American world. He marched six miles in Mardi Gras parades. Following his father’s early death, he started playing tuba in the Preservation Hall band. Now he provides a place for older musicians to mentor youngsters who want to follow in their footsteps.

He also seeks to preserve a community and way of life nourished by the music. “Every time I see another Wal-Mart going up it breaks my heart that it’s chipping away at the soul of America,” he says. “I just use that as a metaphor for everything that’s becoming too big and too much.” He prefers, instead, the New Orleans world of traditional jazz.

The music, he says, “gives us hope. It allows us to mourn. It’s a way for us to celebrate and to honor people. And that’s what’s important to me, those traditions.” He describes people from other countries coming to New Orleans and hoping to find in the city and its music the meaning of life.

Those who stay, he says, realize “it’s not one thing.” He recalls the experience of pianist Marie Wantanabe. The first time she experienced New Orleans musicians playing in a funeral procession it was as a tourist, the second time as a performer, the third time as a mourner for someone she knew. “When you’ve gone from birth to death is when you’ve become a part of our community,” Jaffe says.

The way of life of his New Orleans, he suggests, should spread across the world. “If everybody would dance a little bit more, and sing a little more, and celebrate life—not Bourbon Street celebration, Preservation Hall celebration—if they would celebrate the way we celebrate, the way we honor people with our music, the way we celebrate at funerals, the way we’re able to mourn people, it just would be a better place for everyone.”

Loren Ghiglione

Video by Dan Q. Tham

When the doctors couldn’t completely remove the large and painful cyst on her son Kent’s lower back, Chung Kim Do, who insists that we call her Miss Kim, took matters into her own hands.

Miss Kim, 58, is a single immigrant mother from Vietnam who raised six children in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. She is skeptical of Western medicine and, despite all the love that she has for her new homeland, Miss Kim refuses to administer Tylenol when she can call upon the healing properties of ginger and other herbs.

Every night, for five nights, Miss Kim snuck into her son Kent’s room, rolled him over and lifted up his shirt. She spat on the cyst and gently rubbed her saliva into the lesion as her son slept. A business week later, the cyst was gone.

Kent looks a little embarrassed when his mother tells us the tale. Her hair is neatly pressed up in a mini-bouffant and her girlish bangs are swept to one side. Dressed in a pinstriped business suit and adorned with jeweled earrings, Miss Kim clearly took the lessons she learned at beauty school to heart. Her laugh is an inaudible, joyous eruption and her kind eyes moisten with sadness or pride, depending on the story she’s telling.

A particularly wet-eyed story was the one about how she got here.

“I don’t understand,” Miss Kim said, looking upward. “God blessed me.”

She was born in 1953 in a small hamlet called Pleiku, where my mother was also raised. I visited Pleiku once. As I sputtered along on a motorcycle with my father, I remember seeing a severed dog head for sale in the market. When we drove back through the main drag, the dog head was gone.

My mother has fonder memories of the place.

She was Miss Kim’s best friend in grade school. My mother remembers walking home from school with Chung every day. The road was lined with shady trees and vendors selling frozen yogurt. Miss Kim’s family was poor and only got poorer with the end of Vietnam War because of their affiliation with the losing South Vietnamese government. In their schoolgirl days, my mother recalls buying afterschool treats for the two of them. Crispy pâté chaud, sweet mung bean soup, pouches of sour frozen yogurt.

Miss Kim still remembers my mother’s kindness. Separated by more than 1,300 miles, they often talk on the phone.

Though my mother finished high school, Miss Kim dropped out after the ninth grade to help sell trinkets and candy at her family’s store. She eventually married a Chinese man, something she was reluctant to do but agreed upon for the sake of financial stability. Together, they had six children.

It was after her husband died in a motorcycle accident that Miss Kim wanted to leave Vietnam. “Bring me anywhere but here,” she said. “I wanted my children to have a good future. I had dreams. I dreamed my children would have a good education.”

Someone from a Catholic ministry saw Miss Kim, a single mother raising six children, and agreed to help her get to the United States via the Philippines. In 1994, she arrived in Baton Rouge, unable to speak English.

She immediately started working in a factory where she skinned raw fish and shelled crabs. After five months laboring in the factory, Miss Kim knew she had no future there. She decided to go to beauty school. With her newly minted license, she opened her own business, a nail salon, which has been in operation ever since.

“The customers so love me,” Miss Kim tells us with a laugh.

In 2003, with the help of her son Ben who had just graduated from pharmacy school, Miss Kim purchased the house they currently live in, an immaculate and spacious home to all her children and in-laws.

Next year, Miss Kim plans on converting her nail salon into a beauty school, so she can teach others the trade.

“If I was still in Vietnam, I’d be poor,” Miss Kim said. “I appreciate America very, very, very much.”

Charles Reich in his San Francisco home

Four decades before the Occupy Wall Street message spread across America, the New Yorker published on September 26, 1970, a nearly 70-page article, “Reflections: The Greening of America,” by Yale Law School professor Charles Reich that spread a message about a student-generation counterculture that sought “a more human community.”

Reich’s zeitgeist article generated more letters to the New Yorker than any other article in the magazine’s history. Among non-New Yorker readers, the article also provoked excitement. Even my 5,700-circulation, mill-town Southbridge (Mass.) Evening News, which published the article along with local pro-and-con reactions, generated a barrage of brickbats and bravos. Random House soon published The Greening of America as a book that went into its fifth printing in less than two weeks, topped bestseller lists and eventually sold more than two million copies.

Reich, the former editor-in-chief of the Yale Law Journal and the admired scholar of property and civil liberties law, suddenly became an instant celebrity, portrayed in the “Doonesbury” comic strip and sought daily by the media for sound bites. He said the media were “trying to turn me into a fifth Beatle.” The Washington Post’s Don Oldenburg wrote that “so desperate were the media for a piece of Charles Reich that when he turned down its offer, the ‘Today Show’ scheduled Yale’s chaplain, William Sloane Coffin, as a friend of Reich’s.”

Reich depicted as a character in the comic "Doonesbury"

Despite the popularity of The Greening of America, or possibly because of it, many academic and media critics savaged the book. Newsweek’s Stewart Alsop called it “scary mush.” Harvard Law School’s Charles Fried dismissed Reich as a naïve, “pop-fadist cult” romantic and The Greening of America as a “bad book,” slipshod, incoherent and silly.

“The Greening of America did me in as far as academe was concerned,” Reich says today. “I would never be the same after that.” He resigned from the Yale Law School faculty and in 1974 moved to San Francisco. “It was with the goal of being as far away as I possibly could be still in the United States—as far away from New York, where I grew up, New Haven, Washington, D.C.—to get some distance from my former life.”

How does he feel about today’s counterculture movement, Occupy Wall Street? “They’ll never get anywhere with what they’re doing now because they’re appealing to someone else to do something,” whether it be Congress, President Obama or the business community, Reich says. “My message is: ‘You’re going to have to do it yourself.’”

Reich sees plenty to do. He worries about the two million inmates in U.S. prisons, the spread of nuclear weapons (“I’m not sure we won’t blow ourselves up completely in the next few years”), the role of the U.S. military, at a cost of $1 million per soldier a year, in Japan and other countries, and the “scandal and disgrace” of the U.S. economy, with millions of jobs sent overseas, sometimes with tax support.

Our economy “is much worse than the Democrats are willing to say,” Reich continues. “If you’re over 50 and you lose your job you’re not going to get another one. You’re going to live to be 80 and how are you going to support yourself for 30 years?”

Contrasting his attitude during the 1960s, when he taught law, believed in reform and felt he was “doing some good,” he sees himself today as “a dissenter in my own country.” He says: “I don’t like what is going on. I don’t think this is a good future.” He echoes a concern he expressed in The Greening of America about the United States having become a corporate state “taken over by a small minority of powerful interests. I don’t think we’re a democracy anymore.”

But Reich, 84, sees greater tolerance today among Americans than in the past. He recalls growing up in New York where “black people were not allowed to come in the front door” of his apartment building and had to use the service elevator. The progressive private schools he attended—City and Country School and Lincoln School—were not so progressive. They had no African-American students.

He began his law career in 1952, at a time of discrimination against Jews and women as well as blacks and people of other races and ethnicities. At Cravath, Swaine and Moore in New York, where all the lawyers and stenographers were male, Reich says his boss, Donald C. Swatland, told him, “Women are frivolous, women belong at home, women are not designed for business.”

Reich, who is gay, fails to see “how anybody can object to expanding marriage to include any two people—two grownups—who want to live together.” But he downplays his gay identity. “I represent a different group—an unknown minority, probably 40 million or more—people who live alone. I’m a person who can’t live with another person and that trumps sexual orientation completely. My sexual orientation now has almost no relevance to my life.”

As we leave Reich’s San Francisco apartment, the floors of every room and hallway stacked high with books, he reiterates that he is a dissenter, but a dissenter with hope. I recall his earlier comment about his life as an older person who walks with a cane. When he climbs on a bus, people rush to give him a seat. “You get the best of human nature….I get the feeling that people are very nice.”

Loren

Dan posing in front of the sign welcoming us to Colorado

With hours to drive before reaching the night’s Not-So-Super-8 Motel, we stopped in Julesburg, Colorado, for only one hour, the time Mark Twain spent there on his 1,700-mile stagecoach ride west in 1861 to Carson City, Nevada. I was prepared, as an oh-so-serious, glass-half-empty journalist, to write off Julesburg as yet another dying small town (2010 population 1,225, down 16.5% from 2000), bypassed by industry and focused more on its past than its future.

After all, the town sports two, not one, history museums; a monument to its days as a Pony Express station; a municipal light building that commemorates Julesburg’s century-old, community-owned electric utility, and a lyrical sign about the town’s role in Colorado’s history—as gateway on the route west for travelers by foot and wagon, then rail and auto.

But the gloriously restored Hippodrome Theatre at 215 Cedar Street offers a message of hope, not despair, about Julesburg today. Built in 1919 at a cost of $10,000, the Hippodrome failed as a 500-seat movie theater and closed 2 ½ years later. The theater survived a name change and a variety of owners until 1996 when it was reborn as the Hippodrome Arts Centre, a nonprofit intended to serve as a multicultural center as well as a 162-seat theater showing newly released films each weekend for $5 (free if you’re 4 or under).

The theater’s restoration has not been completed, but the Hippodrome Community Players envision performing there several times a year. Next month the theater will host the Missoula Children’s Theatre for live performances. An annual fund-raiser helps subsidize such events.

The Hippodrome Theatre in Julesburg

One hundred and twenty volunteers—high school students, farmers, sorority sisters and bankers called “Hipp Helpers”—staff the movie theater, usually one night a month. Their pay for the night is free popcorn, soda and a ticket to the show.

Sherri Hinde, volunteer coordinator as well as bookkeeper for her husband’s machine and welding shop, says, “If it were not for the volunteers the Hippodrome would not exist.” But it does exist as a wonderful example of what a community can do to help itself.

Loren Ghiglione