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

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

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.”

Rev. Paul J. Colling, a vicar for Hispanic issues for the Grand Island Diocese

“The writing was on the wall,” says Rev. Paul J. Colling, the 54-year-old pastor of St. Ann’s Catholic Church, Lexington, Nebraska, who also serves as vicar for Hispanic issues for the Grand Island diocese, 50,000 square miles of Nebraska that extends north to South Dakota and west to Wyoming. He remembers the life-or-death decision faced by the region’s small towns.

They could remain virtually 100 percent white, a choice favored by many residents, and lose their few factories to plants in other towns that welcomed low-pay, nonunion workers, a majority of them immigrants. Or the communities could try to avoid becoming ghost towns by supporting the hiring of workers who would make local factories more competitive. In Lexington, population 10,000, “city leaders said, ‘This is what we gotta do if we’re going to survive,’” Colling recalls.

So immigrants arrived in Lexington, home to an IBP (now Tyson Fresh Meats) beef processing plant, first by the dozens, then by the hundreds, finally by the thousands. The town became ethnically 63 percent Hispanic, 37 percent non-Hispanic, with also an estimated 1,300 to 3,000 Somalis (not counted fully in the 2010 census).

When the immigrants—Mexicans, Guatemalan Indians, Cubans, Colombians, El Salvadorans and natives of numerous African nations—started arriving, many Lexington whites left for nearby towns like Johnson Lake, which grew from 531 in 1990 to 825 residents in 2000 and remains 98 percent white. The so-called white flight might not be completely attributable to the arrival of immigrants. An unpleasant odor, blamed on the STABL Inc. rendering plant, which converts dead animals from farms and feedlots into such products as Happy Hound dog food, reportedly also played a role.

Colling says that while prejudice still exists in Lexington he believes the community comparatively “is really, really open.” He says the town now attracts whites because of its diversity. If you walk along Washington Street, the main business thoroughfare, you can choose from not only from the usual downtown businesses but also a Somali restaurant, two importers of Mexican and Latin American goods, two Chinese restaurants and African International Food Market.

The diversity does not necessarily mean people mix. At lunchtime, Madeline’s Café & Bakery has 17 white female customers and, two doors away, Freddy’s, a Somali restaurant, has four black male customers. Colling tries at St. Ann’s, which has two masses in English and two in Spanish, “to help the community blend as much as I can.”

He delights in the local July 4 parade that features Mexican-Americans riding their dancing horses. He encourages whites to experience the Our Lady of Guadalupe Fiesta, with its Mexican dancers wearing traditional, hand-made costumes. And he applauds the efforts by Tyson Fresh Meats to accommodate the cultures of workers who, for example, attach great significance to funerals: “They’ll just leave and can be gone for a week.”

But tough challenges remain, he says. He bemoans the closing of Haven House, a shelter for people who arrived in town virtually penniless, looking for work. He says his church is undertaking a feasibility study for the establishment of an immigration office for the parish.

He encourages us to talk with other Lexington residents. We are curious about the impact of the town’s meatpacking plant on its workers. It’s hard not to see the immigrant workers at Tyson as the twenty-first century equivalent of Jurgis Rudkus, the devastated Lithuanian immigrant in Upton Sinclair’s classic 1906 novel, The Jungle, about meatpacking in Chicago.

Ana Maria Hermosillo

But Ana Maria Hermosillo, 45, whose husband worked in Lexington’s plant, has a different view. She worries about immigrants now “applying but not being called” by Tyson. She fears for the future, pointing to the cut in workers’ hours at the plant, from 48 hours to 37 hours. Work at the plant may be repetitive and it may be exhausting, but she believes that the alternative, work in the fields, “that’s the hard work.”

Loren Ghiglione

Loren H. Haskin as a young man in Hiawatha, Kan., circa. 1890.

After our visit to St. Joseph’s Pony Express Museum, we head west on the Pony Express Highway (Rte. 36) for northeastern Kansas to learn about my mother’s Methodist, farm-family parents, Loren Haskin (I was named for him) and Hettie Fletcher. They, like Twain, would travel west, but by railroad four decades later, in 1901.

Hiawatha, Kansas, where my grandfather had this picture of him taken and where Hettie and he married in 1897, claims three distinctions. Until the 2010 census, it could say it was the largest city on Rte. 36 between St. Joseph and Denver, 600 miles to the east. But then Marysville, Kansas (Black Squirrel City, reportedly named for rare specimens that escaped from a traveling circus), achieved a population of 122 more people (squirrels not counted) than Hiawatha.

Second, Hiawatha’s location amidst Indian reservations (many of its streets are named for Indian tribes) encouraged its school district to question the names of its high school, middle school and elementary school mascots. In 2000, the school nicknames changed from Redskins, Warriors and Braves to Red Hawks, Hawks and Junior Hawks.

Third, the town’s Mount Hope Cemetery features a tomb so wonderfully weird that it has become a tourist attraction. In 1930, when Sarah H. Davis, the wife of John M. Davis, died he began erecting a massive memorial to her. The memorial’s 52-ton marble canopy and 11 life-sized statues took seven years and hundreds of thousands of dollars to complete.

The Davis memorial

Townspeople were dismayed that Davis spent the money on the memorial, not the town. But, ironically, the bizarre memorial’s empty overstuffed chair, winged-angel Sarah and four statues of Davis without his left hand benefit the town by attracting curious visitors who spend their tourist dollars locally.

In nearby Morrill, where my great-grandparents and grandparents lived, we interview Robert Herbster, 75, whose family for three generations worked the 160 acres that made up my great-grandfather John Fletcher’s farm. I show Herbster a photo I had taken of his family in 1980, when I first visited the farm to interview him as we drank lemonade and home-made apple cake.

On Morrill, Kan., land once farmed by a great-grandfather of Loren Ghiglione from his mother's side of the family, generations of the Herbster family farmed in 1979: Left to right, George and Nellie Herbster; Robert and Mary Herbster; front row, left to right, Mike and Marty Herbster.

The photo, in a way, tells the story of American farming. In the generation of Robert’s parents, George and Nellie Herbster, independent-minded local farmers could make a decent living on crops from hundreds, not thousands, of acres. By Robert’s generation, large agribusinesses began to dominate farming and Robert struggled to keep working his small farm, eventually moving into downtown Morrill and taking a job with Wenger Manufacturing in Sabetha, Kansas, before retiring in 2009 (his wife continues to work at the grain elevator in Morrill).

Their two sons, Marty and Mike, born in 1969 and 1971, also live in Morrill and do not farm, instead choosing engineering work at air filtrator and seed treater manufacturing plants in Sabetha and Wetmore, Kansas.

Meyers Hy-Klas Grocery and two other stores, Morrill, Kan., 1979.

Perhaps anticipating the fate of farmers around Morrill, my grandparents took the railroad west in 1901 and settled in Pomona, California, where my grandfather, Loren Haskin, sold furniture for—and eventually became an owner of—Wright Bros. & Rice.

But the Morrill farm life survived in their souls and stories, such as their account of Grandmother Fletcher being kidnapped by Indians while playing and returned the next day unharmed.

Loren Ghiglione

Mark Twain, celebrator of his siblings and children, many of whom died too young, would have joined me in appreciating what I experienced with the Ghiglione family in Seattle.

I am an effete, East Coast Ghiglione, an only child (please, spare me the jokes) with an immediate, four-generation family of only 10 people—not even enough for a football team. 

But the Ghigliones of Seattle invariably collect enough relatives at family events for a football team, soccer team, basketball team and baseball team, plus a full complement of pompom-waving cheerleaders.    

In 1997, on the 125^th anniversary of Angelo Francesco Ghiglione’s arrival in America, 60 relatives gathered in Seattle and, with green, red and white Italy-America lapel buttons in place, smiled for the camera. 

This trip to Seattle, Dan Tham, Alyssa Karas and I attended the first birthday of Tinley Ann Tyson, the great, great, great-granddaughter of A. F. Ghiglione.

For someone who has reached age 70—what Twain called the scriptural statute of limitations—I was pleasantly reminded that, whatever mess I make of my time on earth, the family and life survive.

Christopher Hitchens, shortly before his death, said, “It will happen to all of us that at some point, you get tapped on the shoulder and told not just that the party’s over, but slightly worse: The party’s going on, but you have to leave.”  In the case of the Ghiglione family, however, at least the party continues in a joyous celebration of life, as Dan Tham’s video of Tinley Ann Tyson’s birthday party captures.

Mexican American artist Andy Valdivia

Shortly after my Haskin grandparents left Kansas by railroad, Mexican immigrants began arriving in Kansas by railroad to escape poverty and the violence of the Mexican Revolution, 1910-1920. They took unskilled jobs with railroads, mining companies and agribusinesses. Alyssa, Dan and I drive south from Morrill, home in the late nineteenth century to my great-grandparents and grandparents, to Topeka, to interview Andy Valdivia about his paintings on exhibit at the Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site.

Murals by Valdivia, who shares his Nov. 30 birth date with Mark Twain, are part of an exhibit titled “From Mexico to America: Through the Eyes of Kansas Artists.” One mural captures the story of Mexicans arriving in Topeka, working for the Santa Fe railroad and living in cramped boxcars and bunkhouses, often without indoor bathrooms, electricity or running water.

Mexicans were not encouraged to continue their education. They were not permitted in the public pool or movie theaters—except in the balcony’s “Mexican Heaven,” next to the section for blacks, the “Crow’s Nest.” At restaurants, only takeout was available to Mexicans. A typical sign read “Coloreds, Mexicans and Indians Served in Sacks Only.”

"HIS Story," a mural by Andy Valdivia

Valdivia’s murals also tell the story of later generations of Mexican-Americans—distinguished military service overseas, graduation from college as well as high school and employment in skilled and professional positions. Valdivia, 63, taught computer programming at Topeka Correctional Facility until he retired on November 30, 2011—an anniversary, of course, of Twain’s birth.

Loren

Dan uses the interactive daguerreotype display at the Cincinnati Public Library

For the two hours we have to spend in Cincinnati we focus on food and a photo.

The photo, an amazing 1848 daguerreotype view from across the Ohio River, details two miles of the Cincinnati waterfront where eight years later Mark Twain would begin his career as a riverboat pilot. Sixty steamboats dot the eight daguerreotype plates shot by William S. Porter and Charles Fontayne.

The original plates, each 6 ½ inches by 8 ¼ inches, are on display in the third-floor Cincinnati room of the city’s 800 Vine Street main library. On the first floor the plates have been enlarged by digital-age microscopy equipment and merged into a photo mural about 30 feet long.

At both locations high-definition versions on giant touch screens allow you to zoom in on details of the panorama—for example, bloomers drying on a balcony clothesline in a pre-electric-washing-machine age. A pop-up explains that clothes washing “was a grueling daylong task performed weekly in most homes.”

Cincinnati’s critics described it as a boring burg. Frances Trollope said Cincinnatians lived “without amusement.” Twain is quoted as saying (though the quote cannot be authenticated): “When the end of the world comes, I want to be in Cincinnati because it’s always 20 years behind the times.” But the daguerreotype view shows a bustling city, certainly not behind the times. Anticipating the end of steamboats the panorama shows the new passenger depot of the Little Miami Railroad.

The Sunday afternoon image captures an urban center populated by Irish and German immigrants (half the city’s population were foreign-born) and free African Americans. Eighty percent of the city’s African Americans—the nation’s third largest black population by 1850—worked as riverboat deck hand, roustabouts, stewards, cooks or maids.

For food, we traveled to Cincinnati’s Over-the-Rhine neighborhood, a revitalized historic district remembered for its riots a decade ago. Joe’s Diner at 1203 Sycamore Street features an old chrome dining car with an interior in pink, silver and black, a wall clock stuck at 3:37, a disc machine that plays Elvis Presley and pink neon lights.

Joe's Diner, in Cincinnati's historic Over-the-Rhine neighborhood

Open 9 a.m. to 4 a.m. on Fridays and Saturdays, the diner offers “I Love Lucy” on a TV screen behind the counter and breakfast at all hours. For lunch, Dan (fish and chips) and Alyssa (Caesar salad) order sensibly. I choose “Over the Rhine”: two eggs over easy, two bacon strips, two sausage links, hash browns and two pumpkin pancakes.

But even I don’t attempt “Shadeau’s Big Bite” $19.99 challenge, a three-pound burger with big-bite fries. If you eat Shadeau’s Big Bite in 30 minutes or less it’s free.

Loren Ghiglione

Washington Post videographer Evelio Contreras

Evelio Contreras, a Washington Post videographer, grew up in Eagle Pass, Texas, across the Rio Grande from Piedras Negras, Mexico, “with a divided understanding” of himself.

He was a first-generation Mexican American with, he said, a strong connection to the United States. He also had deep ties to Mexico. His parents were born there.

His mother, who sewed clothes, and his father, who worked construction, stressed education for Evelio and his siblings: “They taught us about working hard in school.”

Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism represented Contreras’s first experience with diversity. Eagle Pass “felt like 99 percent Mexican,” said Contreras. “There were no African Americans.”

So Contreras spent 2000-01, his first year at Medill, exploring a different student community each quarter: blacks in the fall, Asians in the winter, and the student daily newspaper staff, largely white, in the spring. Used to direct Eagle Pass residents, he found he needed to study whites to learn “how to read what they were saying.”

In his junior year, he was in the first group of Medill students to report a quarter from Johannesburg and Cape Town for South African news organizations.

After dealing with racial categories different than those familiar to Americans and 11 official languages in South Africa, Contreras felt that he returned to the United States with “a South African identity,” comfortable with the country’s diversity.

Dan Tham’s video records the explanation by Contreras of how his background and training have led him to connect in his reporting with people who have a strong sense of their “otherness.”

Loren Ghiglione

Juan Williams

The writings and remarks of Juan Williams, Fox News political analyst and provocateur, have a habit of generating controversy.

He titled his recent tribute on The Root to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, after 20 years on the court, “Clarence Thomas: Black Nationalist?” Williams called Thomas “a leading black conservative,” admirably independent: “His race neutral approach is a sharp contrast to race conscious programs approved to remedy past discrimination.”

Jack White, former Time magazine columnist who also contributes to The Root, dismissed Williams’ column as a “ludicrous piece” that tried to “remake Thomas into a black nationalist icon instead of the Uncle Tom that many blacks consider him to be.”

A second controversy occurred while Williams was working for both National Public Radio and Fox News. Contending on Fox’s “The O’Reilly Factor” that fear of Muslims should not be used to restrict their rights, Williams said, “When I get on the plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried, I get nervous.”

NPR terminated Williams’ contract two days later, on Oct. 20, 2010. Fox signed Williams to a three-year contract reportedly worth $2 million, and Williams wrote a book critical of NPR titled Muzzled: The Assault on Honest Debate.

Despite the recent controversies, Williams’s earlier journalism commands respect. During 23 years at The Washington Post, he served as national correspondent and political columnist. He wrote a distinguished biography of the first African American on the U.S. Supreme Court, Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary, and Eye on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965, which accompanied a documentary TV series. His TV documentary writing earned him an Emmy.

So we sought his opinion about a vexing challenge for America, how to respond to a black underclass that seems to lack the education and support network to succeed. In an earlier interview, Pulitzer–winning Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson had recommended to us a domestic Marshall Plan, equivalent to the huge U.S. effort after World War II to rebuild European economies.

In another interview, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr, director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, had called for a second civil rights movement.

But Williams takes a strikingly different approach, perhaps reflected in the title of his 2007 book Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements, and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America—and What We Can Do About It.

Williams thinks it is unrealistic to count on help from new government programs: “Now it’s politically untenable to get more money for stimulus.” He stresses individual responsibility—educating yourself and choosing to be accountable for your own circumstances.

“What would I say to my daughter, what would I say to my sons? ‘Here’s what you can do to help yourself,’” Williams continues. He suggests staying in school and the job market, not getting married and not having children until you have a job, and being realistic. “Don’t think you’re going to be a rap star,” he says.

Born in Panama, Williams, 57, describes his roots in the West Indies and the sense of black people there not as broken, but as strong and capable. He talks about the “much higher” educational level in the West Indies and the stress on taking advantage of academic opportunities.

Williams majored in philosophy at Haverford College in 1972. He voices skepticism about Haverford’s initial civil-rights-era efforts in the late 1960s to achieve student body diversity by recruiting black inner-city high school students. He sees the black students in his class of ’72 as a reaction—three African princes and three prep school boys.

But he credits the civil rights movement and Dr. Martin Luther King for opening doors for him, recalling a time when The Washington Post had no black writers. Pointing to the absence of black TV anchors, Williams says race still remains “a real ceiling and a real issue for me.”

For his children, however, race is less important. His daughter, Rae, is married to a white man. His two sons, Antonio and Raphael, find race “real, but not defining.”

The generational difference is captured in a Fox segment in which Williams takes his two sons along King’s route on the day he helped lead the 1963 March on Washington and then to the new Martin Luther King Jr. Monument.

“I grew up in a world that was being changed by Dr. King,” Williams says. “But for you, you grew up in a world that’s already been changed.”

Loren Ghiglione

Loren's mother, Rita

What makes a woman The Other? Race? Ethnicity? Sexual orientation? Skin color? Wanting a family, not a career, first? Or does a woman become The Other by just being a woman, not a man?

I’m asking those questions after interviewing five female graduate students at Yale’s School of Drama who identified themselves as The Other (watch our video here) and after thinking about my mother, a graduate student of drama at Yale almost four generations earlier. She earned a Master of Fine Arts in theater production in 1935.

Today’s students call themselves The Other for strikingly different reasons. Delilah Dominguez, 24, a native of Bastrop, Texas, identifies herself as small-town, “queer and a minority woman”—the first member of her family to attend college. A student of dramaturgy and dramatic criticism, she feels uncomfortable in the privileged world of theater at Yale and bristles at the “socio-economic disparities” she observes. Having volunteered at a Branford hospice, she plans to switch careers and enter social work.

Keri Klick, a 22-year-old student of sound design who is also the first college graduate in her family, defines herself as The Other “because I have excelled quickly in a male-dominated industry—but with the sole intention of preparing myself to have a career in theater production eventually.” She talks of getting married and starting a family young. To ensure a life focused on her family, perhaps she will earn a Ph.D. and teach. “I’m going to make it work somehow,” she says.

First-year acting student Michelle McGregor, 24, of Wilmington, N.C., considers herself The Other for three reasons. She recalls her first day of classes at Yale. She felt uneasy, as a private person who viewed theater as scripts to be analyzed, “rolling around on the floor, acting like children, being goofy”—being pushed immediately to open up to people and to analyze herself. Though “school is great” now, she remains sensitive to her life within the seemingly safe, “strange bubble” that is Yale, when gunshots at night and people on the street asking for help remind her of the harder-edged reality that is much of New Haven. And, while working in New York City before arriving at Yale, she became increasingly aware of women needing to “care very much about their appearance,” while men “can get away with being disheveled.”

Prema Cruz and Carmen Zilles, acting students, are conscious of their ethnic heritage. Zilles, a 24-year-old Mexican-American, says she is the only Hispanic member of her second-year class. At the drama school, which accepts only one acting student for every 80 who apply, she wonders sometimes whether “that has to do with why I got in here.”

Carmen Zilles

As a scholarship student at Sarah Lawrence College, where “most people had a lot of money, I felt like a huge Other,” she says, turning philosophical. “I sometimes have the feeling everyone is an Other.” When she visits her family in Mexico she says she feels “very Other.” “Sometimes,” she adds, “I feel very American.”

Yale’s drama school, with its free tuition, “feels very equal,” she says. But ethnicity remains an issue. “It’s interesting that people don’t talk about it,” she says, “but it’s definitely there.” She worries that she will be limited to Hispanic acting roles after Yale.

“There’s not a whole lot of plays about the Latin American experience in this country,” she says. She has already been cast in a Yale play as a Cuban. “I’m not Cuban,” she says. “I don’t necessarily walk around feeling like a Hispanic person. I just kind of walk around feeling like a person.”

Born in the Bronx, N.Y., Cruz, a 26-year-old, first-year acting student, grew up in Sacramento, Calif., with her African-American mother. Only recently has she begun spending much time with her Dominican-born, Spanish-speaking father in New York.

They visited the Dominican Republic together. Cruz, who considers herself “a black woman” and is much darker than her father, found herself faced with a wrenching moment of decision in a culture with “very blatant racism.” She needed to board a flat-bed truck that served as a bus, with dark-skinned women sitting in the back and light-skinned locals sitting inside the truck’s cab.

Her father knew to sit inside the cab, Cruz recalls, her eyes tearing. “I didn’t know what to do. Do I sit in the back or the front with my father? I’ll never forget that moment.”

Prema Cruz

Cruz, who was “never raised to think about color,” has not dated African-American or Dominican men, only white men. Whomever she marries, her children “must know who they are and where them came from”—the stories and roots of their parents and grandparents. She says, “It’s important to know what those roots dig into, what they are soaking up.”

My mother, Rita, was the daughter of Loren Haskin and Hettie Fletcher, white, Methodist, farm-family Kansans who moved west to Pomona, Calif., at the beginning of the twentieth century and never attended college. Rita graduated in 1932 from Scripps, a new women’s college in Claremont, Calif., where she was known for being, in the words of Groucho Marx, “well over four feet” and nicknamed “Birdie.”

Childhood polio had required annual surgery, recalled Marion Jones, a cousin, “to lengthen and keep her spine as even as possible. She must have suffered great pain and I thought she was very brave.” Virginia Willis, a Scripps classmate and childhood friend, said, “She had so much illness but in all the years I never heard her complain.”

Many of her classmates regarded Scripps as a finishing school preparing them for marriage and a family, not graduate school and a career. But Rita pursued her interest in theater production at Scripps and beyond (for a summer 1931 course in play production at Claremont Colleges she earned an A).

She applied to Yale. Isabel F. Smith, dean of Scripps, recommended her as “quick and humorous; diligent, conscientious and ambitious.” Smith concluded: “I have seen her take part most admirably in several plays, but she has a slightly noticeable spinal curvature and it may be that her decision to go into production has been influenced by a realization of this handicap.”

Yale accepted Rita. My grandparents scraped together Yale’s annual tuition of $350 and in 1932 my mother started the three-year production course of Yale’s department of drama where, according to department rules, “only one third may be women.”

Loren Ghiglione

Dan Tham’s videos capture two of the Mario Picciones I know from my 26 years, 1969 to 1995, of putting out the Southbridge (Mass.) Evening News. As the owner for decades of Mario’s, a local restaurant, Mario produces excellent Italian cooking and trains numerous people to become chefs. As caring, concerned citizen he offers his honest assessment of the state of his home town.

Loren Ghiglione

Video by Dan

Matthew and Emily MacMillan in their Twain-trip T-shirts

It’s Sunday, Oct. 23, my first day off from the Twain trip. I’m spending it in Scituate, Mass., with my wife, Nancy; younger daughter, Laura; son-in-law Mike MacMillan; and their three children.

Infant Joy (who is a joy), 3-year-old Matthew and Emily are celebrating Emily’s 4-and-a-half-year birthday with special fudge swirl ice cream and six toppings (to take a photo of Matthew and Emily in their Twain trip T-shirts required first scrubbing their cheeks and chin clean of fudge swirl layers).

I also visit my 93-year-old mother, Rae Whitney Ghiglione, who has been living in a second-floor studio apartment at Sunrise, a Cohasset, Mass., nursing facility, for 15 months. She has adjusted well to what could have been a traumatic change.

Rae Whitney Ghiglione from her glamorous days in show business

Following my father’s death in 1966, she spent 44 years living alone, most of it in a tiny Sherman Oaks, Calif., house with an assortment of animal-shelter mutts. But on April 6, 2010, she was found by a housekeeper after surviving two days on her kitchen floor. She was barely conscious.

Then came three months of hospitalization and physical therapy. She moved cross-country to Sunrise and, with the aid of a walker, immediately joined in all activities, from morning exercise classes to field trips to church services to drawing classes to nightly movies.

She has meals at a table of eight—seven women and one man—known for laughing loudly and staying late. From her days as a TV singer and her beauty, she has gained the nickname “glamour girl.”

But there are reminders of mortality. An aide gives her 13 pills each morning and evening. Occasional falls require visits to a nearby hospital. The latest occurred when she bent over to pet Harley, Sunrise’s somnolent, sad-eyed pooch, and broke her neck.

Doctors did not recommend surgery because of her age. So, after knocking on her apartment door, I find her napping on her bed, flat on her back, her neck immobilized by a 4-inch-wide, black-and-white brace.

Sensing my sadness at seeing her in the brace she explains how she is adjusting. She describes an easel-like contraption that allows her to continue to play bingo. “It works fine,” she says.

She remains philosophical about her condition, including memory loss. She endures the neck brace without complaint. “No point,” she says, “in doing anything else.” When she thinks she hears me address an aide by the wrong name, she laughs, “No name is the wrong name around here.”

Loren Ghiglione