Immigrant Stories

Carlos Davila Torres

2012-01-25T07:36:00.000-08:00

Torres: We came to the United States in August of 1996 when I was nine years old. My family was in search of better opportunities. I came with my mother and father, my older sister and my younger brother and sister. I didn’t know what to expect, it was pretty scary. None of us knew any English and in 1996 there weren’t very many Latino families in the valley.

When we first came we lived in a basement studio apartment. That was tight. The winter of 1996 was a heavy snow year and we had never seen snow or experienced the cold. I love it now but it was quite an adjustment for us at first.

I thought we were just going to be here three months and leave. I didn’t think we were going to stay. Catholic Charities was really small at the time so there wasn’t much in the way of help. I think what pushed us all to learn English and get out there was the lack of Latino interaction. Because of that we felt like we had to learn the language as fast as possible.

I can remember going to the store and realizing that I couldn’t just ask someone where things were. I realized I had to learn how to ask. I learned English in about six months. In a year I was pretty fluent.

Gallacher: You said you didn’t expect to stay in the U.S. Is that what your parents had told you?

Torres: Yeah, my parents had said that it was just a trial to see if we liked it. We weren’t here very long and my brothers and sisters and I were begging to go home. It was scary. I can remember my first day of school I was waiting for the bus. My mom had dropped me off and told me that the bus would be coming in a few minutes.

So while I was waiting, these other kids came and started asking me God knows what. I just nodded my head yes and no to their questions and they started laughing. I couldn’t tell if they were making fun of me or really asking me a question. It was really intimidating.

Being in school and not knowing the language is a very vivid and frightening memory for me. I didn’t talk to anyone, I couldn’t. There was one Latino girl who helped me out a lot. She would translate for me and we became good friends that year. She would make sure I understood the homework and even tutor me.

Gallacher: How did your parents handle the situation when you were all begging to go back to Mexico?

Torres: My parents knew it was hard on us but they were firm with us about staying. They knew we would eventually get used to life here. They were right. We went back for a visit in 1998 and after a week we were all saying, “Let’s go home.”

When we were in school in Mexico we wore uniforms and school was very strict. Teachers didn’t really care that much about students, you were on your own. But here, if the teachers see you are having trouble, they do everything they can to help you.

At my school in Mexico they had people at the door checking to make sure our hair was short, our shoes were shined, our uniforms were pressed and that the girls weren’t wearing make up. We had to take our books home with us every night.

So when I came here I thought you had to do the same thing. At the end of my first day I was putting all of my books in my backpack when my friend asked me what I was doing. She told me I could leave the books there, but I didn’t believe her. She finally convinced me. I couldn’t sleep that night because I thought my books would be gone. But the next day, there they were. I was amazed. I remember thinking, “Maybe this isn’t such a bad place after all.”

Gallacher: You couldn’t leave your books at school in Mexico?

Torres: Oh no they would be gone.

Gallacher: What did your parents do in Mexico?

Torres: They owned their own taco shop. They were doing really well until 1994 when the value of the dollar went up and the peso was devalued*. People who were doing well one day woke up poor the next. Our money was suddenly worth nothing. There were a lot of successful businessmen committing suicide.

My dad had just bought a truck, a Ford F150. It was brand new and my parents were current on their payments but when this happened in 1994 the amount they owed on the truck tripled because of the drop in the peso. The economy was the main reason we came here. My dad came first in 1995 and worked for a year. He saw the life and the opportunity here and decided to come get us.

Gallacher: How did you come to the United States?

Torres: We came on a visitor’s visa and applied for residency. I started working very young. I got a job as a busboy at Marshal Dillon’s Steakhouse and my older sister got a job as the hostess. We all worked together. After school we would come home, do a little bit of homework and go to work until 10 or 10:30 at night.

Gallacher: How were you able to do schoolwork when you were working so much?

Torres: We did pretty well and since my dad ran the restaurant he was able to work with us on our hours. If we had a big project at school we didn’t go or we left early. I did fine I made it through high school and I will graduate from Colorado Mountain College with an Associate of Arts degree in Criminal Justice.

Gallacher: What do you want to do with your degree?

Torres: I want to be a police officer. I just graduated from the police academy. My plan is to start as an officer. Eventually I want to get a Bachelor’s Degree and work as a detective.

Gallacher: It sounds like your family was really close growing up?

Torres: We still are. We stick together. Every night we gather round the table and talk about our day. We give each other advice and support one another. We are all still living at home. My parents never believed in the “you’re eighteen and out of the house” approach to raising a family. They have applied the family values they brought with them from Mexico. They believe that you don’t leave the house until you’re ready to move on.

Gallacher: A lot of immigrant kids have to work to help their family. Was that your situation?

Torres: We did help our parents but they were pretty self-sufficient. My dad wanted us to work and learn the value of money. He wanted us to learn the difference between need and want. He used to say, “If you need something you’re going to work for it and your going to help out in the house too.” We weren’t like some teenagers just hanging out after school. We were studying or working.

When my parents came here they really applied themselves. Both of my parents went through the English as a Second Language program at Colorado Mountain College. It was really hard for them to learn a second language because they are older but they were determined. My dad has been managing restaurants ever since he learned the language. My dad is totally fluent. I can have long conversations with him in English.

My mom works as a cashier at Kmart and uses English everyday. She was really afraid to apply for the job but we all encouraged her. We told her the only way to learn was to get out there and make some mistakes. She’s not fluent but she’s about sixty percent. She is a cashier so she is learning everyday and she is still going to CMC classes.

She gets off work at five and goes straight to class and gets home at nine.

The first three or four years were really hard for them, trying to learn a new language and adjust to not owning their own business. Dad started working in restaurants just doing prep and having someone tell him what to do. I think that experience really motivated him to learn English. He wanted to be able to speak for himself. Now my parents are both doing well for themselves and their family.

Gallacher: Did your parents go to school in Mexico?

Torres: Yes they both graduated from high school. They didn’t attend college but they understood the importance of education and encouraged us. My dad used to always say to us, “You’re all going to finish school if it’s the last thing I do.” All of us have gone to Colorado Mountain College.

* The 1994 Economic Crisis in Mexico, widely known as the Mexican peso crisis was caused by the sudden devaluation of the Mexican peso in December 1994. The Mexican government's finances and cash availability were further hampered by two decades of increased spending, a period of hyperinflation from 1985 to 1993, debt loads, and low oil prices.

Charles Piffer

2012-01-10T08:03:00.001-08:00

Listen to Charles' story

Piffer: My granddad Joe Telck came from the Tyrol, which is Northern Italy now, but before World War I it was Austria. His plan was to get settled with a good job and send for grandma but while he was here the war started and my grandma got stuck. During the war my granddad had a hard time because Austria was in the war against the United States and when he went to New Castle people would heckle him because he was Austrian.

He worked in the coalmines in New Castle and eventually got 160 acres from the government* up West Elk Creek and started farming. After the war, my grandma was able to join him on the farm.

My dad came next and went to work in the mines in Ludlow, Colorado. Mom joined him two years later and they got married.

Gallacher: Was he there during the Ludlow Massacre**?

Piffer: Yes he was. I remember him talking about that. They shot some of those striking miners on the spot. They were against the unions and anybody trying to organize one.

He worked in Ludlow until he lost his leg in a mining accident. A moving cable came around and caught him and his days in the mine were over. After that Mom and Dad moved in with her folks on the farm in West Elk.

My dad had a wooden leg for most of his life. Even though it was really heavy he could do a lot of things with that wooden leg. Actually he had two, one for work and one for Sundays and special occasions.

He could ride horseback and do all the work around the farm. He farmed for years and years. I was born on that farm. Even as little kids my brother Joe and I had to work. We milked cows and stacked hay fed the pigs and chickens. We always had plenty to eat.

We raised acres and acres of potatoes. I remember in the fall when school started most of the farm boys in that whole area missed the first couple weeks of school because they were picking potatoes.

Gallacher: What did you do with all of them?

Piffer: We had big potato cellars and during the winter we would sort them and put them in hundred-pound sacks. And then in the spring Johnny Ritter, the potato buyer, would come by and truck them down to the railroad and ship them out to Denver and the big cities. We only shipped the best. The rest we ate or fed to the pigs.

But life changed when my mom died. I was ten at the time. By then my mom’s folks had bought a place in Coryell Town in New Castle. My dad figured that with Mom gone he couldn’t take care of the farm and us at the same time. So my brother Joe and I went to stay in town with the grandfolks during the week and Dad would come get us and take us back to the farm for the weekends.

My mom was nice, she never laid a hand on us but Grandma had a pretty heavy hand. If we didn’t do things the way she wanted, she let us know it.

Gallacher: That must have been a really difficult time for you.

Piffer: It was but when you’re that little you don’t realize as much. But when my grandmother took over, she really took over. If you did something wrong you got a slap on the face. She meant well but it was hard after losing Mom.

Gallacher: Did you finish school there.

Piffer: No, I got a chance to go to California about half way through high school and I took it. It was 1939 and the aircraft factories were real busy. I went to school out there and then later on I got a job in the factory building airplanes. That’s where I was on December 7, 1941. I was working the night shift and was on my way home when the bulletin came on the radio saying that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor. Right then and there I thought, “I’m gonna join the Marines.”

Gallacher: Why the Marines?

Piffer: Because I knew they would get there first. A month later I was in boot camp and from there they shipped us out to New Zealand and trained with the New Zealand army for six months. We went from winter in New Zealand to our first landing at Guadalcanal where it was hotter than hell. That’s where we met the Japanese.

We got bombed every, every night while we were there. They circled their planes around and around just to harass us and just before they left they would bomb us.

From Guadalcanal we went to Bougainville Island. I remember we landed on the beach and the Japanese air force came at us so hard that the ships that dropped us off had to leave, taking all of our supplies and ammunition with them. So all we had with us was a little bit of grub in our backpacks and whatever ammunition we could carry.

I remember just like it was today. The beach had a giant curve to it. And I was in that curve when a Japanese Zero came strafing up the beach. I can still see the face of that Japanese pilot because he was only thirty feet away from me. He was really laying it down but he couldn’t get at me because I was tucked into that curve. We finally got off the beach and into the jungle.

Two days after we landed the Japanese landed a bunch of their people in behind us. Bougainville was quite a fight. We saw death everywhere, day in and day out. From Bougainville we went to Guam and ran the Japanese out of there. From there we went to Iwo Jima where we had a helluva fight. We were losing about 300 Marines a day. We were there thirty days and had about 7000 die and thousands more wounded.

I remember one night we were relaxing in camp sitting around in a group when a Japanese artillery shell hit and it got the guy sitting right next to me. Iwo Jima was tough. I remember when they raised the flag there, everybody thought the battle was over but that was just the beginning. Everyone on both sides took a helluva beatin’. They were hauling the dead out in dump trucks.

Gallacher: What did that do to you?

Piffer: I knew I had to keep goin’. I couldn’t afford to stop and think about it for very long. I never thought that I would get killed but I saw so many of my buddies get it. Sure it affected me but I knew I had to keep movin’. I see this war stuff today and I break down into tears.

I probably wouldn’t have made it if the war had continued. We were scheduled to be one of the first divisions to invade Japan but then they dropped the atomic bomb and the war was over.

Gallacher: How did you adjust to civilian life after living in the thick of war?

Piffer: It felt so good to be home and the people treated me so good. I did have a lot of sleepless nights. I dreamed about some of my buddies that I knew and lost.

I remember one time, just after I got back, I was up at the ranch standing out by the garden fence when a county road crew blasted some rock. That sound scared me so bad I jumped over the four-foot garden fence.

My family was good about helping me. When I came back I met my first wife Mary Antonelli and got married. She helped me adjust.

Note: Charlie and Mary Piffer had three children, Duane, Dick and Barb. Charlie took advantage of the GI Bill and studied auto mechanics and auto body repair. He worked in Glenwood for Tenbrook Motors and then Lincicome Motors where he was the service manager. Charlie eventually opened his own auto body shop on South Grand and ran it for twenty years. When he closed his shop he went into real estate for a few years before retiring.

Mary Piffer died suddenly in the early seventies. Three years later Charlie met his present wife Glenda McDonald. They now live in Grand Junction.

*The Dawes Act, adopted by Congress in 1887, authorized the President of the United States to survey Indian tribal land and divide the land into allotments for individual Indians and others .The important provisions of the Dawes act were: (1) A head of family would receive a grant of 160 acres, a single person or orphan under 18 years of age would receive a grant of 80 acres, and persons under the age of 18 would receive 40 acres each; the allotments would be held in trust by the U.S. Government for 25 years; (3) Eligible Indians had four years to select their land; afterwards the selection would be made for them by the Secretary of the Interior; (4) U.S. citizenship would be conferred upon allotees who abandoned their tribes and adopted "the habits of civilized life."

**The Ludlow Massacre was an attack by the Colorado National Guard on a tent colony of 12,000 striking coal miners and their families at Ludlow, Colorado on April 20, 1914.

The massacre resulted in the violent deaths of between 19 and 25 people; sources vary but all sources include two women and eleven children, asphyxiated and burned to death under a single tent. The deaths occurred after a day-long fight between strikers and the Guard.

Ludlow was the deadliest single incident in the southern Colorado Coal Strike, lasting from September 1913 through December 1914.

Judith Nakagawa Ritschard

2011-12-27T17:05:00.000-08:00

Listen to Judith's Story

Ritschard: My parents came to the United States for different reasons. My dad is Japanese and came from Brazil because his uncle told him if he learned English he could go to work for him in Japan. My mom was working in a hotel in Puerta Vallarta where she met a man who lived up in Starwood in Aspen. There wasn’t very much help in the valley at that time and so people were looking for housekeepers and caretakers. So my mom had a job here before she left Mexico.

We came to the United States and lived in his caretaker unit for about a year. That was fun. They were hardly ever there and they had a pool and dogs and a stuffed Bugs Bunny that was about six feet tall. They had those strange things that rich people have that were pretty amazing to me at three-years old.

Gallacher: Do you remember coming here?

Ritschard: My very first memories as a child were of arriving in the U.S. We got here a couple of days before Halloween. I just thought I had died and gone to heaven, going door-to-door and getting candy. My mom was really great at encouraging us to meld into this culture. She saw that other kids were doing it and so off we went trick or treating.

I remember that first winter and the snow and crying in preschool. I was cold and I didn’t understand the kids because I only spoke Spanish. I think I cried for about a month and then I went home one day happy and that was it. I was having fun. I had made some friends.

It helped that I had my brother with me. He was a year and a half older than me and he was my little sidekick. That preschool was the beginning of learning and adjusting to a new culture because, at home, we weren’t getting what little American kids were getting.

My parents were gone a lot, especially when we were younger. It was a real struggle for them because they had to work so much. They were trying to learn the language and adjust to the culture. I remember my mom working long days and taking English classes at CMC after work. She would take us along and we would do coloring projects while she learned English.

My dad was working at a sushi restaurant, one of the first sushi places in Aspen. So with both parents working, we were alone a lot and had to learn to be grown up and resourceful at an early age. I think that’s what made my brother and I so close. We were in it together. So while other kids were doing after school stuff we were waiting in the car for my dad to be done with his shift.

He’d come up and check on us and bring us some miso soup and give us some quarters to go to the bakery. There was an elderly woman at the bakery who really loved us and would give us cookies.

My brother and I weren’t complainers. We were pretty resilient and we took care of each other. I did spend some time being resentful of my parents and the fact that I couldn’t be ice-skating or taking piano lessons after school. But being an immigrant you learn to be resourceful and you learn to take care of each other.

Eventually, mom ran a housekeeping business and my dad had his own landscaping business. So by the time I was ten years old, I was helping her and my brother was helping my dad. That was our summers. Other kids got to go to summer camp and my brother and I went to work. That was hard sometimes.

Gallacher: What else did you learn from that experience that contributed to your character?

Ritschard: I learned to navigate the world. There were a lot of things that my parents couldn’t help me with so I had to figure out how to do it myself, like my college applications. I figured out the forms. I remember going into our counselor’s office at high school and there were all the moms helping all their kids, holding their hands through the process. Part of me felt superior to that, I was thinking, “Oh my gosh, you are such children.” And the other part of me felt inferior because I was asking, “Where is my hand to hold?” So there are a lot of mixed emotions.

Gallacher: It’s complicated isn’t it?

Ritschard: Yes, when my brother and I were going through the Aspen school system we were one of only four or five families of Latino kids. So we were all pretty united and tight knit. We would do Christmases and holidays together. And over time more families came and they would look to my parents for help and jobs and guidance. My parents were amazing teachers. They bent over backwards to help others because they knew how hard it was.

Gallacher: So what was it like to grow up in a multicultural family?

Ritschard: If you were to ask me what I am most proud of it would be the fact that I came from a fusion of so many cultures. I feel like I can connect to so many different people because of that fusion. My dad is a Japanese Brazilian. He was born and raised in Brazil so he is open and festive like my mother. They both love food and people so when we had Thanksgiving and Christmas there would be people playing music and dancing. The whole house would be shaking.

The turkey would be rubbed with *achiote paste before it went in the oven. The food of Thanksgiving wasn’t that different but it felt more like a Latin party. We made the holidays our own.

Gallacher: What did Christmas look like?

Ritschard: When we were younger there were piñatas and *Las Posadas. The Posada is a Christmas play with Joseph and Mary and you replay the Christmas story. We would start at St. Mary’s Church in Aspen and walk around the block. I can remember one year my brother was Joseph and I was an angel. There we were, fifty people walking around Aspen at nine-o’clock at night in the freezing cold. And then we would go back to the church and have a big Latin potluck.

We had food from all over Mexico and South America. We had tamales and atole and the kids would break the piñata.

Gallacher: Were you comfortable as a young Latino girl dressed up as an angel walking through the streets of Aspen?

Ritschard: No! I remember thinking, “God Mom, no one does this, parading through Aspen at night.” We did it one time in Carbondale with ten other families and my mom dressed me in a traditional skirt with yards of red, white and green cloth. And I was thinking, “Oh my god people are watching us.” It was partly my teenage attitude and partly my feeling that people in the community looked down on us,

Now when I look back on it, I applaud my mother for trying to hold on to a religious celebration that was such an important part of our culture.

Gallacher: That makes you emotional, what is that memory bringing up for you?

Ritschard: It makes me emotional because I know that so many of the people who come here are wonderful, hard-working people who have a story. They have a lot to be proud of. Just because you aren’t white-collar affluent doesn’t mean you are less. Everyone has a story, everyone is someone’s child. I am proud of those people who struggle to make it in the face of so much defiance, people who fall but get up with dignity, pride and grace. Everyday they are giving it all they have. That’s what it brings up for me.

Gallacher: You are that person.

Ritschard: Hmm……I guess I am in a way. I have my parents to thank for that. I am thankful for their sense of adventure and their courage and for instilling independence and resourcefulness in me. I really feel like I have a true sense of self because I had to figure out who I was at an early age. Having a strong sense of self and culture makes me beam with pride. I am so proud of them and my brother and my sister and myself.

*achiote paste or recado rojo is a popular blend of spices from Mexico. The spice mixture usually includes annatto, Mexican oregano, cumin, clove, cinnamon, black pepper, allspice, garlic, and salt. The annatto seeds dye the mixture red, and this gives the meat or vegetables it seasons a distinctive red hue.

**Las Posadas is a nine-day celebration, beginning December 16th and ending December 24th. Typically, each family in a neighborhood will schedule a night for the Posada to be held at their home, starting on the 16th of December and finishing on the 24th. Every home has a nativity scene and the hosts of the Posada act as the innkeepers. The neighborhood children and adults are the pilgrims (los peregrinos), who have to request lodging by going house-to-house singing a traditional song about the pilgrims. All the pilgrims carry small, lit candles in their hands, and four people carry statuettes of Joseph leading a donkey, on which Mary is riding.

At each house, the resident responds by refusing lodging (also in song), until the weary travelers reach the designated site for the party, where Mary and Joseph are finally recognized and allowed to enter.

Note: Judith lives in Carbondale with her husband and their two-year old son.

Welcome!

2011-12-14T08:38:00.000-08:00

My name is Walter Gallacher. I’m the producer of the Immigrant Stories Project. Immigrant Stories was inspired by National Public Radio’s Story Corps project and in 2007, with the help of the Colorado Trust and a local community integration project, I started adapting the Story Corps model to the stories of immigrants and their families here in the Roaring Fork Valley of western Colorado. At that time, there was a growing climate of fear and mistrust of undocumented immigrants. Nationally immigrants were being framed as illegal and unwanted.

I have always felt that immigrants’ stories are the story of our nation. Leaving home, family, culture, and country and then facing the unknown in hopes of a better life is a heroic act. These quest stories reveal our shared history and our humanity and they define us as a nation.

The storytellers are from Aspen to Parachute. There is Sandor, a Hungarian survivor of a Russian gulag. Sandor was bagging groceries in the local market when I first met him. There is Julie who manages the local nail salon. At age 10, Julie escaped in a boat with her father and her little brother under heavy fire from the Viet Cong. There is Pablo who crossed the U.S.-Mexican border in the trunk of a car with his father when he was five. Seventeen years later, he still lives in the shadows of the only country he has ever really known.

Most of the stories are of immigrants who are no longer in the shadows. Their stories are illustrated with their portrait, but for those who must still remain anonymous, I have used the old Ellis Island photo of a mother and her three children.

With most of the stories, you have the option to listen to an audio segment at the beginning of the story or to read an expanded version of the story. These are the stories of heroes and heroines. Their quest has made our country richer.

wjgallacher@gmail.com

Susana “Susie” Jimenez

2011-12-14T07:01:00.000-08:00

Listen to Susie's story

Intro: Nine years ago, Susana “Susie” Jimenez came to Aspen after graduating from culinary school. She quickly earned a reputation as an outstanding chef and eventually started her own catering business. Thisyear she was a finalist on the Food Network’s “The Next Food Network Star”.

This Thanksgiving she prepared six turkey dinners for her Aspen clients and returned home in the afternoon to host Thanksgiving dinner for twenty of her friends.

Jimenez: My family is from Michoacan, Mexico. My dad came here with his older brother forty-five years ago to pick citrus in Florida. There was a drought in Florida that year so they went to California and worked in the vineyards. While they were there they discovered there was lots of work and they ended up sending for the whole family.

It became the family’s routine, heading north in the spring to work in the fields and live in the migrant camps and pick fruit and caravan home to Mexico in the fall after all the work was done. Both my dad and my mom spent most of their lives working in the fields. And they taught us to work right alongside them.

Gallacher: What were the migrant camps like?

Jimenez: They were gated areas with about 100 little houses for 100 families and everyone worked from 4 in the morning til 4 in the afternoon. I can remember feeling like a turkey in a cage forced to work and work. There was a men’s bathroom and a women’s bathroom. I can remember brushing my teeth with all these other kids from the camp in the morning.

My dad went to some of the camps by himself because that’s how some growers worked them. They didn’t want families around to distract the men from the work. He used to come home after being gone for a month looking exhausted.

We all traveled together from one migrant camp to the next. My dad worked the fields for so many years that he developed a good relationship with all of the growers. They knew they could rely on him to bring them good workers who would get the job done. So he had work lined up for us for six months and we just moved from orchard to field.

To this day I don’t know how to swim and my friends give me a hard time, but my summers were devoted to working in the fields and picking cherries. There was no time for swimming. I never had a problem with it. I was helping my family. It was hard work, but it was all we knew.

I can remember when my father would ask us. "Are you tired?" and we would say, "Yes." And he would say, "Remember this feeling because if you don't work hard and educate yourself, this is the ways it will always be.That stayed with me. I knew that I didn’t want to be working that hard for the rest of my life.

One of my first jobs as a kid was to wash my parents’ clothes when they came in from the fields. They had to work even when the planes were spraying. My mom said they would just put bandanas over their faces to keep from breathing the pesticide. I had to scrub and scrub to get that crud off.

Gallacher: Did you get to go to school?

Jimenez: Yes but that was difficult because when the farm work stopped in mid-November we would all follow each other back to Mexico, stay in Mexico until March and then head north again to start pruning trees and vines. Our schedule was hard for teachers to understand. I can remember them saying, “what do you mean you’re leaving for three months? You can’t just leave.” My parents’ response was, “well we have to go home to Mexico no matter what, so please give them homework.”

The teachers finally agreed and sent homework with us and while we were in Mexico my dad made sure we did it. He would always ask us if we had our homework done and when we complained he would say, “Remember how tired you were in the fields? Get to it!”

Gallacher: Who helped you with your homework?

Jimenez: My two older sisters dropped out of school to work in the fields and help my sister and brother and me. My parents didn’t speak or read English so it was up to our sisters. It was about this time that my parents realized that they needed to settle down. That’s when they bought a house in California. They had their papers by then so it wasn’t a problem and it made school easier.

We still continued to work the orchards. That was our trade, picking fruit. When I think back on that part of my life it seems crazy that I became a chef. But I guess it fits on some level. I picked so many different fruits and vegetables as a kid I feel like it gave me a better sense of what to do with them in the kitchen.

Gallacher: So tell me how you became a chef?

Jimenez: I never really thought about it when I was a kid. My mom was encouraging me to just be a wife. I moved out of the house when I was seventeen. I wasn’t running away but in Mexican culture you move out when you get married. You walk out in your wedding dress. It was difficult. My family wouldn’t talk to me for a long time.

My parents were very traditional people and I started to feel like they were holding me back from the things I wanted to do. I knew that I wanted to go to school. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to be but I knew I didn’t want the life my parents had planned for me. My mom tells me now that I was always the outspoken one who always wanted more. I can remember always taking extra classes in high school. My mom thinks that came from me but I think it was my dad always reminding me, “Do you like being in the fields?” And I would answer, “No.” And he would say, “Then work harder.” It was my dad.

So at seventeen I had just finished high school and I was working as an office manager making a living with my boyfriend's family. I worked really hard for the next three years and saved my money. I just had so much in my head that I wanted and I decided that I was going to pay the price and do what I wanted and do it on my own terms. I wasn’t trying to be selfish. I just wanted a different life. I know that hurt my parents but I felt like I needed it to make myself happy, otherwise I felt like I was going to go crazy.

Anyway, while I was living at my boyfriend’s house I started cooking with his sister. I knew all about Mexican food and I knew fruits and vegetables but she introduced me to things like risotto and truffles. She really wanted to show me other things. I bought a cookbook and we started discovering new dishes together. It was there that I found my passion for cooking. It just came naturally for me. She told me that I had an understanding of food that must have come from all the years I spent with my parents in the fields. She told me to go to culinary school.

At first I thought it was a crazy idea. I think I was afraid that it would be too confining because in my culture women cook and, for many of them, that’s all they do. But I got over that and finally decided that I wanted to go to San Francisco to culinary school. My boyfriend said no, he wasn’t going to move. I told him I was going without him. His sister took me aside and handed me a check for six months in the dorm. “I already filled out an application and mailed it in for you,” she said. Two weeks later I was accepted.

I had just made peace with my family and gotten really close again with my parents and I was leaving for school. I started school in October and five months later my dad got sick with a brain aneurysm.

I got to see him before he died and I asked him if he wanted me to quit school and come home to take care of mom. “No,” he said, “I want you to be the first one in our family to finish school. I want you to create something for yourself.” I will never forget that moment. I am so glad I had that time with him before he died. His last words have helped me to keep going. I think he finally got what I was doing. He realized that it was what he did.

Kurt Bresnitz

2011-11-23T08:07:00.000-08:00

Listen to Kurt's story.

Intro: When Kurt Bresnitz was nineteen the Nazis invaded Austria. His life would never be the same.

Bresnitz: On the twelfth of March 1938, we heard the cannons and machine guns and the troops started to invade Austria. Some of the Nazi followers in Austria already had their brown shirts on and their Nazi flags flying throughout the town.

The first thing the Nazis occupied was the railroad station, the radio station and the parliament. The following day the newspapers were abolished and so were all the organizations not politically affiliated with Hitler’s regime. I was a Boy Scout leader at the time and the Boy Scouts organization was dissolved and absorbed into Hitler’s youth movement.

I had a very wonderful young lady as my friend. She was blond and blue-eyed and Aryan and because I was of Jewish faith I was, all of a sudden, an outcast. She was not allowed to continue her friendship with me. In the school, the Jewish kids were now confined to the last row in their classrooms and the professor was welcomed with “Heil Hitler”. Two months before my final graduation from the school I was ousted because I was a Jew. I was issued a yellow armband with the Jewish star so I was marked as an outcast. I was no longer considered an Austrian.

You had to be a member of the Nazi party to be recognized. You were either for or against the regime. If you didn’t have the brown shirt uniform with the swastika on it, you were immediately arrested or detained and interrogated. All of my friends either went underground, fled the country or they didn’t show their faces on the street.

Whenever I had to go out on the street, I carried a handbag with me that had everything that I might need in an emergency. I always said goodbye to my parents because I never knew if I would be coming home.

Hitler had his fiftieth birthday on April 20th and there were big celebrations all over with people marching in the streets. Jewish homes and shops were invaded and marked with the Magen David, the Jewish star. Nazis were posted in front of the Jewish shops prohibiting anyone to enter. All Jewish literature, books of any kind, was stacked on the street and burned while the crowds cheered and celebrated.

I saw the Nazis pour hot tar on people as they left the synagogue. I saw a Jewish man dragged to the Danube by a big crowd shouting Nazi slogans. The man was pushed through a hole in the ice and held under until he almost drowned. Unbelievable things happened, one day I had friends and the next day they were gone. My father always said during this time, “Don’t speak to loud because the walls have ears.” Every apartment building in the city had a superintendent and they made it part of their job to report anything that looked “suspicious”.

Wearing the yellow armband attracted immediate attention. I was spit on and hit and I could not defend myself or I would be deported immediately. One day a German soldier came into our home and served me with papers. I was being conscripted into the German army. But, because I was a young man of Jewish faith, I would not be permitted to carry a gun. I was assigned to the front lines to dig trenches for the Nazis and unable to defend myself.

My father and mother knew that this meant death for me, so they took most of the family’s money and bribed a Nazi official to get falsified army release papers. As soon as I got the papers I went underground and fled to Hamburg, Germany where I stayed with a family that harbored Jewish people.

One of the things I wanted to save before I left was my stamp collection. Because my father had contacts all over the world, I was able to collect some very interesting stamps. Instead of an allowance I got stamps. I had a very, very nice collection and I was really hoping I could keep it out of Nazi hands.

I had a friend who worked for my uncle in Czechoslovakia. He agreed to help me smuggle my stamp collection out of Austria. One day he came for a visit on his motorcycle. I tore all of my stamps out of the albums and we stuffed the collection into his motorcycle’s spare tire and he took them back to Czechoslovakia.

Later, when Czechoslovakia was invaded by the Nazis, they found out that my friend had helped me, a Jewish person. He and all of my relatives disappeared. Only my immediate family was able to escape and join me a year after my escape to America.

Second Story

Intro: When the Nazis invaded Austria, life changed for Kurt Bresnitz and his family. Kurt was harassed and beaten and finally drafted into the German army to dig trenches unarmed on the front lines. Kurt’s mother and father realized this was a death sentence for their son. They used the family’s savings to buy him false army release papers.

Bresnitz: I fled from Vienna to Hamburg, Germany and stayed with a family that harbored Jewish people. Hamburg was the port for all trans-Atlantic transport. I waited in line with hundreds of people outside of the American embassy. People were searching through the pages of New York City telephone books looking for people with their last name. They were hoping that they could get someone in the United States to sign an affidavit that would allow them to come to America. We were all trying desperately to get out of Germany. I stayed overnight there sleeping on the sidewalk. Finally, I got permission to come to Cincinnati and stay with my uncle but I still had to get a ticket.

Tickets were very hard to get. I got my ticket because of another’s tragedy. A family had just lost one of their members to suicide and the ticket agent sold the family’s extra ticket to me. I sailed for America in September of 1938 on the Columbus.

I escaped two months before Kristallnacht*. My uncle was one of the leading jewelers in Vienna during this time. His business was located in the old part of Vienna near the opera house. He was well known throughout Austria and also had international clients. Because of his reputation he was entrusted with many valuable gems and expensive jewelry that customers had left on consignment. He had a wonderful reputation.

After the Kristallnacht there was nothing left. The mobs broke into his shop and stole everything and a Nazi was appointed to run his business. Everything that wasn’t stolen or broken was taken away by the Nazi commandant. My uncle was under terrible pressure because he was still being held responsible for reimbursing his customers for the jewelry and the world-class gems that were stolen. Everyone was trying desperately to get their money back from my uncle. He didn’t have the funds to pay what he owed. Finally, my uncle learned that he and his wife were being shipped to a concentration camp. He could no longer stand the pressure and he and his wife committed suicide. They were very close to my family. It was a terrible, terrible time and I was so lucky to get out when I did.

Believe me, I never had cried before but I was so overwhelmed when I saw the Statue of Liberty. I came to the United States with eight dollars in my pocket. That was all I was allowed to bring. My cousin met me when I got off the boat. I told him how overwhelmed I was. He said, “Kurt, I understand but I can’t take you with me. I have to get back to my workplace. Here’s twenty dollars. Go get yourself a good dinner and meet me this evening at my home”. So all of a sudden there I was all by myself in downtown New York on American soil.

I went to a cafeteria and splurged and had a really nice meal. I hadn’t eaten very much on the Columbus because I didn’t want to attract any attention to myself. I knew that as long as I was on a German ship I was on German soil. I was afraid that they would find out that I was traveling with falsified army release papers so I stayed in my cabin and didn’t show my face too much. So when I finally got to eat in New York I was very hungry. My first taste of food in America was delicious.

After my meal, I walked the streets of New York. I was overwhelmed by the skyscrapers, the traffic and the people. After walking the streets for a while I needed to find a restroom. I went into a hotel and I asked them to please show me the “closet” which is the German word for bathroom. The guy at the desk gave a key to the bellhop and he took me to the seventeenth floor and showed me all of the closets in one of the rooms. Finally, I was able to make myself understood and he showed me the bathroom.

Late in the afternoon, I took the map my cousin had drawn for me and boarded a bus to get to his home. I showed my map to the driver and asked him to let me know when I should get off. I was sitting there waiting as we went for what seemed like a very long time. I started to get worried that I had passed my stop, so I went up to the driver. I said, “Sir, would you please let me know where I have to dismount?” And he turned to me and grumbled, “Hey buddy, you are not on a horse. I’ll tell you when it’s time.”

I finally made it to my cousin’s and everything was fine. I stayed two days with him and his family and then I continued on to Cincinnati to stay with my uncle.

My uncle had come to the United States in 1920. He had started out as a newspaper boy and eventually became very well to do. He ended up as an owner of one of the large department stores in Cincinnati. When I asked him for a job, he said, “Kurt, you know I am a self-made man and I believe in that philosophy. I could give you a job because I have two hundred employees. But I started out with nothing and I think that you should go and find your own way.” And I am glad my uncle took that approach, because now I am a self-made man myself.

* Kristallnacht is the night of the broken glass. On the nights of November 9 and 10, 1938 gangs of Nazi youth roamed through Jewish neighborhoods breaking windows of Jewish businesses and homes, burning synagogues and looting. In all 101 synagogues were destroyed and almost 7,500 Jewish businesses were destroyed. Ninety-one Jews were killed and twenty-six thousand were arrested and sent to concentration camps.

"Antonio"

2011-11-22T07:01:00.000-08:00

Listen to Antonio's story.

Note: (Antonio is not his real name. His name has been changed to protect his identity.)

Antonio: I came to the United States from Mexico and like many others I came for a better life and an education. I came with my mother eight years ago when I was ten years old.

Gallacher: What was life like as a little kid in Mexico?

Antonio: That’s a hard question because I barely remember things from Mexico. It was a good life. I had my family and I always had food on my table and people who loved me and cared about me. But the place I am from is a very small town with very few opportunities. Most of the kids there get married at sixteen or seventeen and most teenage girls get pregnant. I think my mother wanted more for me so that is why she brought me and my sister here.

My other sister stayed with my father in Mexico. I haven’t seen them since I left eight years ago. It was hard for my dad to let me go even though he knew I would have a better chance in the United States. I was always at the top of my class in Mexico and he knew I would be a good student in the U.S. My parents argued about it but in the end my dad let me come.

There were always problems between my dad and my mom and they finally got a divorce. I only lived with my dad for three years, most of my life I have lived with my mom. We moved from place to place and from town to town.

Gallacher: Was it hard for you to do well in school when you were always moving?

Antonio: It was a little bit difficult but I have my ways of moving on and not just staying in the past. Back then I was a really social person who made friends wherever I went. I was the kid who wanted to be involved. I even played soccer on two teams, one in the school and one in the community. Most people knew me there, because I was a pretty good player.

I’m not like that now. Now I am more of a quiet guy. I am still involved but I try really hard not to attract any attention.

Gallacher: Can you tell me what that feels like to always have to worry about being discovered?

Antonio: My mom taught me since I was little to always be careful about the friends you hang out with. When I first came here I was hanging out with the troublemakers but I finally realized that I had to stay away from those kind of people.

I started looking for the kids who were doing well in school and not getting in trouble, kids who would help me without making fun or expecting something back. I met some friends in middle school who are still my friends, but I only have two or three real friends.

Gallacher: What was it like when you first came?

Antonio: I can remember the day my mom came to the school to take me north. At first I was really scared and didn’t want to leave. But everyone encouraged me and I finally decided to go. The next day we left for Mexico City and then traveled by bus to the border.

It was scary. We came hidden in a small car and there were twelve people in it. I was lying on the floor where you put your feet. Most people were lying on top of each other so it was very scary.

I remember that we almost had an accident. We were driving down the highway going really fast and there was a dead animal in the road. The driver saw it at the last minute and swerved to miss it and I could feel that the car was only on two wheels. That was the day I felt like I nearly died.

Gallacher: What was the hardest part of your adjustment to this new country?

Antonio: I think it was the language. It was hard to figure out how things work here. One thing I noticed was that I couldn’t just go anywhere I wanted like in Mexico. As a kid in Mexico I could play and run around but in the United States my mom was more worried about me, so I had to stay close.

There were kids in middle school who teased and bothered me because I didn’t know how to speak any English. They knew that I couldn’t defend myself so they would steal my stuff. At that time I was afraid to say anything to the teachers.

Gallacher: So how did you overcome that?

Antonio: I just worked harder. I learned to speak English in two years. I got here when I was in fifth grade but they put me in sixth grade for some reason. That made it that much harder because I missed most of fifth grade. It was a tough challenge but I learned ways to overcome it.

My mom and my sister couldn’t help me because they couldn’t speak English that well so I always had my dictionary beside me when I was doing big projects or research. It took me two or three times longer than other kids because I was looking up all the words.

Gallacher: Some kids would have given up, what kept you going?

Antonio: When we first came to the United States we lived in a one-room apartment and all three of us slept in the same bed. It was difficult but it made me realize that wasn’t the future I wanted for my family and that education was a way out.

Gallacher: How did you learn English in two years?

Antonio: Music helped me a lot. I listened to people like Usher. I would listen to the song and then look up the words on the internet. That’s how I learned to pronounce words and make sense of how the language went together.

I had a really cool teacher who taught me a lot. He knew how to speak both languages so he was able to help me understand the word in English and Spanish. He used to ask the class questions and the student who got the right answer got a candy. I’m a very competitive person so that candy made me try harder and I learned faster.

Gallacher: Do you stay in touch with your dad?

Antonio: No I haven’t talked to him or my other sister in a long time. He has started another family, but I think he is happy for me. He knows that we are doing our best and trying to make a better future. I don’t think he is worried, well maybe a little bit but he knows it is for the best.

Gallacher: Has it been hard to not have your dad in your life?

Antonio: Yeah it’s hard. But you have to move on. It is just life. I help my mom a lot. I’m kind of the man of the house.

Gallacher: What is it like to be a child and the man of the house?

Antonio: It can be stressful because I had to start working when I was pretty young to try and help my mom. But my mom made me quit when I was in school because she wanted me to focus on my studies. We argued about that for a while because I worry about her and I wanted to help but she wouldn’t let me.

Gallacher: What kind of jobs did you have?

Antonio: I worked on a ranch and I worked with my mom, sometimes, cleaning houses. I mowed lawns, worked in the gardens and managed an irrigation system.

Gallacher: What do you want to do with your life?

Antonio: I have always wanted to go to D.U. That is my dream school and I am working hard to get enough money to go there some day. We’ll see.

Gallacher: What is it that you want to study?

Antonio: Computer or mechanical engineering, I’m kind of good at math. When I first got here I couldn’t understand any English but when I got to my math class it didn’t matter what the problem was I could solve it. Math was a language I could understand.

Dr Quinones Hinojosa

2011-11-20T07:31:00.000-08:00

The Immigrant Stories Project was inspired by Story Corps and On The Road with Charles Kuralt of CBS News and Steve Hartman. Steve Hartman took Charles Kuralt's idea and created "Everybody Has a Story" and more recently CBS's Assignment America. Here is his story of Dr. Quinones Hinojosa whose journey is the embodiment and essence of the immigrant's "American Dream".

I know current high school students who are striving to become the next Dr. Q.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/05/18/assignment_america/main2827109.shtml

Helen Anderson

2011-11-09T07:04:00.001-08:00

Listen to Helen's story.

Anderson: I came to the United States as a tourist from the United Kingdom, specifically from England and Wales. While I was here visiting I met my husband who is an American and now we live here.

I had come to Los Angeles with my parents when I was thirteen and had always loved America with all of its national parks. I dreamed about returning some day. So when I finished at university I decided to go traveling, but my mom didn’t want me to go on my own. I didn’t really have anyone to go with me so she finally agreed that I could go if I went on an organized trip. I signed up with TrekAmerica, a company that does organized trips of different length.

I chose the six-week long trip from New York to Los Angeles and back. Along the way I got to see quite a few of the cities and national parks. The tour guide for my trip was Seth who is now my husband.

There were twelve other people on the trip with me and we traveled in a thirteen- passenger van and Seth did the driving and told us stories about America along the way.

Gallacher: So was it love at first sight?

Anderson: Pretty much. He just seemed pretty cool and very funny, and I just thought “I have to get to know him better.” We pretty much hit it off straight away and spent the whole six weeks finding out about each other.

I didn’t expect to come to America and fall in love. It wasn’t part of my plan.

Gallacher: How did your parents react?

Anderson: They had always brought me up to be a free spirit and make my own decisions. So when I came back in August and told them I had met this really cool guy, they weren’t shocked.

I stayed in touch with Seth and he came and visited me for a week that October. I had started working on my Masters that year and was pretty busy with my studies. Masters programs are usually just a year in England. After our visit he went off traveling around Europe. When he got back to the United States in February I came and visited him. Then he came and visited me in March. By then we were saying, “OK what are we going to do. This is silly.”

I finished up my Masters and was beginning to write my thesis. By then Seth had decided to move to Glenwood and enroll in CMC’s photography program. So we both moved to Glenwood at the beginning of June in 2006. It was an amazing summer.

Gallacher: What was your thesis on?

Anderson: It was on *Woking, England, a town that was able to reduce its carbon emissions by seventy-four percent. I researched how they had done that and how other towns could use small-scale renewable energy systems and replicate what Woking had done.

Gallacher: You said it was an amazing summer.

Anderson: Yes I love the weather here, the national parks, the space.

Gallacher: Talk more about the space?

Anderson: You can go hiking and camping here and not see anyone for days and weeks on end. It is a lot harder to find that kind of solitude in Britain. That solitude is something I really love.

Gallacher: Tell me about growing up?

Anderson: I grew up in the county of Hampshire in England until I was eleven and then we moved to South Wales for my father’s job. I wasn’t aware of the rivalry between Wales and England until I moved there. The Welsh are very patriotic and don’t really like the English that much because of England’s dominance over the years.

I think the Welsh feel like the English act superior and put on airs. So it wasn’t an easy transition for me. But my whole family has stayed there. My older brother and my mother and father are still there.

Gallacher: I’m sure it was hard to leave your friends and your country when you were eleven? That is a tough time in life to make that kind of move.

Anderson: Yeah, but at the time I thought it was going to be really cool. I thought to myself, “I’m going to be the new girl, people will be interested in getting to know me.” That had been my experience in school when new kids had come. They were always seen as the interesting new person.

But the reality was, “Oh you’re English,” said with disdain. Kids made fun of me. I had no idea this resentment between countries existed. I had to learn to speak Welsh, it was compulsory.

Gallacher: What differences did you observe between the Welsh and the English?

Anderson: The Welsh are very patriotic. You will see the Welsh flag flying everywhere. The Union Jack is the flag of Great Britain, which is supposed to represent England, Ireland and Scotland. The Welsh are upset because they don’t feel like their flag is a part of the Union Jack. It doesn’t have a dragon or any of the colors of the Welsh flag. In England, the Union Jack flies on government buildings and churches and at soccer matches. It is only flown on special occasions.

I think it is almost frowned upon to be too proud to be English within the United Kingdom. The English don’t really celebrate St. George’s Day but the Welsh heavily celebrate St. David’s Day and the Irish celebrate St. Patrick’s Day.

Gallacher: Why did your family move to Wales?

Anderson: My dad was hired as the National Athletics Coach for Wales and my mom was a geography teacher. My dad was responsible for selecting athletes for the Welsh athletic squad. These athletes were then groomed and trained to compete in the Olympics.

My dad was an athlete when he was younger and has always been involved in sports. The only sport in Britain that it well funded is soccer, all other sports are supported by volunteers.

The move to Wales was hard on my mom. She didn’t have an easy time of settling in and I was having problems settling in at school. My dad was working all the time with his new job. Mom was depressed a lot and my dad couldn’t deal with it very well. They just stopped communicating and I think that is when it they started to drift apart. They stayed together for another six years and finally split up when I was eighteen.

For a while I felt like I didn’t really have a home. I didn’t fit in Wales and when we would go back to England to visit, it didn’t feel like home. It just felt like a place where I lived. The only thing that stayed the same was my nana and my granddad. Their place felt the same. They lived up near Manchester and I loved it up there.

My granddad would take me camping and fishing. That was always amazing. I used to love going there because life seemed really simple. I think that’s where I developed my love of the outdoors. Granddad had two big dogs that lived outside and a big vegetable garden. He was a schoolteacher who retired at a young age so he had time to spend with me. We would take long walks in the morning in a little forest nearby and then after breakfast we’d go fishing or pick berries or plant things in the garden. We were always doing simple, practical things. It was always really fun.

My grandparents were very special to me growing up. Now I love hanging out and talking to them on the phone. They are two of my favorite people.

Note: Helen Anderson works at the Bluebird Café in Glenwood Springs

*Woking’s council is one of England’s leaders in adopting greener energy technologies. Several combined heat and power stations provide district heating and electricity, and electricity is also provided by a combination of hydrogen fuel cells and solar cells dispersed throughout the borough. These are linked via an innovative private electricity distribution system operating completely off the public power grid.

**Skype is a computer program that can be used to make free voice calls over the Internet to anyone else who is also using Skype. It's free and considered easy to download and use, and works with most computers.

Violeta Ornelas de Flores

2011-10-30T11:45:00.000-07:00

Listen to Violeta's story.

Ornelas de Flores: I came with my husband and my son from Juarez, Mexico so that my son could get a good education. My husband had been working in El Paso, Texas across the border from Juarez. He was working in a restaurant frying chicken and when he lost his job he decided we should come to Colorado and start a new life, a better life. There weren’t many jobs in El Paso and salaries were low.

My husband is an American citizen who was born in Texas but when he was young his parents moved back to Mexico. So he never really learned English. We wanted our kids to be able to speak both languages.

My husband helped me apply for a green card and we came to Colorado in 2000. He came in June and I followed with our son in September. He got a job with an excavation company. He’s been there eleven years.

I didn’t work for the first few years because I was taking care of my son who was in preschool. I think that is why it took me longer to learn English. I stayed home with the kids and only spoke Spanish.

Gallacher: Was it hard for you when you first came?

Ornelas de Flores: I loved Colorado. I came when the trees were changing colors. I remember, my husband’s uncle took us for a ride over Independence Pass. That ride was like a fairytale dream for me. The hills were all different colors. It was beautiful!

And the people were so friendly. In Juarez I was used to saying hello to only people I knew. But when I came here everybody was greeting me, “Hello.” “How are you?” or “Good Morning”. It was really a surprise for me because they didn’t know me. It felt good. And when I tried to say something in English people would encourage me and say “Good job.” That for me was wonderful. People were really, really helpful.

Gallacher: What was the most difficult time for you?

Ornelas de Flores: There was one time when I was at the deli in City Market. It was when I couldn’t really speak English. The lady at the counter couldn’t understand me. There were three men behind me waiting in line and they were laughing at me. They made me really sad and uncomfortable. I felt terrible because they didn’t try to help me, they just laughed at me.

But I said to myself, “This lady doesn’t understand me and these men are laughing, but one day I will return speaking English and I will buy anything I want.” It was a bad experience but I have had so many more wonderful experiences.

Gallacher: What was Juarez like when you were a child?

Ornelas de Flores: Growing up there was wonderful for me. It wasn’t dangerous then like it is now. I was surrounded by my family, in a good neighborhood, with many friends. It was a safe place then. People from the United States came across from El Paso to buy Mexican things and eat in the restaurants. It was a very festive place, when I was a little girl. Thousands of tourists came there every month. But that has all changed.

When I was about sixteen, Juarez started to change. By then I was in high school and I can remember always being scared because I had to take two buses to get to school in the morning and home in the afternoon. It felt dangerous but it was safe compared to now. Now no one leaves home during the night. It is not good.

My mother still lives there and when we go to visit we are very careful about protecting our kids and staying safe. But I can never really relax when I am there.

Gallacher: What does your mother do there?

Ornelas de Flores: She is a retired teacher. I was a student in my mom’s school and I have wonderful memories of being there with her. It was a great school with very good teachers, My mom loved teaching the kids.

Gallacher: What happened to change Juarez when you were sixteen?

Ornelas de Flores: Bad people began killing *women in Juarez. It was terrible, they were taking women between the ages of sixteen and twenty-four, so I was always really scared. Usually the women were taken from the factories. There were a lot of factories in Juarez then and women were disappearing when they left work.

All of the high schools had special police patrols after every factory shift was done, to make sure the students were safe. We had to always stay together. Guys and girls were always walking on the streets and riding the bus together.

Gallacher: Did they ever arrest anyone?

Ornelas de Flores: They caught one guy, but the murders continued and now with the drug cartels it is so violent it is hard to know who is doing the killing. Anyplace at any time can suddenly become deadly when they start shooting.

Gallacher: So it wasn’t hard to leave?

Ornelas de Flores: It is always hard to leave your home and your family but I didn’t miss what Juarez had become. We came to live in Lazy Glen (outside of Aspen) with my husband’s uncle. We stayed there until the owners decided to sell the house. That’s when we decided to move to Glenwood. We couldn’t speak English very well so trying to find a place to rent was very difficult.

I can remember going to the office or the place that was for rent and giving them the “for rent” ad. I was hoping that they would understand that we wanted to rent the place. But that didn’t work very well. I couldn’t explain myself and they couldn’t understand. I tried a lot of times to rent a place but I didn’t.

Finally, we were able to rent an apartment in Glenwood. I finally felt like I had a place and that I was in control of my life. I think the language is the main problem for any immigrant.

Gallacher: You speak very good English now. How did you do that?

Ornelas de Flores: Well, I can say that one of the people who really helped me speak better English is Judy Beattie. She is my **Literacy Outreach tutor and she is wonderful. I had another teacher before her who spoke Spanish and English. But when I met Judy she spoke only English and that really forced me to use my English. I think that was a better way for me to learn, because I couldn’t use Spanish. Sometimes we had to use hand movements or pictures to communicate.

Gallacher: So your relationship with Judy has been important to you?

Ornelas de Flores: Yes, very important. You know one of the things I really admire about the United States is that many people volunteer. People give their time and their money to help others and Judy is one of those people. She volunteers with love and shares her time and her knowledge. She is wonderful. I can say that she is part of my family. She is like a mother to me and my children love her.

Five years ago when I was pregnant with my daughter I decided to work on my English skills and that is when I met her.

Gallacher: Didn’t you get your citizenship recently?

Ornelas de Flores: Yes it was almost three years ago. I wasn’t sure about getting my citizenship because of my English. I didn’t think I could pass the test, but Judy believed in me. She has always encouraged me and pushed me to do many things. She completely helped me become a citizen.

We probably worked more than one year studying the questions. But finally we made it. I still can’t believe it. The day I went for the interview I was really, really nervous. The interviewer was Mr. Crook. He told me many things and I was so nervous I couldn’t remember any of the things he told me. My brain was stuck. I was sure I wasn’t going to pass. I thought that part of the test was going to be writing but everything was oral. That made it more difficult for me.

But at the end of the interview I asked him if I passed and he said, “Yes.” “What is your name,” I asked him. He said, “I am Mr. Crook.” “For sure, I am never going to forget your name,” I said. He finally laughed, but during the whole interview he was very serious.

Later I got a letter inviting me to the ceremony. My husband and I went with Judy. I was expecting more people like me, Mexicans. But there were people from all over the world there, Italy, Germany, Spain. Everybody had to give a speech about their citizenship. It was really wonderful.

Gallacher: What did you say?

Ornelas de Flores: I thanked my family and I thanked Judy and I thanked the United States for giving me the opportunities. I now feel like I am part of this country and I feel proud. I am an American.

*The phenomenon of the female homicides in Juárez, involves the violent deaths of hundreds of women since 1993. The estimated homicide toll is speculated to be around 400, but many local residents believe that the true count is much higher Most of the cases have remained unsolved.

**Volunteer tutors provide weekly instruction in one of the following basic skills: reading, writing, math, or English as a Foreign Language (EFL). Volunteers also help students with skills related to personal literacy needs and goals such as letter writing or job applications. http://www.gcpld.org/content/literacy-outreach

Glenn Vawter

2011-10-15T11:42:00.000-07:00

Vawter: My family came to Jamestown, Virginia from England in the late 1600s. The reason they came in kind of a mystery. We’re not sure if they were horse thieves or noble men. There is a story that they were noblemen who got on the wrong side of the king at the time. The name, Vawter, was either changed by them or by someone else. Which often happens when people come to a new country. We haven’t been able to trace Vawter back to England, France or anyplace.

We’ve heard that it may have been spelled Vatier, which would have been the *French Huguenots who had immigrated to England and then to here, but we are really not sure. We do know they had a religious bent because there is a church there in Virginia that has the name of Vawter on it. The church was built on their land.

Gallacher: What did they do there?

Vawter: They were farmers, probably for about three of four generations. They were there for the Revolutionary War and fought on the side of the States. It was around the time of the Civil War that the family started to move west into Kentucky and expand into the frontiers.

My branch of the Vawter family came here during the 1870s. Apparently, there was a bad boy in the family who was my great grandfather. He was sent away from Virginia for some reason. I’ve seen the letter from his parents saying, “We’re sending you to Oregon so your uncle can straighten you out.” So, as the story goes, he passed through Denver on his way to Oregon where he met an Irish dance hall girl and they went on together to Oregon and started a life together.

My grandfather was born there. He moved to Colorado and joined the Colorado First Regiment when he was 18. He fought in the **Spanish American War and went to Cuba with Teddy Roosevelt. When Roosevelt became president he invited my grandfather and a bunch of the guys who had served with him during the war to act as an unofficial guard. When that played out, my grandfather returned to Colorado and settled on a ranch outside of Boulder, up Left Hand Canyon, and married my grandmother. My dad was born in 1912 on that ranch.

They eventually moved to Denver where my dad finished high school at North High. Dad met my mom and married in 1937. Mom grew up in Denver and was attending Colorado Women’s College when she met my dad.

She had been adopted by the Cole family when she was little. She and her older brother were found in Grand Junction along the railroad tracks picking up coal and living a life of squalor. They were both adopted into families in Denver. It would be forty years before my mom saw her brother again.

My mom’s adoptive father was a doctor who had lived in Yampah and Oak Creek. He started his career as a young doctor in Dodge City, Kansas where he lived in the back of a saloon. Mom told me that he had to put boards up behind his bed to stop bullets from coming through the wall of the saloon. He was there during the 1870s, the rough times of Wyatt Earp.

From there he moved on to Leadville where he was during Colorado’s silver boom. In Leadville, he was known as the high society doctor. Baby Doe Tabor was one of his patients.

My parents had only been married for a few years when World War II started. My dad joined the Navy in 1942 and my mom took me and moved to McCoy where she went to work as a teacher in a one-room schoolhouse. So I became one of her twelve students in grades one through four. We were there when my dad came back after the War. Mom and Dad decided to stay in McCoy. Dad opened a garage and Mom became the postmistress.

I was an only child until I was eleven and my parents decided to adopt my sister. I can remember going to the orphanage in Denver to pick her up when she was just ten days old.

Gallacher: Do you think it was your mother’s experience that prompted the adoption?

Vawter: I think it was that and the fact that they couldn’t have any more children. Her name is Linda and I love her dearly.

My dad’s garage business didn’t work out so well. People weren’t paying their bills so we finally moved to Denver for a few years. I was ready to start high school when my parents decided to move to Glenwood Springs and buy a house on Sopris Avenue. My high school years were a great time for me. I made friends here that are still friends today.

I graduated and went on to the Colorado School of Mines. I took a course there on petroleum drilling and I decided then that that was what I wanted to do. I went on to major in petroleum engineering.

Gallacher: What was it about petroleum drilling that captivated you?

Vawter: I think it was the adventure. You’re out there in the field and you’re never sure if the oil is going to be there, it’s the unknown. I was also interested in the engineering challenge that drilling presented.

In the late 50s, during my summers in college, I came home and worked for Tom Walker, the Garfield County Surveyor. That was when I learned about oil shale. Tom had us survey oil shale claims in the Piceance Creek Basin. One summer I spent the entire summer up there and only went home twice. There was a lot of exploratory core drilling going on and I was there to tell construction workers where to build the roads and the guys on the drill rigs where to set their pads.

I was also responsible for logging and boxing up the core samples for testing. As it turned out, although Tom Walker never said, we were working for Occidental Petroleum who was doing a lot of experimental work on the feasibility of oil shale.

Gallacher: So this was all secretive?

Vawter: Yes, very secretive. They didn’t want anyone to know who the client was.

After college I got a job with a company called Ohio Oil. It later became Marathon Oil. It turned out to be a good job for me. I moved to Bakersfield, California where I met my wife and had my son and my daughter.

After about four years there I decided that I wanted to get back to oil shale exploration. I took a job with a little company called The Oil Shale Corporation (TOSCO). I was the thirteenth employee. The company owners had a process that they were convinced was going to be the best. I eventually moved my family into a trailer house in Grand Valley (Parachute). My wife was used to living in the city so she was wondering where in the world I had taken her.

She adapted well and eventually became a member of the Women’s Home Culture Club. They would get together and do sewing and cooking. The older ladies of Grand Valley took her under their wing.

The family and I left Grand Valley in 1968. My company was still very active in oil shale and was making plans to build a commercial processing plant called the Colony Project. We had various partners along the way Cleveland Cliffs Iron, Ohio Petroleum, Atlantic Richfield and finally Exxon. When Exxon came in as a sixty percent partner we thought we were finally going to do this. We thought we finally had a company with the money and the know-how to make it happen.

Well we all know what happened. In 1982, Black Sunday occurred and suddenly the two thousand people who were employed the day before showed up to locked gates and pink slips.

Gallacher: So no one knew this was coming?

Vawter: No, even as an executive for TOSCO I only knew the day before, which was just enough time to sit around and commiserate with friends and family. Exxon left and oil prices dropped from forty dollars a barrel to ten. The whole energy business in Colorado went down the tubes and our communities got hit hard. It took fifteen years for the communities and the State to recover.

Gallacher: How did you recover?

Vawter: I got fired too. My company let me go and I became a consultant. I finally went to work for TRW on a controversial project called Yucca Mountain. Yucca Mountain was being considered as a nuclear waste site.

They hired me to supervise the drilling of a five-mile exploratory tunnel so scientists could get down in the mountain and do feasibility studies. This tunnel was thirty-five feet in diameter. It was a tremendous undertaking. I stayed on that project for ten years until I finally retired from TRW in 2001.

Note: Glenn Vawter returned to Glenwood Springs after retiring.

*The Huguenots were members of the Protestant Reformed Church of France during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. By the end of the 17th century, roughly 200,000 Huguenots had been driven from France during a series of religious persecutions. They relocated primarily to protestant nations including England and America.

**The Spanish–American War was a conflict in 1898 between Spain and the United States. It ended with the Americans defeating the Spaniard. Although the main issue was Cuban independence, the ten-week war was fought in both the Caribbean and the Pacific.

Noemi and Kristof Kosmowski

2011-09-27T05:21:00.000-07:00

Listen to Noemi and Kristof's story.

Intro: Noemi and Kristof Kosmowski are local artists who have worked with the city of Glenwood and Glenwood’s Center of the Arts to paint murals on the city’s electrical transformers.

Noemi: I have loved America since I was a little girl and I knew I would be here one day. I knew it ever since I got my first pair of jeans from America. It was the colors, the different states and all the different people from different countries, the little houses and the big farms, the palm trees in Florida and California, everything. It is really hard to say where it starts and where it ends when I talk about what I love about America.

Gallacher: How is it different from Poland?

Noemi: How is it different? Everything is different! Poland was really a very sad nation after the *Second World War, a very grey nation. It was in the faces of the people, always very sad, very down. They were always talking about problems and never talking about anything happy. They didn’t see a bright future. Everything was greyish, houses, no signs on the stores. I was raised in a family of artists, so I was looking for color. It was just in my nature.

Kristof: We were married back in Poland and we came together. We grew up under Communist rule and lots of changes in the government. Imagine if the United States was forced to live under a completely different political system. When we were kids our parents were involved in politics, trying to create a better situation for Poland. So our parents taught us that there could be a better Poland. We weren’t raised to be Communists, that’s for sure.

It’s hard to live in a country where you have to live without freedom. Our only freedom was to breathe the air. It gets to you and you try to get out from under it.

Noemi: You try to rebel, it’s the nature of humans.

Gallacher: Were you in danger if you spoke out?

Noemi: Of course, of course! Three people together on the street were considered a demonstration. You would be stopped by police and asked for your documents and asked, “What are you doing here?” This happened especially during the ‘80s the **Lech Walesa times, but also in the 50s, and the 60s, and the 70s. It all depended on who was on top.

Gallacher: How did you get out?

Noemi: We escaped.

Kristof: We arranged all the papers and everything and then Solidarity came and we couldn’t get a visa. It was impossible for families to leave the country so we had to leave separately. I left first. I was a graphic designer so I forged some stamps on my passport and took off for the border, hitchhiking and riding the train.

The plan was for me to call Noemi and the kids when I got to Germany and then she was going to take the kids and go on what looked like a holiday and join me in Germany. She had all the papers ready.

Noemi: If he hadn’t gotten to Germany then we wouldn’t have left from Poland.

Kristof: It wasn’t possible to sneak across the border so I decided to ride the train across the border and take a chance that they wouldn’t check my papers.

When I got on the train I spotted an American who was talking about not having his paperwork because everything had been stolen. He had no money just a permit to cross the border. He was really upset so I bought him some food and some tea and learned more about his story and made my own plan.

He told me that his permit allowed him to cross the border and go to the American consulate in Berlin. So he was legal to cross but I wasn’t. So a few hours later we approached the border and the customs people boarded the train and started checking people’s paperwork. I stood up and pointed at the American and said in Polish, “That guy doesn’t have his paperwork.” After that the customs people focused on the American and didn’t pay any attention to my paperwork. The American couldn’t speak Polish and the guards couldn’t speak English. So I volunteered to translate.

By the time the customs people realized that the American had enough paperwork to cross we were at the border and the officials got word that they needed to leave the train. They turned to me and said, “And where is your paperwork?” I said, “It’s in car in my briefcase, I’ll go get it.” “There isn’t time for that,” they said “You’re free to go”.

After I caught my breath, I went looking for the American and apologized for making it difficult for him. When he learned what my situation was he said, “Oh my God, I’m gonna help you.” But I told him he had already done enough for me. He had been my decoy.

When I got to Berlin I called Noemi and told her I was OK and she could leave with the kids.

Noemi: I took the kids and we flew as tourists to Germany. Our kids were very little but they had heard us planning, so they knew that we wanted to go to America. Along the way, they kept asking me in loud voices, “Mommy, are we going to America now?” I was so worried we were going to be stopped. I kept saying, “Be quiet, we are going to Germany, not America.” During that time there were many people who were listening to other people and trying to figure out the situation, so they could report you. I was so stressed. We were under a lot of pressure. It took us a week after we arrived to realize that we were still whispering.

We flew to Hamburg where Kristof was waiting for us at the airport. Our daughter Eva saw him and said, “Is this our daddy?” because she didn’t know that we were going to meet him. I couldn’t tell them because they were too young to keep secrets. And then Eva asked again very loud, “Is this America?”

Gallacher: How old were the kids?

Kristof: They were two and a half and one and a half.

Gallacher: Did you feel free once you got to Germany?

Noemi: No, that didn’t happen until we got to America and that took three years. We didn’t want to apply for political refugee status in Germany because then we wouldn’t be able to come to America. So we spent three year trying to get our papers for America.

We sat on our suitcase for three years.

Kristof: Then one day, we got an ultimatum from the German government to leave Germany. They said we had been there too long and we needed to find another country. I went down to the immigration office and asked the woman there what we were supposed to do. She told me we could go to Spain, France or back to Poland but we couldn’t stay there anymore.

I told her our story and she finally told me that I should sue the German government. If we sued it would give us time to work it out in court and they couldn’t deport us. She even helped me file the paperwork.

I returned home and a few days later we had our tickets and paperwork for the United States.

Noemi: God bless that woman, I guess they didn’t want to deal with us.

Kristof: We flew to JFK airport soon after that and when I got off the plane I kissed the ground. It was such a relief to finally be in the United States.

We lived in Harrison, New Jersey for the first year. We had to start from scratch because we didn’t have the connections we had in Poland.

Noemi: It was fun, learning English, everything was new. I was cleaning houses and Kristof was doing everything possible.

Kristof: I was working as a graphic designer in Poland and even in Germany, but here it was hard to get a job in design. My first job here was doing layout and design for a Russian newspaper. So I came to America and the language I was reading and speaking was Russian.

Noemi got a job at night singing in a Polish club.

Noemi: I was singing at night, cleaning during the day, painting whenever possible and taking care of two kids.

Kristof: After New Jersey we moved to Florida and we lived there for nineteen years, but we moved about twenty-five times.

Noemi: We’re artists so we are kind of gypsies. We liked it in Florida but we really like it here.

Gallacher: Are your kids here with you?

Noemi: No our daughter was in the musical “Cats” and is now in California where she has a role in the new television show, “PanAm”. Our son is a computer animator with a company called Tiger Direct. So they have their own American dreams.

Kristof: We decided to leave Florida and move here when we lost our properties and a lot of our money. So we are starting again from scratch. When I first came to town I met Stanley Bartlomiejzuk (owner of Silver Spruce Motel) and he gave me a job. He has helped us a lot. He is like our godfather.

Noemi: I fell in love with Glenwood. I think this is it.

Gallacher: So is this the place you were looking for as a little girl?

Noemi: I think so. You know I hear some people saying that this country isn’t free anymore but that’s not true. Some people take what you have here for granted. These people should live in another country for a while and then they will understand what they have here.

You are lucky to be born here. Some people feel like they are being controlled by the government, but they haven’t really experienced control. In Poland you felt it all the time, it was everywhere. You would be talking on the phone with a friend and suddenly there would be a third voice telling that you were talking about things that were forbidden.

In Poland they would just turn the phones off for months and months everywhere. You couldn’t call anybody.

Kristof: Yes for the years we lived there it was like the script for a Hollywood action thriller.

*Of all the countries involved in World War II, Poland lost the highest percentage of its citizens: over 6 million perished — nearly one-fifth of Poland's population — half of them Polish Jews.

**Labor turmoil in 1980 led to the formation of the independent trade union "Solidarity”, which eventually became a political force. Despite persecution and imposition of martial law in 1981, the union eroded the dominance of the Communist Party and by 1989 had triumphed in Poland's first free and democratic parliamentary elections since the end of the Second World War.

Lech Wałęsa, a Solidarity candidate, eventually won the presidency in 1990. The Solidarity movement heralded the collapse of communism across Eastern Europe.

Hector Vazquez

2011-09-05T12:26:00.000-07:00

Listen to Hector's story.

Vazquez: I was born in 1965 and grew up on the border in Tijuana during the 1970’s when there was no fence between the two countries. It was a very unique life. We lived a half-mile from the border and I used to ride my bike to the United States everyday.

We used to run errands for the INS, border patrol. They would give us money to go buy sodas for them at the 7-11. It was a different world back then. In fact, people in south Mexico thought that Tijuana was part of the United States. When I was growing up I never saw Mexican money. It was all dollars. Even the television, we didn’t have any channels in Spanish, so we watched “Popeye” and “Bugs Bunny”.

It wasn’t until the 1980’s, when everything started changing, that I realized I was Mexican and not an American.

Gallacher: Did you listen to American music?

Vazquez: Yeah, we listened to classic rock in the ‘70’s and “heavy metal” in the 80’s. My brothers and I used to listen to radio stations broadcasting out of San Diego. I grew up with a bunch of skateboarders during that time, when kids were switching from surfers to skateboarders. It was a great life. I liked it a lot.

Gallacher: Contrast that to Tijuana now.

Vazquez: It is very different. I used to be able to walk down the street like I can in this valley. I would see a lot of people I knew and I would stop and visit with them. It was very polite and respectful. We used to leave the car keys inside the car. We would leave it like that for days and not even worry about it. The doors to our houses were always unlocked.

But in the 1980’s everything started to change, lots of traffic and a lot more people. I think the earthquake in Mexico City got people moving north. One of the places they chose to move to was Tijuana.

Gallacher: Why did you come to the United States.

Vazquez: My parents moved to the valley about fifteen years ago and my father started a landscaping business. I brought my family to visit a few times and we finally decided to join my parents in 2002, back when there was still a lot of work.

We were living in Tijuana at the time but our daughters were going to school in the United States. My wife used to get up at 4 o’clock in the morning to get the kids across the border in time for school. They spent at least two hours waiting in line to get across. Once they were across it was only five minutes to the school. She would come back to the house and then do the same thing in the afternoon to pick them up, another two or three hours. So we were tired of that life.

Gallacher: What did your parents do in Mexico?

Vazquez: My father used to have a factory where he made pottery and statues out of plaster. He had big trucks and used to bring the merchandise across the border into Arizona and California. We always spoke English, even in Mexico, because we were dealing with American people in the business. They were coming to my father’s factory everyday with their trucks to buy pottery and take it back to the U.S. to sell, so we had to know how to speak English.

Dad was doing all the production work and my mom was doing all the paperwork. She was the one who coordinated with all the buyers and sellers. There were fifty to seventy-five people working for my parents. They were very busy when I was growing up, we always had somebody to help at the house.

We lived a block from the factory so there were always a lot of workers and relatives around the house.

Gallacher: Did you go to work in the factory when you were young?

Vazquez: I did but I didn’t like it. When I was seventeen my parents felt like I was doing too much skateboarding and not enough work. They sent me to live with friends of the family in Arizona. They were hoping that this family could teach me how to work.

I spent about six months with them and I worked hard. I went back to Mexico and stayed about six months and my parents found another family. This time they sent me to Florida.

Gallacher: What did you do in Florida?

Vazquez: We made and sold birdcages. My parents made some in the factory in Mexico and shipped them to this family in Florida and we would sell them and make more. There were a lot of birds in Florida.

I spent four long years there. And then we started traveling throughout the South and up the east coast to state fairs, selling birdcages and other Mexican items. I spent another four years doing that. That was fun. I really enjoyed it.

When I was twenty-five I settled down and married my sweetheart of thirteen years. We fell in love when we were twelve. I’m forty-six and we have been together for thirty-five of those years.

She lived half a block from my house and her family owned a pharmacy across the street from my house. She had to pass my house everyday and I would wait for her. I always said hello to her but she wouldn’t say hello to me. That went on for months and months. But one day she smiled and said hello and I knew I had a chance.

Gallacher: Do you have children?

Vasquez: I have two beautiful daughters, twelve and fourteen. I am very proud of them and they are both very smart. They get along and do well in school, which is a gift.

Gallacher: So in this wonderful life was there a particular hard time for you?

Vasquez: Well it was a hard time and then again it wasn’t. This year I had a massive heart attack. I was doing my martial arts class at Basalt High School and all of a sudden I just collapsed on the floor and hit the back of my head. I woke up two days later in intensive care in Denver.

Apparently when I collapsed I wasn’t breathing and, fortunately for me, my instructor had just completed a CPR course the day before and he started working on me. Maria, one of the students in the class, ran out screaming for help. Some people were next door in the gym and they heard her and came running.

One of those people was Bryan Larr. He hollered, “Where is the *AED? Please get it I can help him.” Someone found it and Bryan knew what to do. He saved my life.

The paramedics took me to Aspen and from there they flew me to Denver. I was out for two days. The doctors told my wife that they weren’t sure what kind of shape I would be in when I woke up. They didn’t know how long I had been without oxygen.

When I woke up I knew that I was OK when I started speaking English to the English-speaking relatives and Spanish to the Spanish-speaking relatives gathered ‘round my bed.

A week later I had a triple bypass.

Gallacher: How did that experience change you?

Vazquez: It made a very big difference in my life. Before this I believed that there was nothing else after this life. People used to tell me, “Once you’re dead, you’re dead. There’s no coming back.” But, I came back. And now I know that we have to be better prepared, we have to take better care of each other. We have to love each other. We have to do things to change this world.

Sometimes people think you have to invent something or be a billionaire to help. But it’s not like that. We can all help our neighbor, our community, our friends, our families. It’s the people around us who need our help. We can all make a difference.

When you have a near death experience that’s when you find out. Mine turned out all right. It was a great journey and I am so happy to be here. I’ve got a lot of things to do.

Note: Hector works for Habitat for Humanity in Glenwood Springs.

* An AED or automated external defibrillator or is a portable electronic device that automatically diagnoses the potentially life threatening cardiac arrhythmias of ventricular fibrillation and ventricular tachycardia in a patient,[1] and is able to treat them through defibrillation, the application of electrical therapy which stops the arrhythmia, allowing the heart to reestablish an effective rhythm.

Mathew Katz

2011-08-24T07:05:00.000-07:00

Listen to Mat's story.

Intro: Mathew Katz is a Canadian multimedia reporter who spent the last year working as a news reporter for KDNK community radio. He recently left the valley to take a job as a reporter in New York. He writes for a Manhattan local news site DNAinfo about Chelsea and Hell's Kitchen.

Mathew's work has appeared in the Huffington Post and the Toronto Star. He's also worked as a staff writer for Torontoist.com, and as the Comment Editor of The Varsity, Canada's largest student newspaper.

Katz: I originally came to the United States to go to graduate school. I was finishing up my undergrad in Toronto and had applied to a whole bunch of different journalism schools across Canada. My parents urged me to take a look at schools in the United States. NYU, Berkeley and Columbia were the three that I had in mind. But NYU and Berkeley required the GRE and I really didn’t want to do that because I was working two or three jobs, finishing my undergrad and working on the student newspaper.

So I applied to Columbia because they had their own custom test and it was the most prestigious one of the three, in my mind. I didn’t really think I was going to get in but I applied anyway.

Gallacher: From your perspective what is it that distinguishes Canadians from Americans?

Katz: We Canadians are constantly obsessed with trying to figure out who we are and the way a lot of Canadians define themselves is “not American.” That’s not good enough for me.

We were born of the British and never really got rid of that legacy. We still have the Queen. And at the same time America is just south of us. Most Canadians live within a hundred miles of the U.S. border. So we get all your T.V. and your magazines. The U.S. has a huge influence on our culture. So we are constantly pointing out how we are different. One of the differences is universal, government-run health care which Canadians love and would never give up.

From what I have seen of America, Canada is a much more multicultural country. We’ve never tried to have other immigrants assimilate. There is no push to make newcomers super Canadians. There are a lot of hyphenated Canadians, Polish-Canadian, Chinese-Canadian etc. The government and the people have embraced that. We have an official government policy of multiculturalism. I don’t see that in the States.

Gallacher: How did that attitude evolve?

Katz: It was developed in the early 70’s. Canada is a country that is slightly bigger than the United States but only has a tenth of the population. We need to fill it. Canada has had huge pushes to attract more immigrants. We decided back then that we wanted a “mosaic of people” instead of a “melting pot.”

Canada still has government funded settlement agencies that help immigrants from different countries relocate in Canada. For example there is a Haitian agency and an Indian agency.

Gallacher: How is that “mosaic” manifested in daily life? What do you see?

Katz: I notice it in the way people interact. I never had the sense, growing up, that my friends were different because they were Indian. I feel like I grew up embracing all of the different cultures. I have a lot of friends who are Muslim and Hindu and Asian and growing up it all seemed like a normal thing.

Here in the States I don’t think that multicultural mix is that common. Canada as a “mosaic” means that our identity is always in flux. Here in America the identity is set. In Canada it is constantly changing. And so the Canada of twenty years ago is very different than Canada now because of the new people coming into our country and adding to our culture and adding to what it means to be Canadian. Our literature and our arts are richer because of immigration.

Gallacher: What was life like growing up in Canada?

Katz: I grew up in an affluent Jewish suburb of Toronto. It was fifty percent Jewish and fifty percent every other ethnic group under the sun. It was a fairly typical suburban childhood. We went to the mall and hung out at Tim Hortons, which is Canada’s version of Denny’s. Tim Hortons was open 24/7 so it was the hangout for every suburban teenager who couldn’t get into a bar and didn’t want to go home. It was the place to be after ten o’clock at night.

Gallacher: How long has your family been in Canada?

Katz: My grandparents on my father’s side were both Canadian. They grew up in Winnipeg. My grandparents on my mom’s side are both from Turkey. They first came the U.S. and lived in New York for a while and then Detroit and eventually made their way to Canada.

Gallacher: How did your parents meet?

Katz: They met in college. They both went to York University in Toronto. My dad saw my mom at the campus gym and didn’t stop until she went out with him.

Gallacher: Do you have your father’s persistence?

Katz: In many ways, yes. I pursue stories in my job in the same way. I don’t get intimidated by people who are reluctant to talk to me, at work or at play. I have always been the kind of person who will talk to you no matter what.

Persistence runs in the family. My mom is actually more persistent than my dad. Mom is the kind of person who will take a waiter to task if she feels he hasn’t performed his duties in every way. When I was a teenager I was embarrassed more than once by that behavior, but I have come to appreciate it more as I’ve gotten older.

Gallacher: Are you planning to stay in the U.S.?

Katz: I don’t know. It’s weird I’m not sure what I should consider myself, an immigrant, a temporary worker. At this point I’m not sure because I miss home but my professional experience has largely been in the U.S.

It’s interesting, I have driven across the United States three times in the three years I have been here and I have barely seen my own country.

Gallacher: Growing up in Canada what were the things you liked about America?

Katz: Your T.V. and movies. In Canada the arts have to get government funding to survive because Canadians watch American television and listen to American music. In fact, in Canada there is the CanCon regulation that requires every Canadian radio station to play forty percent Canadian music. Most of what we watch and listen to is American.

We Canadians have this weird obsession about making it big in the States. We are very proud of Canadian bands like Nickelback and people like Mike Myers who have become famous in the U.S. It’s odd when you think that eighty percent of the culture we consume in Canada comes from another place. Imagine if eighty percent of the movies that came out in the U.S. were British. It is a strange thing when the culture that you have is technically not your own.

Gallacher: So how does Canada maintain its own image?

Katz: I think a lot of that happens through government funding. For example, the Canadian equivalent of the Grammys is called the Juno. Our music award is named after a government bureaucrat named Juno, a nerdy French guy with glasses, who came up with the rule that says forty percent of the music on Canadian radio stations needs to be Canadian.

I think most Canadians are thankful to our government for keeping the arts and culture alive otherwise folks would just consume American stuff.

Gallacher: What differences have you noticed?

Katz: We don’t have the same reverence for the people who founded our country. Your founders and framers can do no wrong. We Canadians tend to see ourselves as much bigger screw-ups throughout our history. We don’t think that anyone is perfect.

Americans had to fight for independence while we Canadians just gradually separated from the British. We never had to fight to be free so we have a different attitude about guns and the role of government. Many Americans feel like they need their guns because they may have to rise up against the government someday. That is something that most Canadians would never imagine happening. The government has never been something that would try to harm you. Most of the time, we see the government as something that gives us a leg up and helps us when we need it.

*In 1971, Canada was the first country in the world to adopt multiculturalism as an official policy. By so doing, Canada affirmed the value and dignity of all Canadian citizens regardless of their racial or ethnic origins, their language, or their religious affiliation. The 1971 Multiculturalism Policy of Canada also confirmed the rights of Aboriginal peoples and the status of Canada’s two official languages.

Tony Rosa and Angela Rosa Hancock

2011-08-03T07:02:00.000-07:00

Listen to Angela and Tony's story

Intro: For over sixty years the Rosa family has been in the restaurant and bar business at the corner of Seventh and Grand in Glenwood Springs. It has always been a family affair. Joseph and Anne taught their three children Tony, Angela and Joe Jr. the business. Here Angela and Tony remember their parents and the circumstances that brought them together.

Angela: I always knew my grandmother as “yia yia”. That’s Greek for grandmother. “Yia yia” came from Messenia, the southwestern region of Greece. My grandfather, “Paposse,” came to America through Ellis Island a year or so before her. He came with his brother and they went to San Francisco and got jobs on the railroad. He eventually wrote to his mother who was still in Greece and told her he wanted to get married. She wrote back and told him she knew of a real nice family that had a daughter, Lucille, who was also interested in getting married.

In her next letter, she sent my grandfather a picture of Lucille. Even though he was Greek, my grandfather was blue-eyed and blond and he wrote that he thought she was “a little dark.” His mother wrote back and said, “She is very nice she needs to marry. Her mother has died and her father has remarried and she wants to come the United States.”

So the marriage was arranged and her father put her on a ship by herself and she came over. It took her two weeks and she cried the entire time, because she was going to a strange land to marry a man she had never met.

They married and, for some reason, settled in Bayard, Nebraska. They had eight children and Mom was one of the youngest. When she was twelve her dad died and her mom was left to raise the children and take care of the farm. There were quite a few Greeks who settled in and around Bayard so she had some community support, but she did most of it on her own with the help of her older kids.

Tony: There is a little Greek Orthodox Church there and the community revolves around it. Most of the people in Bayard are either Greek or German.

Angela: Mom’s sister Elsie was about fifteen years older than Mom and she helped “Yia yia” raise the younger kids. Elsie eventually fell in love, got married and settled in Dillon, Colorado where she and her husband bought a restaurant. So when my mom turned eighteen she left Bayard and moved to Dillon to help in the restaurant.

Tony: Yeah and that’s where Dad met her. Dad’s parents came from Italy in the 1930’s and settled in Milwaukee. We think Dad was born in Milwaukee, but we’re not sure. What we do know is that when he was three, his parents were killed in a car wreck and he went to live with an aunt who was working in the coalfields of Wyoming.

By the time he was thirteen or fourteen he had dropped out of school and was working in the coalmines. He worked in the mines until he was eighteen. He had been in a couple of cave-ins and he decided he had had enough near misses, he wanted to work for himself.

So with the money he had saved, he opened The Cowboy Bar in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. And so, for the next twenty plus years, he followed the boom and bust of the oil and gas business and opened bars and restaurants.

Angela: Dad lived in the present. He didn’t live in the past or the future. He seldom talked about his past and we were young when he died, so we didn’t get a chance to ask him a lot of questions.

Tony: From Jackson Hole, he moved on to Rangely, Colorado where he opened the Ace High Bar. He always had an apartment in the bar. He lived where he worked. From Rangely he moved on to the Club 40 in Vernal, Utah and then to Rock Springs, Wyoming and eventually to Rawlins for a while.

Angela: He did tell us about being in Rangely in the middle of the boom with no police or fire departments surrounded by these guys who were always ready for a fight after a few drinks.

Tony: So he came up with a plan. He built a boxing ring outside of the bar and hired ex-prize fighters as bouncers. Every Wednesday night was “fight night” and anybody who wanted to could get in the ring with one of the bouncers. It didn’t take long for those guys to see how tough the bouncers were outside the bar. They didn’t make trouble inside.

Gallacher: How did your dad manage to stay safe and sane in that environment?

Angela: Dad didn’t drink but he felt really sorry for people had a problem with alcohol. He would never buy customers a drink, even though that was the business he was in. He had a guy tell him one time, “Joe, this is the only place in town where I can sit at the bar all day and be sober when I leave.”

Tony: Yeah, Dad used to have to call the cops on some of those guys when they’d get out of hand. And the cops would come and throw them in jail, but the next morning my dad would go bail them out.

Gallacher: How did your dad end up in Glenwood?

Angela: Well, he hadn’t intended to end up here, but one day he was passing through on his way to Denver and his car broke down in Glenwood Canyon. He decided to stay the night and rented a room from Mrs. Zanella at the Rex Hotel. The next morning he took a walk and noticed that this corner was for sale.

Tony: He told me that he figured he would only be here for six to eight months, just enough time to fix it up and sell it. But that’s when he met Mom.

Angela: Mom was in Dillon working for her sister and one morning Dad stopped in Dillon for breakfast on his way to Denver, met her and fell in love. They became soul mates. Every night after he closed the restaurant here, he would get in his pink Cadillac and drive to Dillon to have breakfast with her.

After they got married they did everything together. They were inseparable. When Dad died, Mom never really recovered. She died three years later.

Gallacher: What are your favorite memories of them?

Tony: Dad always liked the sporty cars and one Mother’s Day he went out and bought a red Thunderbird with a white top. He filled the back seat with roses and parked it under the bridge across from the restaurant.

Mom came out and was surprised of course. She said, “Oh Joe, the flowers are beautiful and the car is nice. But I’d rather have the money.”

Angela: And she took it back!

Tony: And Dad was back to driving the station wagon around.

Angela: Dad always paid cash for everything. He had a vehicle repossessed when he was a young man and it really made an impression on him. He always said, “if you can’t pay cash for something you don’t need it, you want it.” And that’s how he lived his life. He lived within his means and paid cash for everything.

He was very consistent and taught us a lot of valuable life lessons. Most of our memories are working with our folks in the restaurant. We kids went to work in the restaurant as soon as we were able.

Tony: Dad loved to fish. Every morning he’d come in and shake me awake before daylight and we’d go fishing out in Glenwood Canyon for an hour or two and then come to work.

Gallacher: What would you talk about?

Tony: Oh, that was one of the rules. We weren’t supposed to talk when we fished. Dad said it scared the fish. We just enjoyed being together.

Angela: Dad didn’t talk much even when he wasn’t fishing. He was a very quiet man.

Gallacher: What about your mom?

Angela: Most of the memories are around working together. That’s what we did, worked and shopped. Mom loved to stay up late at night after we closed the restaurant. She would actually put a towel over the clock so that we could stay up all night and bake. She would say, “Angela, if you don’t know what time it is then you won’t get sleepy.” Sometimes we would stay up all night to clean the house when “Yia yia” was coming

Tony: And no matter how clean it was, we had to clean it again.

Angela: She loved to cook, paint and clean. She was always doing something. In the summers we would go visit “Yia yia” in Bayrd, Nebraska.

That’s where Mom and Dad are buried. My mother wanted to make sure she was buried with her family. My father hated Bayrd because it was such a small town and there was nothing to do. But, of course, that’s where she took him to bury him.

Tony: That was Mom’s home and Dad never really had a place.

Angela: She wanted to be with him when she died, so that’s where she took him. And that’s where we took her three years later.

Bruce Christensen

2011-05-02T12:40:00.000-07:00

Listen to Bruce's story

Intro: Bruce Christensen has spent most of his career as the executive director of Mountain Valley Development Services, an organization that provides an array of services to children and adults with developmental disabilities. He also just completed eight years of service on the Glenwood Springs City Council, including six years as the city's mayor

Christensen: Both sides of my family emigrated from Denmark. My father came in the late nineteen twenties and both of my mother’s parents came right around the turn of the twentieth century. It was a time when the United States was a great magnet to people in Europe. Economic conditions weren’t great in Europe back then and a lot of people were coming here looking for opportunity. That was true for my father and my mother’s parents.

My grandfather was seventeen when he came in 1902. He spent a lot of time traveling in the West working on the railroads. He told me a lot of interesting stories about working in the Northwest. He was in California right after the San Francisco earthquake. He spent most of his life as a dairy farmer and only went back to Denmark one time and that was after he was too old to milk cows anymore and had sold his herd.

He went back in the 1960’s. I can remember him being very excited about his trip but he came back disillusioned by all the changes that had taken place during the sixty years he was gone. A lot of the farms he had remembered as a young man were gone and factories and towns had taken their place.

Gallacher: What about your father’s parents?

Christensen: I never met either of them. They both stayed in Denmark and died shortly after I was born. My dad only went back to visit once in the 1930s just before he married my mother.

My dad was one of fifteen children, which was pretty common back then. People who had large farms had large families because it was a source of free labor. In the case of my father’s family, twelve of the fifteen children immigrated to the United States. They wanted to do something other than work on the family farm, so they came to the United States seeking work in other areas.

Dad came with one of his brothers when they were both in their twenties. My dad told stories of being herded through Ellis Island with hundreds of other people. He said he was afraid the whole time of being rejected and accepted. If he was rejected he would be put on a boat and sent back and if he was accepted he would end up on the streets of New York with no English and no clue as to what to do or where to go.

The two of them made their way to Chicago and then to Texas where they worked in a greenhouse. Dad told me a lot about being in the South in the twenties and thirties. There was a great deal of discrimination towards people who were not from the United States. He said people in the South referred to them as Yankees, which was a term that was applied to anyone not native of the South at the time. So, after a few years of not feeling very welcome, he and his brother migrated back to the Chicago area.

He went to work in dairies just outside of Chicago. Somehow, probably through the Danish subculture, he and his brother heard about a farmer who had four daughters and lived only fifty miles away. And it turned out that my dad and his brother eventually married two of his daughters.

My folks lived near Chicago until I was about three and that’s when they moved back to the country and bought a farm that adjoined my grandparents’ farm. We were on one side of my grandparents and my aunt had a farm on the other. There was a strong sense of family in those Danish communities not unlike many of the Italian families that were settling this valley at about the same time. I can remember, as I was growing up, we would share work. When we baled hay we went from my grandfather’s farm to our farm and then to my aunt’s.

My father’s brothers and sisters were scattered across northern Illinois, Iowa and Wisconsin. Whenever they would get together I felt like I was stepping into a Danish community with all its customs and its food.

Danes eat several times a day. In addition to breakfast, lunch and dinner there are mid-morning and mid-afternoon breaks for coffee and pastries. When I was growing up, I would walk over to my grandparents’ place in the afternoon, when my grandfather took his break from the fields, and have coffee and pastries with him and my grandmother.

Gallacher: Were you an only child?

Christensen: Yes, which is pretty interesting when you consider that my grandparents had huge families.

Gallacher: You must have worked pretty hard being the only child on a working farm.

Christensen: Our farm was small so my dad worked in town at a dairy to make ends meet and my mom and I did most of the farm work. I started having responsibilities when I was seven or eight years old. I was driving a tractor when I was nine and cars and trucks when I was twelve.

There’s a funny story about my grandfather. When he was in his late seventies, he failed his driver’s test. So he just parked his car and drove his tractor when he went to town. He wasn’t the only one. There used to be all these tractors at the coffee shop in the morning. He and his buddies had figured out that they didn’t need a driver’s license for farm equipment.

Gallacher: Did you feel different being a farm kid.

Christensen: No, because half the kids I went to school with lived on farms. Farming changes your social life. School sports weren’t an option because I had responsibilities at home. It was hard sometimes, but I do think that kind of discipline prepares you well for

life.

Gallacher: Do you think your experience as the only child of Danish immigrants shaped who you are today?

Christensen: Well I have spent almost all of my adult life working in human services in a field that helps people who really face some significant challenges. I don’t know if it’s the Nordic genes or the Scandinavian value of putting society above self. I am in no way saying that I am some selfless person. I’ve lived a very good life. But you go home at night feeling like you did some good that day. That’s very important to me.

It’s also why I got somewhat involved in government. I had always been a student of government and hadn’t planned to get involved. But this community has been very good to me and I began to feel like I should give back. I was a very good friend of Ted O’Leary’s and considered him my mentor. It was Ted who urged me to get more active in the community.

Gallacher: How were you able to balance your work and your community service?

Christensen: I think part of it goes back to my farm background where work is life and life is work. I think when you grow up that way you do what you need to do to get the job done.

Gallacher: What are you proudest of at Mountain Valley?

Christensen: I am proud of the accomplishments that we have enabled the folks we work with to achieve. These are people who face significant challenges everyday, but they lead really good lives. Part of their quality of life is due to the culture of Glenwood and Carbondale.

I have done accrediting surveys in thirty states as part of my work and I have never seen any towns that are as open to diversity as Glenwood and Carbondale. The people we work with are treated very, very well in these communities.

Gallacher: What are you proudest of in your years on city council.

Christensen: I think we have worked cooperatively with the surrounding communities for the betterment of the region. I am also proud of the fact that the city of Glenwood Springs has taken an active stand in favor of the environment on every single issue related to clean air or clean water. These things are very important to our communities and our citizens.

Gallacher: As the son of immigrants what is your view of immigration today?

Christensen: I think, throughout our history, the first generation of any immigrant group has been treated rather poorly. I think “the melting pot” is more than just a saying. I think it is true that the United States, more than any other country in the world, has developed into an eclectic, diverse and dynamic entity because of all the contributions of the various cultures that have come here.

I do feel that we are not able to open our doors to everybody, but I also feel that the hardworking people who are here deserve some sort of track to citizenship that will allow them to do what our parents did, make a good life.

I was the third person in my extended family to graduate from high school and the first to graduate from college. For my parents it was the realization of a dream and one of the main reasons they left Denmark-to make a better life for themselves and their children.

Gerry and Marja Vanderbeek

2011-04-19T07:39:00.000-07:00

Intro: Marja and Gerry Vanderbeek grew up in the Netherlands. Marja was three and living in Indonesia with her family when World War II broke out and the Japanese invaded the islands. Marja spent the next four years with her mother and her brothers and sisters trying to survive the brutality of a prison camp and wondering about the fate of her father.

Gerry was a little boy living with his family in the northern part of the Netherlands when the Germans invaded. Gerry and his family passed the “racial test” but the Jewish family that lived across the street was deported and never seen again. Gerry and his family were forced to feed and house German officers who moved into their home during the occupation.

Those traumatic childhood events didn’t dampen their sense of adventure, and when they finally met and married they were off to see the world. They left for Canada with their two young sons, two hundred dollars and faith that it would all work out. And it did. Gerry got a job as a banker in Montreal and then a better job in Seattle where their third son was born. Eventually Gerry and Marja settled in Denver and raised their family.

And then, in 1998, the wonderful life that they had created was shaken to the core and they were forced to draw on a strength that they hadn’t had to tap since they were children.

Gallacher: So what has kept the two of you together through the “thick and the thin”?

Gerry: We’re both Dutch and stubborn. We don’t give up.

Marja: Gerry has been telling his friends, “You need to have a wife that won’t leave you”. But I think it is more about how we were brought up. We were both taught that you don’t give up once you get married, you try to work it out. I think that younger people tend to give up when something happens in a relationship that they don’t like.

We are still working on ours.

Gerry: Yeah, we both know from growing up, during World War II and Marja being in a prison camp, that life can be very hard. So when life is hard……

Marja: You don’t give up. That was especially true after our son, Mike, died because you really can’t help each other and you just have to work through the grief. That was very difficult.

Gallacher: Can you talk about that?

Marja: It was devastating.

Gerry: We lived a charmed life as a couple and a family. We did a lot of outlandish things without giving it much thought, because analysis would have paralyzed us. “Let’s move to Canada. OK let’s go.” “Let’s buy a house. We don’t have any money. Oh well, let’s do it anyway. We’ll figure it out.”

Marja: We didn’t have any really difficult things happen to us in our life.

Gerry: So we couldn’t believe that this was happening to us because everything had always worked out. It took us a long time to see why our ideal home had collapsed. Then we began to realize that so many other people suffer.

Marja: We started to discover that we weren’t the only ones.

Gerry: After a month or so of saying “why us?”, we began to think, “why not us?” A lot of people have terrible things happen, why shouldn’t something tragic happen to us? Why should we be spared?

Then we started to think about Mike and the incredible life that he had.

Marja: Our son was really an example to us. He was not interested in material things, at all. What he owned he had on his back. He had just bought a piece of land and he was planning to build himself a small cabin.

Mike was an Outward Bound instructor and loved the outdoors. He had a special place in his heart for younger kids and was always helping them. He was a very giving person.

Gerry: Marja and I are idealistic, but we are also pragmatic. He was a true idealist who had a glorious short life and I am not so sure, looking back, if he would have been happier living a much longer life. Sooner or later his idealism would have clashed with the reality of everyday living.

Marja: He was still looking for the frontier, that’s why he was so drawn to Alaska. He watched as the paved roads moved further and further into the wilderness that he loved so much. That was very hard for him to accept. He was really troubled by man’s disregard for nature.

He spent one winter in a hut deep in the Alaskan mountains studying the receding glaciers.

Gerry: Then in May of 1998 he was working as rescue ranger in Denali National Park. Only the best climbers are chosen for these positions, so he was very excited and having a wonderful time. And then, two days before his term was up, Mike and a co-worker, Mark, were descending from an 18,000 foot camp on Denali when they saw two Canadian climbers fall. They radioed it in and went to help and in their haste they forgot to rope up.

As they descended to Peter’s Glacier, they got caught up in a ground blizzard. It was then that they realized that they needed to rope up before they went any further. They were in the process of roping up on this very narrow ledge with no visibility when Mike’s partner said he heard the scratching of metal and the swooshing of the rope and then nothing. Mike was gone..disappeared.

At that point Mark tied himself into the mountain and screamed his head off. And he stayed there waiting for twenty-four hours.

Marja: They have never found Mike’s body, which was so hard for me for a long time. But I have realized, over the years, that Denali is the perfect resting place for him, the place he loved so much.

Gerry: I climbed to the spot two years later just to have that experience and be near him in a way. There was a very steep drop off into Peter’s Glacier and Mike must have fallen into a deep crevasse because they had three different searches for him and found nothing.

Marja: They did find the body of the boy Mike was trying to rescue and Mike’s backpack. They found his broken crampon. That was one of the reasons he fell.

Gerry: Yeah, I still have that. He was an amazing climber but he would not spend money on the latest and greatest equipment. He had these ancient Everest crampons and he must have kicked in to get a hold and it broke.

Marja: Because Mike was working for the government at the time, Gerry and I were given grief money, seventy thousand dollars each. We used the money to set up the Mike Vanderbeek Scholarship Fund at the Alaska Mountaineering School. Every year there are three or four native Alaskan kids who get a chance to learn how to climb and survive in the wilderness.

Gallacher: I understand that it was Mike’s death that brought you here.

Marja: We were living in Denver at the time and, even though Mike wasn’t living at home, he always came back to what he called his “blue room.” I had such a hard time even walking by the “blue room” after his death. I finally decided that I had to leave that house. I could not handle it.

Gerry: He gave us the impulse to move on. We thought about a condo on a golf course but I couldn’t stand the thought of not being part of a town with the daily comings and goings. We were in Glenwood for a visit and we saw this house for sale. We didn’t even have our house for sale in Denver, but we bought this house on impulse and went back to Denver and put the other one on the market. We sold it in three days.

Mike helped us a lot. There are amazing things about life that aren’t obvious.

Marja: We changed a lot. Before his death I’m not sure that we would have liked to live in this house.

Gerry: We both grew up in towns where people walk around and neighbors visit. This really feels like home. I can mow the lawn and get caught up with everything that’s happening in the neighborhood. So we are very fortunate and we have to thank Mike for this.

Marja: Yes, we owe him a great deal.

Note: Marja and Gerry watch the daily comings and goings from their home on Blake Avenue in Glenwood Springs.

Julian Hardaker

2011-04-04T10:56:00.000-07:00

Listen to Julian's story.

Hardaker: I came to the United States because of my wife, Deborah, who at that point was not my wife. I was at St. Andrew’s University in Scotland and, at the beginning of the school year, they had a mixer at dorm that was a three-legged “pub crawl” contest. We were randomly assigned to one another and tied together at the ankle. We made it to the ten different pubs on the crawl and haven’t untied ourselves since.

We dated pretty steady after that. Deborah was on her Junior year abroad and then came back to the States. I finished up in Scotland and went to the French Alps for a winter and worked at a resort in Chamonix. I tried to convince her to come over and join me, but I failed. It got to the point where she told me, “either you come here or I am moving on.” So I got on a plane and came to the States.

She had family in Acton, Massachusetts, so I found a job teaching nearby in Weston. We were there for about five years, and although I couldn’t get her to the French Alps, I finally convinced her to come to the “American Alps.”

Gallacher: Were you a skier then?

Hardaker: Yes. I didn’t start skiing until I was eighteen, but I loved it and have been doing it ever since.

Gallacher: Where did you grow up?

Hardaker: Just outside of Liverpool in England, a fairly industrial town not too dissimilar from Detroit. Liverpool used to be a great port, but when I was growing up in the eighties, it was in the middle of a deep recession. The whole area was depressed economically and my dad was unemployed for quite a long time. It was a rough area in many ways.

We used to go down to the town center and there would be trash everywhere and shuttered storefronts. There used to be riots down the road from us. There was a coal miners’ strike and the young and unemployed would take to the streets.

That was also the time of the football (soccer) hooligans. Apparently, for some of these guys, part of the fun of going to a football match was to get in a fight. I can remember going to the games and hearing this clicking sound. I couldn’t figure out what it was at first, but I finally realized that it was these guys breaking the plastic chairs off. All of a sudden someone would throw a plastic cup and then all of these plastic seats would come flying through the air.

Gallacher: So they would start dismantling the stadium?

Hardaker: Yeah, just looking for a fight. I was about ten at the time so it was quite the scene. We always managed to steer our way around the trouble, but it could be dangerous at times. We had to be careful to not be at the wrong place at the wrong time.

It was a little scary. Our house was burglarized two or three times. We were fairly close to the docks, and you would see grown men in gangs on street corners just standing around. They were all unemployed and had nothing to do. That could be pretty intimidating. You could see an anger and a kind of bitterness in their eyes. But, overall, it was pretty safe.

Gallacher: How did your parents manage during those times?

Hardaker: My dad was gone quite a lot. He ended going down to London and working in shipping down there. He stayed all week and came home on weekends. I was young and not too aware of the family stress at the time. My mom did a good job of insulating us from all of that. Life carried on. I had my friends and didn’t want for too much.

Gallacher: Where would you play?

Hardaker: In the summer we played outside all day long. We played pretty much all the time until we got called in. It was rough in some ways, but it wasn’t that bad. Our parents were fine with us running around. They kept an eye on us and steered us away from any trouble.

My parents worked hard and pushed us with education. Mom encouraged us the whole way. None of her generation had been to college so she was determined that we would go to college. It was understood, early on, that college was something we were going to do. She was always there for my sister and me. She always made sure, even during those really hard times, I was never wanting for anything.

My mom was a nursery (preschool) teacher. She was able to trick me into learning things. It was her influence that got me into teaching when I first moved to the States. She just had a way of making learning constantly fun. She retired when I was about sixteen.

Gallacher: What about your father?

Hardaker: Both of my parents grew up in Yorkshire, which is about seventy miles inland from Liverpool. They met at church and married when they were in their thirties. My dad started working in an office for a shipping company and did that all of his life. That’s how we ended up in Liverpool. He smoked all of his life and died of COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease) a couple of years ago.

Dad had a great sense of humor and was always late. Those are two things I think I inherited from him. He used to love cricket and sports, and I get a lot of that from him.

He had a really relaxed attitude about life. Although he would get on me about my grades and tell me I had better try harder in school for all the money he was spending. I could usually find my way to the lower half of any class that I was put in.

Gallacher: When did you get serious about academics?

Hardaker: I was sixteen before I got serious. The last two years in English schools, you choose three classes that you want to specialize in. I loved languages from the first day of class so I was able to really focus on my interest. I don’t think I would have been able to do as well in American schools where the curriculum is much broader.

Gallacher: So in English schools you are specializing when you are in your last two years of school before college?

Hardaker: Yes. It was perfect for me because I could finally get rid of chemistry. But I’m sure it didn’t work for some kids who still weren’t sure what they wanted to do.

Gallacher: How many languages can you speak?

Hardaker: English, American English, Spanish, French, some Portuguese, and some Italian.

Gallacher: Do you have dual citizenship?

Hardaker: I don’t. I have been stubbornly holding on to the “Queen’s passport.” I’m English, that’s who I am. I think, as my two daughters get older, it may make sense to change that. So I’m still toying with the idea.

Gallacher: Do you ever feel like you have a split personality, English and American?

Hardaker: Yes, we went to France and England over Christmas, and for the first time I felt like I was looking at things more through an American lense than before. When I go home now my accent has changed so much that people don’t believe I’m English. They think I’m Canadian because I sound sort of like an American but not really.

We stayed in a hotel in Geneva and the rooms seemed so small compared to here. Service, comfort, the sense of space are different there, especially when compared to the sense of space here in the western U.S.

The sense of civic involvement is something I have acquired since I have been here in the States. I think civic volunteerism is something that is much more ingrained in the American psyche than it is in the British psyche. Volunteering is part of the American spirit.

What they say about America is true, there is much more opportunity. There are so many choices here, starting and setting up businesses for example. This country seems to be so much more open to people with drive, who are willing to look for and try new things. Growing up in England, the possibility of starting a new business and working for yourself didn’t seem to exist. Whereas here, from the first time you land and turn on the TV, you are inundated with ads encouraging you.

Note: Julian Hardaker and his wife Deborah live in the Roaring Fork Valley with their daughters, Kate and Claire. He is an independent real estate broker and owner of the Best Way Home Real Estate company.

Melania Ullerick

2011-03-21T11:29:00.000-07:00

Ullerick: My name is Melania Ullerick. I was born Melania Loredana Salceanue. I came to the United States from Rumania because I was adopted by a U.S. Air Force family.

My earliest memories as a child are of the orphanage that I was in. There were very poor living conditions and I remember having to fight for my food. There was no toy that was mine, it was the group’s. If I got to it first then I could play with it, but as soon as I would lose focus or get distracted it would get taken away from me by some other kid. The same was true of food.

The toilets were actually just holes in the floor. The bathing was awful. They always bathed us with cold water, so when I was adopted and had my first warm bath I freaked out and screamed and cried. I thought I was being tortured. After the second or third bath, I finally started to get used to it and enjoy warm water.

There were cribs that lined all of the walls. No one paid attention to any of us, so I was really on mine own, I had to be self-soothing. It was really hard for the one-year olds and the two-year olds because we literally stood in our cribs and rocked ourselves.

Rocking was the only way to soothe myself. It took me a long time to get over doing it for comfort. I was twelve before I finally broke the habit. I still have comfort issues. I’m still not ever totally comfortable, but I’m a lot better than I was as a child. If I hadn’t been adopted I would probably be lying in some Rumanian street or dead.

When I was three I was moved to the preschool, which was for kids from three to seven. The preschool was more of the same. There were about seventy kids in one room and we all slept together. There was row after row of toddler beds.

Gallacher: How many caregivers were there?

Ullerick: There were about thirty total, five per shift. Some of them couldn’t be called caregivers because they were abusive. I remember a staff member shoving me down the stairs. I didn’t break anything but there wasn’t anybody there to comfort me. I learned to just stay out of the way. Luckily, there were only about three or four bad ones who didn’t like children. Most of the other staff were actually pretty nice. It was an impossible job. Imagine five people trying to take care of seventy toddlers.

Gallacher: Describe the room for me.

Ullerick: It was always really loud. The older kids were the ones making most of the noise. The younger kids, like me, were kind of overwhelmed by it all and really quiet and distant. We tried to just stay out of the way of the bigger kids. There was no point in talking because you couldn’t be heard.

Gallacher: Sounds like how some people have described prison.

Ullerick: I’ve never been to prison but I think the orphanage is actually worse, because you have no self-identity in there, especially if you’re really little. If you are one of the younger kids you have no say about anything. You are constantly having your food taken away from you by the older kids.

Gallacher: How did you stay positive?

Ullerick: I just kept telling myself, “I’m gonna get out of this place, I’m gonna be adopted…hopefully”.

Gallacher: So you had faith that someone would come along.

Ullerick: Yes I did because, like I said before, I’m lucky.

Gallacher: Did you have friends in the orphanage?

Ullerick: I had one or two, but not very close. I developed a shield around me and learned early that I had to protect myself. As soon as a friendship would come along, I was skeptical, rigid and nervous. I was afraid to let people in and I’m still kinda that way. Most of the stuff we learn before we’re five are formative things we carry with us through adulthood.

So I’m trying to unlearn some of those things I learned as a little kid in the orphanage. Actually it’s my New Year’s resolution, to be more open and honest with others about my feelings, to let people in.

Gallacher: How old were you when you were adopted.

Ullerick: I was four and a half. We moved a lot after I was adopted - Germany, Holland, Texas, Italy. Italy was my favorite. We lived there during the war in Kosovo. I remember watching the planes take off and land at the base. They were constantly buzzing over my head. It was nerve wracking but it was also really cool for all of us kids to see that.

Gallacher: Do you remember being adopted?

Ullerick: Yes, it was a twelve-day process. My parents got really lucky with my adoption. Normally it takes a lot longer, years and years. I guess I was just lucky, I kinda always have been. My sister was in the orphanage at the time and she was adopted by another Air Force family. She lives in Boise, Idaho.

Gallacher: How old were you when you went to the orphanage?

Ullerick: I was supposed to go when I was one but there was no room so they kept me in a hospital for an entire year. It wasn’t until I was two that the orphanage finally had room. At least at the hospital I was taken care of. That didn’t happen in the orphanage.

Gallacher: Do you understand why you were sent to an orphanage?

Ullerick: Yes, because my parents were both very, very poor. They lived in an 8 foot by 8 foot shack with my two older brothers. They literally had no room for me or my sister, so they put us up for adoption. I was sent first and my sister followed a few years later. I didn’t even know she was there. The orphanage didn’t figure out that we were related until we were adopted. I got adopted and she was adopted two days later. My new family and her new family got together and figured out that we were related.

Gallacher: Do you have contact with your birth parents?

Ullerick: Not currently. The only time I met them was when I was thirteen. My adoptive father was getting out of the Air Force and we were leaving Italy for Colorado. When I realized we might not be coming back, I asked my parents if I could go see my biological parents one last time. They thought that was a great idea.

I was really excited to see them up until the time I saw their living conditions, and I thought to myself, “Oh, my gosh I am so lucky to be adopted”. We had a translator with us so we were able to communicate with one another. My mom wasn’t looking well, malnutrition was taking a terrible toll on her. She had bug bites all over her face and arms. My father just looked really drunk.

It was a very difficult meeting, more awkward than any situation I have been in since. Here I was with my biological parents and yet I didn’t feel like I was a part of them at all. I felt completely distant. I was realizing that the only thing I shared with them was my physical characteristics. I’m the tallest one in my family.

Gallacher: What did your parents say to you?

Ullerick: They said, “We’re glad for you”. They seemed really happy that my life had turned out well. They wished me the best. At least that’s what I got out of it. When we left, there were a lot of awkward hugs but it did help to ease the tension. By the time we left we were a little bit closer. My sister hasn’t seen our parents at all so I have told her the stories from our meeting.

Gallacher: What are your earliest memories with your adoptive parents?

I remember my first meal. I tucked one piece of bread under one arm and another piece under the other while I clutched the third piece in my hands, eating it like a chipmunk. I was so worried that my new family was going to steal my food. I was very defensive and in fight mode. That was how it was in the orphanage. You really had to fight for your food. A lot of kids had bruises and black eyes as a result of struggles for food.

I remember, during those first few weeks with my new family, I was always really thirsty. I was really malnourished so I had a distended stomach. I had stomach pain for weeks adjusting to new food and getting rid of infection. I was the size of a two year-old at the age of four and a half.

I remember my mom singing to me the first night I was adopted. She sang:

I love you, I love you

I love you in the morning and in the afternoon

I love you in the evening and underneath the moon

Oh scitamarinkadinkydink Oh scitamarinkydoo

I love you

I used to look in the mirror and sing “I love you” to myself. Those were some of the first English words I learned.

****

Note: Melania lives in Glenwood Springs with her husband and her 22 month-old son. She is working on her degree in Psychology and pursuing a career in human services working with neglected children. She says she hopes to give back to her community the way her adoptive parents, Jill and Tom Ziemann, have.

Erwin Knirlberger

2011-03-06T16:25:00.000-08:00

Knirlberger: I was born in Tann, Bavaria Germany in 1919. It was my mother and I. I never knew my father. When I was seven we moved in with my grandparents in a little town in lower Bavaria. My mother got a job in a pastry shop about twenty miles away and would come home on weekends. My grandparents had a big garden and fruit trees. It was a wonderful place. When I was ten, my grandfather died suddenly and that left just me and my grandmother.

I stayed there until I was fourteen and a half, old enough to begin studying for a trade. I apprenticed as a “konditor”, a fine pastry chef. I lived with the family that I apprenticed with for four years and then got a job as a pastry chef in the Black Forest. That job lasted about a year until the fall of 1939 when the war started. Food was being rationed and fine pastry became a luxury that no one could afford. The man I worked for shut his business and laid me off.

I went back and lived with my grandmother and worked as a tax clerk for about six months and then I got drafted into the “work forces” and eventually into the navy. They made me a cook because of my experience as a pastry chef.

Eventually, I ended up on a “mine sweeper”*. I was at Normandy during the invasion when the Americans bombed the hell out of every port. The boat that I was on got hit and ended up on the pier. After that I was sent back to Germany and then on to Italy. I was in Genoa, Italy when we surrendered to the Italian Partisans and eventually to the Americans in May of 1945.

I became a prisoner of war and was sent to a camp near Pisa, Italy for about a year and a half.

Gallacher: How was that experience?

Knirlberger: Well, it was prison. I didn’t like it. It wasn’t too bad at first. There weren’t too many fences and they fed us on c-rations*. But as the fences went up the food went down. We were fed mostly dried food that was prepared in big barrels.

After a while I got lucky. They gave me a job as a cook and then I had it pretty good. I had access to plenty of food. We had lots of raisins and we just added yeast and let it ferment a little bit and we had whiskey. We were near a U.S. Army supply depot and some of the prisoners would sneak over the fence and bring back oranges and other things that made prison life more bearable.

Gallacher: So guys were sneaking in and out of the prison to get food?

Knirlberger: It was only a couple people who were really good at it. They were the ones who could scale the high fences without getting caught. I did it once to go visit my girlfriend but I didn’t have to scale a high fence.

Because I worked in the kitchen, I was able to move around pretty freely. I got word to her through an old Italian guy who hauled the garbage out of the camp. One night, I changed into some civilian clothes that I had hidden and went up onto the roof of a bunker and jumped down. She and I went and spent the night together in a little hotel. She wanted me to go with her to a farm her family owned in Milano. She said we could hide there.

I felt like my release time was coming up and I didn’t want to take the chance of escaping and then getting caught and being kept in prison longer. So I crawled back in again.

They eventually closed the camp and sent us to another one. This one was lousy. It changed my mind about escaping. Shortly after I got there, I joined up with a group of guys who were tunneling out under the fence. It took a long time because it was thirty feet long and came up in the woods.

There were about fifty guys involved in the escape. The night we were planning to escape some of the guys got nervous and made too much noise. The guards heard them and there were spotlights and sirens everywhere. I was one of the lucky ones who got away.

I hid in the woods, running and hiding all night. When it started to get light I was near a little town. I brushed myself off as much as I could and went to Mass in the Catholic Church. After Mass everybody left and I stayed. Finally the priest came and asked me what I was doing. I told him I was a prisoner of war who just wanted to go home. He took me to his house and fed me and then, in the evening, he bought me a train ticket to Genoa, where my girlfriend was.

There were guards everywhere at the train station, so I had to crawl over the railroad tracks and sneak up from the opposite side of the train. Somehow I made it on and got to Genoa without getting caught.

My girlfriend’s family was surprised to see me. When I asked for her they said,

“Sorry, she left with a guy for South America. She didn’t think you were coming”. I was like part of the family so they felt bad that it hadn’t worked out between us. Her mama cooked me a big meal and the family bought me a train ticket to Bozen, Italy, near the Austrian border.

I got off the train in a little town just before Bozen because I didn’t want to attract any attention. I came upon a woman with a little boy and they were collecting firewood. I helped them gather wood and haul it into town and she gave me something to eat.

From there I started to climb into the foothills of the Alps. There were lots of little farms and milk cows along the way. I coaxed some of the cows into giving me some milk. I had a sunglass case that I used as my little milk bucket. It sprayed everywhere but at least I was able to get a little bit of food.

I stayed in the woods most of the time but after a while I had to come out into an open meadow in order to cross a valley. That’s when I saw these guys in uniforms and they saw me. They motioned for me to come and I thought I had come all this way for nothing.

I approached them with my hands up and they began talking to me in German. I was already in Austria and didn’t know it. They gave me some food and told me which way to go to avoid the French patrols.

I bought a train ticket to Tann, where I was born, in the next town I came to. I was afraid to go home to my grandmother because I was a fugitive without papers, and I didn’t want to take the chance of getting her in trouble. I had an uncle in Tann and he took me in. The Americans were occupying the country and requiring everyone to carry official identification papers. My cousin worked in the city hall there and he was able to take my picture and forge the documents that I needed so I could finally go home.

Knirlberger: I returned to the town where I grew up. My grandmother’s house had been hit in the bombing raids and there was a big hole in the roof. Things were a mess. My grandmother was living there because she had no place else to go. My aunts and uncles and their families had moved in and taken the good rooms on the first floor and put my grandmother on the second floor in the room with the hole in it. This made me so mad. I told them all that we had to do something.

Money was worthless, food and other supplies were scarce. The only things we had there to barter with were coffee and cigarettes. We got food rations but if we wanted good food it was all traded for on the black market. I remember I had a pair of dress shoes that I traded for a few pounds of potatoes.

My uncle smoked. I took his cigarettes and traded them for building materials. I had never built anything, but I got enough stuff together and I figured out how to fix the roof and the ceiling. Then I dug a well so we had running water.

I built a form and started making my own concrete blocks, because nothing like that was available after the war. With those blocks I built a laundry room and a bathroom.

Gallacher: How did you learn how to do that?

Knirlberger: Well, you think a little bit. Before long I had a girlfriend and pretty soon I had a son. Germany was down and inflation was high. I had 20,000 marks that I had saved before the war. I could only get three and a half percent of their original value. When I complained to my aunt who lived in the United States, she told me to come live with her and get a job.

I decided to go see if I could make it in the U.S. By then my grandmother’s house was in good shape. My wife and son had a nice apartment. My aunt sponsored me and sent me a ticket to come over. She lived near an air force base in Belleville so she rented everything out. When I showed up, the only place left was the boiler room.

My uncle got me a job in a big bakery. It wasn’t like anything I had ever seen. I was trained as a pastry chef in Germany and I couldn’t believe what they called bread in America. I couldn’t stand the fluffy stuff.

Gallacher: So you didn’t care for our spongy “balloon bread”.

Knirlberger: It was like day and night from the way I had been trained in Germany. I eventually found a job with a real baker. It was just him and me. I came to the U.S. in June of 1951 and by the spring of ‘52 I had bought a building lot. I had learned that in America you can buy something by “putting a little money down”. So that’s what I did.

I didn’t know a foot from an inch or a 2x6 from a 2x4, but I was making plans to build a house. I had fixed up the house in Germany so I figured “why not try building a house in America”. I started going to construction sites to watch and learn what they were doing. I learned that they used 2x4s and spaced them sixteen inches apart. It was hard because I had meters in my mind and everything here was in inches and feet.

I learned that concrete came in trucks in America and I wouldn’t have to mix it by hand anymore. I watched what the construction guys did and I did the same. Pretty soon I was building my own house.

When the baker I worked for found out that I was building a house, he was furious. “You goddamned kraut,” he said, “I’m here all my life and I have nothing like that”. He was so jealous of me that I finally quit. I tried to get a job in the steel mill but they wouldn’t hire me because I was a German, so I went to work for a bricklayer who thought I did good work.

Eventually I got a job in the Union Starch factory and I sent for my wife and son. We had an apartment in town. I worked twelve-hour shifts and spent any extra time I had trying to finish our house.

In 1959, I got discouraged and decided to go back to Germany and see if I could start over there. I quit my job and we went back for three months. But when we got to Germany, we realized that we didn’t like it anymore. It had gotten too small. Germans were real bossy. The clerks in the post offices acted like they was a generals.

I bought a car while I was there, but there was no place to park. All the streets were small and narrow. Prices on everything had gone up, we realized we couldn’t afford to live like we wanted to. Germany just wasn’t what we had hoped it would be.

We came back to the U.S. after three months and made plans to move to Florida. We decided to go to the “land of sun and fun”. My wife started shopping for handbags and bikinis. When my aunt heard about our plans she said, “What do you want in Florida? You already hate the heat here. Florida’s heat is much worse. You’re crazy. Go out to Colorado where there are mountains and the weather is like Germany’s”.

Gallacher: So that’s all it took?

Knirlberger: Yes, she made perfect sense. We came to Denver and then Estes Park and eventually to Aspen. When we saw Aspen we knew it was the place we wanted to be. There were a lot of Germans and Austrians in Aspen in those early days. I remember we were looking for our motel and we stopped and asked a little boy for directions and, when he answered us in German, we knew we were in the right place.

We eventually bought a place from this Swiss guy who sold real estate. He convinced us that a piece of land with cabins was a good deal for us. He was right. We were able to rent the cabins and start building new ones. Over the years, I built the Bavarian Inn, a lodge, a restaurant and twenty-three units. Later on, I bought six other building lots. We did all the work ourselves. My son helped and, occasionally, a ski bum.

Gallacher: How long did it take you?

Knirlberger: It took twenty-six years. I started building in 1964 and I sold everything and left in 1990. Today, it’s all employee housing.

*mine sweeper - A ship equipped for detecting, destroying, removing, or neutralizing explosive marine mines.

*c-rations - a type of canned food formerly used by U.S. soldiers.

Terry and Susan Fattor

2011-02-14T16:13:00.000-08:00

Intro: Terry and Susan Fattor have lived in Glenwood Springs for over forty years. They have a daughter Christie and three sons Eric, Nicholas and Troy.

Terry: My grandparents came from a small town in Italy called Romeno. It’s in the very northern part near the Alps. They came to the United States in 1910.

Susan: They were married in April of 1910 and, two weeks later, they left for the U.S. by boat and landed at Ellis Island on May 8^th.

Gallacher: What are the stories from back then?

Terry: Well it’s interesting. There is no question that I am Italian, but if you asked my grandma and even my uncles and dad, when they were alive, there was resistance to being Italian. According to them, we were Austrian. Even on the chart that we have from Ellis Island, they signed in as being from Romeno, Austria.

Grandma would get pretty upset when anyone would assume that we were from Italy. In those days, the Austrian and Italian border was moving back and forth, depending on the politics. Some days it would be Austria and some days it would be Italy. So I guess they got to choose.

My grandparents came to Cambria, Wyoming. My granddad got a job in the coal mine and they started a family. My granddad didn’t have any experience as a coal miner. Romeno is farm and orchard country, but coal mining was what a lot of immigrants did to get started.

My grandfather died from influenza when my dad and his brothers were pretty young. My grandmother was left to raise four sons and a daughter on her own. We’re still not sure how she was able to get by. The kids were all very young. My dad was only seven. They were living in Denver by this time.

When my granddad died my grandmother told her oldest son, my Uncle Lou, who was nine at the time, to gather up all the photos of Grandpa. They collected every picture that had my grandfather in it and buried them in the backyard.

To this day, I have never seen a picture of my grandfather. I guess my grandmother was saying to herself and her kids, “O.K. this part of our life is over”. She never remarried and she raised five kids. Actually, she had six but she lost a son when he was just a baby.

They were a very tight family who depended on one another. Grandma raised them as strong Catholics. Faith was important to them throughout their lives. They grew up in poverty in a little house near the railroad tracks.

Those kids took care of their mom. Dad used to tell me of how he and his brothers would hop up on the trains as they passed and throw coal off the side of the cars. That was dangerous and illegal activity that could have gotten them in trouble with the rail yard cops. But Dad said that the engineers would see them and look the other way. They must have known that the family was struggling to get by.

The boys would gather up the coal and that’s the way they heated their home and cooked their food. The house was a one-bedroom with a tiny kitchen, a living room and a bathroom.

My Uncle Lou was the oldest and the first one to go to school. Apparently, he got beat up because he spoke mostly Italian and very little English. Grandma was a very strong personality, so I’m sure she went to the school and complained, even though she couldn’t speak much English herself. After that Grandma told the kids, “O.K. that’s it. We speak English from now on. No one speaks Italian ever again”. And, according to my dad, they never did. Grandma spoke very rough English, but it was English never Italian.

Gallacher: There was a lot of discrimination toward Italians during that time.

Terry: Apparently so. At that same time, my Grandma changed all of kids’ names from Italian to English. My Uncle Luigi became “Lou”, Aunt Ana became “Ann”, Uncle Mario became “John”, my dad was Angelo James and he became “Eugene James” or “E.J.”, Uncle Arturo became “Art”. Our last named was pronounced “Faatór” in Italian. That was changed to Fattor (fatter).

They all started working at a very young age and they were all very successful. Only one of them went to college but they all helped take this country to whole other level. It’s amazing what they were able to do without much education. They grew up in the Depression and worked very hard for everything they had. Money was something to be saved and respected because you could lose it all tomorrow.

Gallacher: How did your dad’s childhood experience color his life?

Terry: He made sure all of us went to college and he was always careful with his money. It was only late in life that he finally felt like he had any money. I think his one goal was to make sure all of his kids went to college, and we all did. He was typical of that generation who didn’t want their kids to have to experience the hardships they did.

Susan: I think Terry’s dad always felt like he had to be the person who provided. When he started dating Terry’s mom he had to stop because he was going to night school and he couldn’t concentrate on his studies and have a girlfriend. When he finished night school they started dating again.

They were married at six in the morning. There wasn’t a wedding. They just went down to the courthouse and got married because he had to go to work that day. He didn’t feel like he could take the day off.

Terry: Mom was a dancer who could have had a career, but once they got married she couldn’t do that anymore because Dad felt like he was the one who was supposed to provide.

Gallacher: What kind of Italian traditions did your dad bring to the family?

Terry: We didn’t have much other than polenta. Like I said, my dad insisted that we were Austrian right up to the end. You know, I never thought about my heritage much, growing up. But when my dad died it was my son, Eric, who wanted to know more about our family’s roots. When we were sorting through my dad’s things, he found an Italian magazine that my dad subscribed to.

The magazine was in Italian and published in the Romeno area. Eric found a website and sent an email. A few days later, my cousin Ricardo responded to him. That was the start of a long relationship and five years ago we got the chance to go to Romeno for a family reunion.

It was a very emotional experience for me. I didn’t expect it to be that way. I met a whole new part of my family there. They are wonderful people. They spoke no English and we didn’t speak Italian so there was a severe language barrier but the feeling was there. We understood each other on a whole other level. We had somebody translate for us most of the time, but we couldn’t really converse like I wanted to. I wanted, so much, to join in and have a good time with them and I couldn’t.

Romeno is a very Catholic town and we went to church in the same church where my grandma had gone to Mass as a young girl. It was very moving to be in the town where my family has been for generations.

In the middle of Romeno there is a fountain where people have gathered for probably hundreds of years. I made a point of drinking from that fountain like my grandmother and grandfather did as children. It was an experience I will never forget.

Klaus Kocher

2011-02-07T16:02:00.000-08:00

Kocher: I’m actually a Swiss citizen with a green card. I was born in Santiago, Chile. My dad is Swiss and my mom was born in the Dominican Republic to Spanish parents. We are from all over the place.

My family came to the United States for the first time in 1961, when I was only a few months old. My dad was studying for his PhD in plant physiology at Rutgers University in New Jersey. I was four when my dad finished his studies and we moved back to Chile. We stayed in Chile while my dad taught at the university. That lasted until I was about seven.

It was 1968 and my father began to feel that Chile was becoming a dangerous place to raise a family. As a little kid, I saw soldiers on the corners and tanks in the streets. I went back to Chile ten years ago and, for the three weeks I was there, I kept expecting something bad to happen. Those childhood memories were still with me.

Dad got a job teaching Plant Physiology at the University of Maine. I remember flying over snow-capped Andes as we left Chile, where it was winter, and arriving in Maine, where it was spring and everything was green. We stayed in Maine for three years and then it was off to San Jose, Costa Rica where my dad worked as an agricultural consultant for the World Bank.

The World Bank was lending money to Costa Rica for agricultural development, so they wanted an expert like my dad to make sure that the right plants were being chosen for the climate and the soil of Costa Rica.

We moved a lot with my dad’s work. My three brothers and I never knew where we were going. Mom always kept that a secret but, when she took us to get shots, we knew we were going for a plane ride and that was the coolest. We loved to travel.

From Costa Rica, we moved to Honduras where my dad was the assistant director at the agricultural school, Escuela Agrícola Panamericana. It was in Honduras that my dad lost his job. Things got pretty tight and my parents finally sent my brother, Fritz, and I to live with my mom’s brother in Miami Beach. I was fourteen and in the eighth grade, so time away from the folks was a great adventure. We were only there for about six months where we attended the Ida M. Fisher Junior High School, probably the toughest school I had ever been to.

The school was ninety-five percent black and five percent Cuban and the two groups didn’t get along. We were caught in the middle because we didn’t belong to either group, but we spoke Spanish. My mom said, “Do not speak Spanish or you will be grouped with the Cubans and you’ll get beat up in the hallways”. I remember in science class some kid got mad and broke a bottle in the back of the room and we all sat there, along with the teacher, and did nothing.

Gallacher: And you enjoyed that?

Kocher: It was an adventure and, yes, I was scared half to death but I survived. I didn’t learn anything but I did acquire some life skills. I followed my mother’s advice and didn’t speak Spanish, but it was the hardest thing. Kids would call me names in Spanish and I had to pretend that I didn’t understand in order to survive.

Six months later, my dad landed a job with CIMMYT, the International Center for the Improvement of Maize and Wheat, in Mexico City. The Center works with governments around the world to increase the productivity of corn and wheat as a way to increase food security and reduce poverty. There are thirteen of these centers around the world.

My dad got the chance to work with Dr. Norman Borlaug, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for his work to improve plant productivity and farming techniques in the developing world.

I went to an American international school in Mexico City from the middle of eighth grade through high school. The kids in the school were like me and my brothers, they’d moved around and been to schools in different countries. Here we weren’t freaks, we fit in.

Whatever country we were in my dad made sure it was an English-speaking school because he wanted us to eventually go to American universities. He always thought they were the best.

Gallacher: You said you didn’t feel like a freak in this school. Were there times in your life when you felt like an outsider?

Kocher: Well, my life experience has made me kind of different. Wherever I have lived I haven’t really belonged. I was born in Chile but I don’t feel like I am from there. In Costa Rica, I spoke Spanish but not “tico” Spanish. In Honduras we spoke Spanish but we were much better off than most people there. And then I come here and I’m a Swiss guy with a green card. So I am a little different, but in a good way, I think.

To me the world is a small community. We’re all the same, just different flavors.

Gallacher: So what do you feel is your country of origin?

Kocher: Switzerland. We all traveled with Chilean passports until I was twelve, that was when *General Pinochet overthrew President Allende in Chile. We were living in Costa Rica at the time of the coup but my dad’s parents were still in Chile. They fled the country and came to live with us in Costa Rica.

After the coup we had all kinds of trouble with our Chilean passports. Mom traveled with her Dominican Republic passport because she was born there. But we kids were stopped and detained when we traveled because we were from Chile. Customs people thought we were either refugees or trying to escape Chile. So we stood in the corner while they let our mom go through. It was a traumatic experience.

I think that’s when my parents realized that it didn’t matter where we were in the world, the Swiss mentality of saving money, everything’s on time, everything has its place, was always present. They realized that we didn’t have to live there to be that.

Gallacher: How did you make your way to the United States?

Kocher: Well, when I graduated from high school I told my parents that I wanted to go to school where there was snow. I wanted to study photography, but my parents let me know that they weren’t going to pay for that. My dad directed me to a food technology degree and, since Dr. Borlaug had studied food technology at Iowa State that’s where I was sent. I got my food technology and my business degree there. The best thing about that experience was meeting my “better half”, LeAnn. We have been together ever

since.

Gallacher: So you wanted to be a photographer from the age of twelve. How did you get from there to a food technology degree and back to photography?

Kocher: I was in this science class in Costa Rica when I was twelve and the textbooks for the class hadn’t come in yet. I think the science teacher realized he had to come up with something to keep us busy and interested. So he taught us how to make a pinhole camera and process film. The first time I saw the print come up in the developer, I was hooked. To this day that is my magic.

Note: Klaus followed his childhood dream and completed his MFA degree in photography at Ohio State in 1994. He lives in Glenwood Springs with his wife, LeAnn, and their two children. He teaches photography at Colorado Mountain College and practices food technology in his kitchen for his friends and family.

*The Armed Forces, carabineros, and others stage a coup, overthrowing Allende, who dies in the course of the coup. Augusto Pinochet establishes himself as the head of a military junta. The subsequent repression of leftists and other opponents of the military regime resulted in approximately 130,000 arrests and at least 3,000 dead or "disappeared" over the next three years.

Bob Zanella and Amelia Corazza Zanella

2011-01-24T12:06:00.000-08:00

Bob: At the turn of the century, both sides of my family came from the mountains of northern Italy, near the Austrian border, to work in the mines. My parents, Amelia and Julio, were strong, resilient people who experienced a lot in their lives. I was always trying to convince my mom to write or record her story. Toward the end of her life, she finally did. What follows is her life story, in her own words. I have made only a few changes to her original script. She starts by telling the story of her parents.

Amelia: My mother, Freda, was a beautiful lady, tall, with dark eyes that penetrated you. She could laugh or cry with you. She had an open heart for anybody. The experiences she had in life made her a perfect woman. Everyone liked her and she was good and kind to everyone.

Mom was born on December 4, 1882 in Cloz, Trentino, Italy, the youngest of seven children, five sisters and two brothers. She was orphaned at the age of twelve. Her uncle, a Catholic priest, became her guardian and she went to live with him. With the help of her uncle’s housekeeper, my mother was groomed to become a maid. She learned to do all phases of housework and went to school until the sixth grade.

When Momma finished the sixth grade, she was placed with a rich family in Trento and was a very good maid. She had plenty of work to do, helping raise three children until she left to come to America.

I don’t know too much about my father Luigi’s family. I do know that he had three brothers Olivio, Joseph and Silvio and four sisters Pia, Barbara, Maria and Irene. My father was the eldest. He was born on February 6, 1880. He came to the United States in 1898 and went directly to the mines in Leadville, Colorado.

Shortly after Dad came, his brother, Olivio, joined him to work in the mines. The elevation was hard on both of them and they decided to move to Lead, South Dakota to work in gold mines there. They didn’t like it there either and eventually moved to Cambria, Wyoming to work in the coal mine, where they were joined by their brother Joseph. They all worked in the mine together. Olivio died of emphysema in the early 1920’s.

When my father decided to get married, instead of looking for someone locally, he wrote his parents in Italy and asked them to send his girlfriend to America. His parents knew the girl very well, but they didn’t approve of her. She had a light deformation on her back and shoulder so they decided to see their priest and get his advice. The priest was my mother’s uncle and guardian. My uncle suggested that my mother go in the girl’s place. Mom was asked if she wanted to go to America and get married. She said yes.

My father’s parents made all the arrangements. They even bought her some clothes. She said goodbye to the family she had worked with for the last eight years. They didn’t want to let her go, but Mom believed that America was a dreamland.

My father was very conservative and didn’t want to lose a day’s work, so he sent his brother, Olivio, to meet my mother at the train. Olivio had a picture of my mother so he recognized her, but my mom thought the man approaching her at the train station was her fiancé. It was only after she embraced and kissed him that she heard him say, “I am not Luigi, I’m his brother”.

Mother arrived in Newcastle, Wyoming on February 23, 1905 and she was married two days later. She never forgot what happened on her wedding day. As they walked down the church’s long stairway after they were married, they stopped to kiss. That’s when my father told her, “You are not the woman I sent for to be my wife”. Mom told me this story on the day before I got married. She said she felt a cold chill run throughout her body and almost cried. I have often wondered how she managed.

My parents were married on a Saturday and Mother found out on Monday that she had six men to cook and clean for, not counting my father. Dad had hired a German woman, Mrs. Bell, to teach my mother how to cook and care for the boarders. My mother never forgot her kindness. The boarders were all coalminers who ate three big meals a day-a heavy breakfast, a large lunch packed for in the mine, and a hearty supper served at six in the evening.

Mom did all the cleaning in the house and the men’s laundry. Even when she was pregnant the work had to be done. (I was born on December 4, 1905, ten months after my parent’s were married), She took care of the men until the day I was born. That’s when Mrs. Bell took over so Mom could rest for a week. Maid work became her way of life and the work was hard and steady. The miners demanded heavy meals. She did all the baking, washing and cleaning in addition to raising babies.

They lived in Wyoming until 1918 when they moved to Denver. By the time they moved, Mom was successfully managing a hotel in Newcastle while my dad worked in the mines. She had developed a freedom within herself and she was proud of all she had accomplished.

In Denver, my parents found a partner and leased a hotel. Mother was in charge of the kitchen and she had over twenty boarders who were working for the railroad. She hired a maid who took care of cleaning the rooms. The hotel had twenty-six rooms, a large restaurant with a dining room to serve the boarders their meals. They ate three meals a day, breakfast, lunch in a bucket and an Italian meal of spaghetti and veal stew with a salad for dinner. Mom would substitute the veal with roast beef, but spaghetti was always served. This was like a second home for these men and my mother knew just how to take care of them.

There was a small bar in the corner, which my father and the partner took care of. Prohibition was in force so all they could serve was soda and a funny beer that didn’t even foam in the glass. They called it “glitz”. The men passed the time playing cards and reading. My mother didn’t allow either of my sisters in the bar, but they did help in the kitchen and waited tables. This was the hotel I came to when I returned to America.

As I mentioned before, I was born on December 4, 1905. My sister Loraine was born fifteen months later. At that time, my father had been injured in the mine and developed an acute backache that kept him from working. The local doctor suggested a change of climate might help him, so my parents decided that we should all go back to Italy/Austria and visit my father’s parents.

My sister was only forty days old when we embarked on an ocean voyage to visit my grandparents in Brez, Trentino, Austria. Ten days after we had arrived in Brez to visit my grandparents, Dad said all of his aches and pains were gone. He was ready to return to work in Wyoming. He only had enough money for himself, so he left Mom and me and my little sister, Lorraine, in Brez. His plan was to earn enough money to send for us in a month or so.

In those days it took almost two weeks to cross the ocean and sometimes even longer. In the meantime, we were to stay with my grandparents and their four daughters and young son. The situation was hell for my mother. She was in a small house with her in-laws whom she didn’t really know. My baby sister was sick because no milk was agreeing with her. I was a little too lively and always running away. My mother was overwhelmed, so she got in touch with her two sisters who were nuns at the Institute in Pisa, Italy. They came to visit her and realized that she wasn’t able to take care of a sick baby and me. And so it was decided that my aunts would take me back to the convent with them to stay until my father sent for us.

Mother and my sister returned to America on May 30, 1907 and I was left in Pisa. I never knew why I was left there, but it must have been a deal made with my aunts. I think they felt I was getting a good education and would be well cared for. A year and four months after my mom returned to Wyoming, she gave birth to my sister Naomi. Nineteen months later, my brother was born but he died when he was only eleven months old. His death was a great loss because sons were the center of a family in those days.

The convent had a Catholic school with girls from four to sixteen years of age. I was only seventeen months old but my aunts were able to get special permission to admit me. The school used the Montessori method and I was very proud that I always passed with high grades. I didn’t have much exchange with my parents, my aunts were all that I came to know. They loved me as if I were their child. I know I had certain privileges over the other girls, because of my aunts, but the other girls didn’t seem to mind. We were one big family. I loved that place and cared deeply for everyone. Grade school was only through the sixth grade and from there I went on to high school.

In June of 1920, I graduated from high school with exceptional grades and transferred to the University to begin studying to be a teacher. ...But, almost from the first day, I knew I was in the wrong place. I was all alone after being with over a hundred children. I struggled for over two months, trying my best to learn as much as possible. In December, I went to visit my aunts and tell them my troubles. They assured me things would improve and told me to do my best. None of their advice lifted me from the bottom where I found myself.

I finally decided I would write my parents in America. I don’t remember the exact date I wrote, but I do remember that on April 9, 1921, I received a telegram and all it said was, “meet me at the train from Torino today. Papa”. I was in shock!

I met the first train but no one got off, so I waited for the second. It arrived on time and many people got off. I could see them but I wasn’t sure I would be able to identify my father. The only picture I had of him was taken in 1905 and now it was 1921. I waited but no one showed.

I started home, walking slowly, with so many things to think about and so much to do. Suddenly, a carriage passed me with a man in the back. I looked at him and, to this day, I cannot describe what I felt. He was looking at me as I was looking at him. All at once I hollered, “Papa”! The carriage stopped and I ran to him and he called out, “Amelia, Amelia, Amelia” over and over. We held each other and cried for a long time. He kept saying, “You called me Papa”.

Two days later, we went to say goodbye to my aunts. They were waiting for us at the train depot. We all cried, even my father. I thought they might be angry that I had written my parents for help but they said it was the best thing I could have done.

We left Cherbourg, France on April 21, aboard the Aquitania. I had never seen such an enormous boat. When we arrived in New York, Dad took me to lunch and bought me a new outfit, skirt, sweater, hat, purse and shoes. I felt like a queen! For the first time I was wearing something that wasn’t a uniform.

We arrived in Denver on May 1, late in the evening. We were walking through the underpass of the train station when Dad said to me, “Do you see that lady in the blue dress with the two girls? That’s your mother”! She was running towards us and my legs were shaking as she took me in her arms and held me very tight. “Momma, Momma”, I said. We were all crying. It was a moment I will never forget. I hugged my sisters for the first time.

We walked from the station to my parents’ hotel, my new home, and Mother held me close to her the whole way. In the large dining room of our hotel, a scrumptious dinner had been prepared and many of my parents’ friends were waiting to greet us. I was home at last!

***************************

Bob: My mom (Amelia) married my dad (Julio) on August 6, 1932, in the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Denver. They were living in Superior, Wyoming where my dad was a coalminer and my mom worked in the bank. My sister was born a year later and I was born in August of 1937.

That was really a tough year for my parents because that was the year my dad was injured in the mine. He had a pretty bad head injury. Mom said that he was in horrible shape when his friends brought him home. The doctor said he couldn’t find anything wrong, even though my dad’s head and neck were swollen and bruised. He didn’t work for a few days because of the pain but, eventually, he had to go back even though he was hurting. My mom was pregnant with me and they had bills to pay.

I was born on August 8. At that same time, my sister came down with a high fever and earache. The doctor thought she had spinal meningitis and had her quarantined. My mom was in the maternity wing with me, and no one told her about my sister until she came home with me ten days later. She went back to the hospital to talk to the doctor, but he had gone fishing. Against hospital rules, she went into Freda’s room, wrapped her in a blanket and brought her home.

Mom realized that my sister was in real trouble, so she got on the train with her and me and rode to Denver. Her sister, Lorraine, met her at the train and took us to Children’s Hospital where they operated on my sister. They did a mastoidectomy*. The surgeon discovered that parts of her tonsils hadn’t been removed in an operation six months before in Rock Springs, and everything had gotten infected. Mom had to come back home with me and leave Freda in the care of her sister Lorraine. She went back for her two and a half weeks later.

At this same time my dad wasn’t improving. He was losing weight and suffering from neck and head pain. When the pain started down his spine, my mom loaded us all on the train and we went to Denver. They admitted Dad to Presbyterian Hospital where he had a laminectomy**, one of the first of its kind. After the operation all the pain was gone but so was the feeling on the right side of his head, neck and shoulder. He learned to live with the numbness and never regretted the operation.

My parents were faced with all kinds of bills and no real opportunities. My dad was still going to the mine but he was only able to do light work. It was my mom who found a way out. One day she saw that the Jackson Café, in town, was for sale. She talked to her family and they were willing to help. And that’s how we got into the hotel and restaurant business.

My dad was skeptical at first. He was still insisting on going to the mines, but he quickly saw that the café was a success. My mom was working from five in the morning ‘til ten at night. And then one night, my dad came home from work and said, “Well, old lady, no more mine for me, I want to work here with you if you want me”. Mom’s answer was, “Thank God”.

We had the café until February 15, 1944, that’s when my mom saw an ad for the Rex Hotel (in Glenwood Springs) in our local paper. Mom called the number in the ad and the next day Dad and my sister, Freda, drove through a snowstorm to Glenwood. Dad called the next morning and told Mom he had just bought a hotel.

The folks were able to sell the Jackson Café two weeks later and on March 1, my sister and I started elementary school in Glenwood Springs.

*A mastoidectomy is performed to remove infected mastoid air cells resulting from ear infections, such as mastoiditis or chronic otitis, or by inflammatory disease of the middle ear (cholesteatoma). The mastoid air cells are open spaces containing air that are located throughout the mastoid bone, the prominent bone located behind the ear that projects from the temporal bone of the skull.

** Laminectomy is a surgical procedure used to open up space in the spinal canal and help alleviate the symptoms associated with an impinged or irritated nerve root or spinal cord. Each vertebra contains two laminae, which are bony segments that help form the arch across the back of the vertebra.

Felicia Trevor

2011-01-10T07:50:00.000-08:00

Trevor: My parents are both immigrants. My father came from Poland and my mother came from Chile. My father immigrated after World War II. During the war, he was in the Polish Resistance fighting against the Nazi occupation. The Nazis eventually came and took his whole family because of his work in the Resistance.

Gallacher: What did your father do in the Resistance?

Trevor: Actually his whole family was involved in trying to resist the Nazis, but it was one particular incident that made him and his family a target for the Nazis. In March of 1943, the Gestapo arrested Janek, my father’s friend and a member of the Resistance. When word came of his arrest, my father asked for permission from leaders of the Grey Ranks (Polish Resistance) to try and liberate him. One night, my father and five others ambushed the prison bus that was transporting Janek from Gestapo headquarters in Warsaw to Pawiak Prison.

Five SS guards were killed and three wounded. My father and his friends were able to free Janek and twenty-five other prisoners, but Janek died shortly after from the beating he’d received during his interrogation. One of my father’s friends was killed in the attack and another was wounded. The guy who was wounded ran to a nearby café for refuge. The café owner called the Nazis and they came and arrested him. During his interrogation, he gave them the names of everyone involved.

My father went into hiding but the Nazis came looking for him and took the whole family, his three sisters and his mother and father. One of his sisters, my aunt Lilka, wrote a book about that experience called The Labyrinth of Dangerous Hours. Here’s how she describes the day they were arrested.

“We were transported, at dawn, from Gestapo headquarters to Pawiak prison in a crowded truck…As we entered the prison, women were separated from the men. We were led to a dim office room lit by a desk lamp. A man in a uniform sat behind the desk. He took our names, birth dates, addresses and confiscated our purses. Then we were taken to a quarantine cell. It was in this room that we encountered other prisoners who arrived before us. It was a motley group of women, of different ages. Their faces and their attire showed the almost four years of German occupation: tired, sunken cheeks, clothes from before the war times, carefully preserved; women tired of daily line-ups for the basics; bread, potatoes, milk.”

Two weeks later, my father was arrested and they all ended up in the same camp for a while.

Gallacher: What was the camp?

Trevor: Auschwitz. They were in one of the most notorious death camps but, because they were Catholic and not Jewish, they were assigned to a work detail in a different part of the camp.

Gallacher: How long were they imprisoned?

Trevor: Two years. They were liberated at the end of the war. My father never really talked about it much so it was only recently, when my aunt published her book, that I really learned about the ordeal. My grandmother died of typhus a few months after they arrived in the camp, so my aunts, who were in their teens, were left to fend for themselves. They knew that my dad was in the camp because they saw him one day, but they weren’t allowed to talk to him.

My youngest aunt, Zosia, was moved to another camp after a year and they didn’t see her again until near the end of the war. In January of that last year, as the Soviets advanced on the camp, my Aunt Lilka and my Aunt Marina were forced to walk from Auschwitz to Breslau:

“In the darkness of the January dawn we were awakened by the loud ‘Raus, Raus’ of the guards as they shoved the prisoners out into the cold, wintry air. Marian and I were terrified, as we couldn’t put our stiff and wet shoes on our blistered and swollen feet…I searched for a prayer and repeated Hail Marys, but these so-familiar words also slipped away. I whispered to Marina: ‘Leave me here, I can’t go on, I’ll stay behind, they’ll let me be.

Again she was firm and helped me gently up as the column started moving slowly. ‘Do you hear those shots? They’re shooting the weak ones that can’t go on-they will shoot us, too’ We moved slowly on, every step an unbelievable effort.”

They made it to Breslau where they stayed for a few weeks and then they were moved to Ravensbruck, a women’s camp. That’s where they were reunited with Zosia:

“As we milled around, we heard our names being shouted by someone on the other side of the road. The voice came from a tall girl whose face looked familiar. Zosia. Our first impulse was to run to her, and we burst out onto the road, but a fearsome German Kapo was on our backs with her wooden club. So we moved back, into the contaminated ranks of the Auschwitz prisoners, and started our discourse above the voices of the others…We were amazed at Zosia’s height. When she left us she was still a little girl of fourteen. During the year in prison she grew to be the tallest one in the whole family.”

My aunts were able to stay together and, after a few weeks, they were moved to another camp, Bergen-Belsen. That’s where they were finally freed. They were taken to Italy and eventually reunited with my dad and my grandfather. The family stayed in Italy for a while and then they immigrated to England.

That’s where my father finished his degree in engineering, learned English and started making plans to move to the United States. But Senator Joe McCarthy was holding hearings then and claiming that communists were infiltrating the United States. My father knew that he wouldn’t have a chance of getting into the U.S. with a name like Trzcinska, so he changed his name to Trevor and was eventually granted permission to enter.

Gallacher: How did your parents meet.

Trevor: They met at a dance club in the Aragon Ballroom in Chicago. My father asked my mother to dance. They were both alone in the city and started dating after that.

My mother was born in Santiago, Chile. She was the youngest of four children and eight years younger than her closest sibling. My grandfather was a judge and he enrolled her in a private, bilingual school for diplomats’ children. So she started from kindergarten learning English. She graduated from high school and started a career as a bilingual secretary. Her father died when she was sixteen, so she continued to live with her mother long after high school. I don’t think my grandmother wanted her to get married, none of the suitors were ever suitable.

So by the age of twenty-six she still wasn’t married and my uncle decided he needed to do something. He was involved with Lions Club International and he was able to get her a job as a bilingual secretary in Miami. From there, she was transferred to Chicago.

Gallacher: What was it like growing up with a Pole and a Chilean as parents.

Trevor: My mother’s culture was dominant. She taught me Spanish and when I was little we went to Chile for three months and I forgot my English. When we returned, there was so much pressure to speak English that I refused to speak Spanish and I lost it for a while.

It wasn’t until I was in seventh grade that I started really appreciating being bilingual again. I learned Spanish again pretty quickly.

Gallacher: What about your father’s culture?

Trevor: I never learned much about his culture and I still don’t know that much about his side of the family. He didn’t have much interaction with them after he moved to the United States. My Aunt Lilka and Aunt Zosia moved to Canada and started families. My grandfather moved there with them. My Aunt Marina stayed in England.

I think my father suffered from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) before it had a name.

Danny Brisland Gallacher

2010-12-27T11:57:00.000-08:00

Intro: Over the last three years, I have had the privilege of interviewing over a hundred immigrants, but there is one immigrant I could have interviewed and didn’t, my dad. He was born in Greenock, Scotland on December 31, 1923 and came to the United States in his mother’s arms at the age of two. His father, my grandfather, worked long hours in the shipyards of Brooklyn and the family struggled to get ahead.

By the time he was sixteen, he had five sisters and two brothers. His oldest brother was in seminary, Uncle Joe, his dad’s brother, had just moved out and money was tight. My grandparents needed an extra income and education was a luxury they couldn’t afford. Dad was forced to quit school and go to work in the shipyards.

He worked sixty hour weeks for the next three years and was credited with helping the family get ahead and move to Long Island. Just before his nineteenth birthday, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Shortly after that he joined the Navy.

He was trained as a Pharmacist Mate (navy nurse) and transferred to the Naval Hospital in Glenwood Springs, better known as the Hotel Colorado. He often told me that when he road into Glenwood on the train that first time he sensed that his life had changed forever and it had.

He had discovered Brigadoon and met my mother, Mary Frost. The Brooklyn “street kid” never looked back. After the War, he only returned home once and that was for Grandma’s funeral. He settled in Glenwood and had four sons and did whatever he could to get ahead.

About fifteen years ago, with some encouragement, Danny wrote down some of his childhood memories. I’m sitting with those notes this morning and lots of follow up questions I wish I had asked him.

Danny: We moved a lot when I was little. Our family was growing and it seemed like each move required a transfer to another school. Transferring schools gave me a gypsy complex and a streetwise attitude. Our roots in Scotland, my brother’s and my birthplace, set us apart from other children our age. The “old country” influence of our parent’s had us looking like little foreigners. Most of our clothes were handmade or influenced by our native country: hand knit socks, sweaters, underwear, mufflers, hats and home repaired shoes.

Next door to us lived the Boyles, an Irish family that made their living primarily from boxing, the fight game. Adhesive tape and bandages were part of their household supplies. The father trained his sons, Jack and Jimmy, to fight. They were the favorites of Our Lady of Perpetual Help parish and apparently made a living boxing and working in the shipyards as stevedores.

The Boyles had a daughter, Theresa, who was my age. She was my first female friend. She had been scalded by a pan of hot water that she pulled from the stove when she was a little girl. The accident left her mostly bald and scarred. I have often thought about her and wondered what kind of life she had.

Another memory was of my Granda Daniel Brisland who had to make an emergency trip to Woods Memorial Hospital for a blockage of his intestine. At that time, even an appendectomy was a life threatening procedure. I remember it was Thanksgiving, but we were still “eating Scotland”. Instead of turkey, the main course was a leg of lamb, mashed potatoes, gravy and peas. Salads had not reached immigrant tables, except for the Italians.

Granda survived the operation, but his life as a sailor was ended and, from then on, he was relegated to night watchman. He was never really happy away from the sea, having spent his life as a sailor of ships and yachts. His “brood” of girls Mary, Elizabeth, Helen and Anna were the lights of his life. Granda and Grandma had one son, Dennis, who died when he was eight. He was the youngest and a favorite of his sisters. Dennis was often set as an example of what my brother and I should strive for. A fuzzy picture of him as a slight built eight-year-old in a Buster Brown outfit always hung in our house.

When I was little I saw my Grandma Annie as a cranky, old woman and I tried to stay out of her way. But as I got older and had a family of my own, I saw her as the wife of sailor who was always at sea. She was frequently pregnant and left alone to raise five children. Grandma was a woman with a husband who never had to cope with all the problems of raising a young family. When he arrived home, he was greeted like a visiting potentate.

Grandma had a rough life married to a saint who only visited sporadically. I felt the weight of her wrath and her hand on more than one occasion. We lived together for a time after my sister Peggy was born. Mom and Dad were trying to find an apartment that would accommodate our growing family. The babies kept coming and I had not clue as to where they came from. It was a subject that never came up.

I knew more about piano moving than babies aborning. Italians moved pianos, rigging a jack off the flat roof of the apartment building. The jack was counterweighted and extended over the edge or cornice. The windows were completely removed and rope was attached to the padded piano and lifted, by pulley, two stories up and slipped into the second story window. From then on, we always had a piano, but no one could ever play it. We weren’t allowed to even touch it. Eight of us kids raised with this ever-present, expensive-to-move beast and not one of us ever took lessons or ever got to pound on the damn thing. Is it possible to hate a piece of furniture? Well, I hated this one.

It was an entertainment center, when anyone showed up who could play, and we would have songfests around it. The piano arrived before the radio. We got a radio at our next apartment.

This apartment was a coldwater flat. When we moved in the only heat source was a coal-burning kitchen stove with a round gas-coiled water heater. The water heater was only lit once a week, on Saturday, bathing day. When they converted the building to central heat, they raised the rent and my sister Betty was born, so we moved. I’m not sure whether it was baby Betty or the rising rent that caused us to move, probably a combination.

This is the place I became a street kid. I learned to roller skate, build wagons out of old baby carriages and hitch on the back of trolley cars. I didn’t become a “side door man” until I had perfected hanging on the back of the trolley. “Hanging” was relatively easy because there were lots of handholds, windowsills, rope pulley holders and a slotted wooden cowcatcher at the base of the trolley that we would stand on.

Riding the side door required you to point your feet forward and stand on only two inches of threshold while you forced your hand through the door of the trolley car and grabbed the center handrail on the stairs. This could get thrilling because when the conductor saw you in his side mirrors he would speed up to scare you. But we kids knew he had to stop for passengers and that was a gradual slow glide to a stop. But sometimes, there were no passengers to pick up for a few blocks and that’s when some conductors would speed up and really try to scare the @*** out of us.

Hoppin’ trolleys was reserved for the summer. Hanging on a trolley in the winter could freeze your hands, feet and eyes and then there was the danger of slipping under the wheels. It took a little more effort but winter was for sneaking into the subway. It was a lot less thrilling but more comfortable.

My older brother John lacked my sense of adventure and the bad habits of a true street kid. But me, I loved to climb onto roofs of abandoned buildings. We didn’t just prowl around these buildings, we found a way in and played in them. We made campfires and roasted potatoes, “mickies”. Often the basements were full of water from leaking pipes and we would stock these “ponds” with gold fish and crabs we caught on Shore Road’s seawall. We never ate the crabs because sewer systems of the whole Bay Ridge area emptied into the East River and the pollution was rampant.

*********

My father had four brothers and two sisters. Peter, the oldest boy, and Hanna, the oldest girl, emigrated from Scotland to New Zealand. Anthony and Joe stayed with us for about a year. Uncle “Tony” eventually went back to Greenock, Scotland but Uncle Joe stayed with us until I was sixteen years old. Margaret, the youngest, stayed in Scotland and lived with her parents. She was disabled at birth.

Uncle Joe always smelled of bourbon, pool chalk, pomade, Aqua Velva, coffee and cigarettes. He was a fastidious dresser. He who wore Cuban-heeled shoes that gave him the look of a Spanish dancer and made him appear two inches taller than his actual five foot four. He brewed a pot of coffee at our house every morning for as long as I can remember. For most of those mornings, he put a shot of bourbon in the first cup.

Uncle Joe got the back bedroom, very private and away from us kids. Joe and the piano seemed to be our only fixed assets. He always paid rent and that extra money got us by on more than one occasion. He would often hire me to take his dirty clothes to the laundry down the street and pick them up for him. Both trips got me a dime tip and, on more than one occasion, the tip bought a pound of butcher meat for dinner or assorted vegetables for stew. Uncle Joe was quite the pool hustler. He owned a two-piece, ivory pool cue inlaid with mother-of-pearl that was worth a lot of money.

He played with the “big boys” and had a bad habit of flashing his roll of money. Roll flashing and drinking, two bad habits, eventually led to his mugging. Early one morning on 59^th street, he was attacked by two men outside a diner. He refused to hand over his money and took a terrible beating that left him with broken teeth and a broken jaw. He was never really the same after that. He began to drink more and Dad finally had to ask him to leave. He “lost his way” for a few years but eventually found AA and lived the rest of his life sober. Towards the end of his life, when he got sick, it was my dad who took him in and took care of him ‘til the end.

**********

Note: Here’s my Irish/Scot blessing for you and yours: May the joy of the New Year rise up to greet you. May your house be filled with friends and family and your heart be open to the gifts of the past and the promise of the future and may you find the time to listen deeply to the poetry of your life.

Antonio Ramos

2010-12-20T08:12:00.000-08:00

Ramos: I came from Mexico when I was two. My parents came looking for a better education for my older brother and me. That was fifteen years ago.

Gallacher: Do you have any memories of Mexico?

Ramos: I have no memories whatsoever. My earliest are here in the valley. We didn’t have a place to live so we stayed in the parks. That lasted almost a year, until this kind woman took us in. We stayed with her for a few months. She let us sleep on her living room floor. That really helped us start to get ahead. God has just blessed us since then and we have been able to keep moving up from there. But that first year felt like forever.

Gallacher: I bet. Did you sleep in the parks?

Ramos: No we slept in our car. My dad used the car to go to work during the day and at night it became our house. My brother and I would share the back seat and my parents would recline the two front seats and that’s how we would sleep.

Gallacher: How did you cook?

Ramos: We didn’t. All we ate was cereal and sandwiches, but the sandwich meat was just hot dogs cut up. Sometimes we had enough money to buy turkey and ham lunchmeat and that was awesome. It was like a delicacy for us.

Gallacher: What was the hardest part of that whole experience for you?

Ramos: You know for me, a two-year-old, I didn’t really notice. I thought the park was the best place to live. I could play all day and do whatever, but I know it was tough on my parents. They love my brother and I alot and I can’t imagine how hard it was for them to have to live on the streets with us.

Gallacher: What do they say about that experience?

Ramos: They say it was really tough to know that we weren’t being provided for to the fullest. They felt bad that we weren’t eating the kinds of foods that we needed on a daily basis.

Gallacher: What was life like in Mexico for your parents? What was it that made them leave?

Ramos: My parents actually had a pretty good life in Mexico. They studied at a vocational school, after high school. Then they got into their careers. They both worked in a bank. That’s where they met. Both of them are really good in accounting.

But they decided to come here because they knew my brother and I would have a better life. They were looking for something better for their kids. They gave up what was a pretty comfortable life for themselves to give us a better chance.

Gallacher: Why, if they had this good life, did they feel that they weren’t going to have the opportunities for you?

Ramos: It’s really tough to get an education in Mexico, because you have to pay for school starting at a very young age. It’s not like public schools here in America. Having to pay for education becomes a burden for a lot of families in other countries. I think they felt that coming to America would give us a better education.

Gallacher: What did your parents do here?

Ramos: My dad worked construction and my mom cleaned houses

Gallacher: What has been the most difficult part of adapting to the new culture for your parents?

Ramos: The language, for sure. I remember, when I was only seven or eight years old, I would have to go with my parents to the hospital or to get license plates for the car and I would be the translator. I didn’t even know what I was saying most of the time, but somehow I was able to find the words and translate for them.

Gallacher: What did that experience do for you?

Ramos: I think it really helped me with my maturity level. I got to see how something, like a language, can seem so simple but can become a real barrier if you are from somewhere else. I just learned a lot from what I had to talk about for my parents.

Gallacher: Were there ever times when the adults would just look at you like you weren’t making sense?

Ramos: There were some pretty awkward moments, because I was still a little kid. But I kept trying. I’d find simpler words and come at it in a different way and eventually get to the point.

Gallacher: So when you entered school could you speak English?

Ramos: Yes, I remember my brother coming home from first grade with new phrases he had learned and he would teach me. He taught me simple things like “How are you” and told me what they meant in Spanish. It was my brother who really helped me get started learning English.

Gallacher: So your brother was the scout, he would go out and gather the information and bring it home?

Ramos: Yeah, he was a really quick learner. He only had ELL (English Language Learners) classes for the first couple of years.

Gallacher: Do you ever go back to Mexico?

Ramos: I have never been back to Mexico. That’s one of the things we had to give up when we came here. I listen to my friends talking about going to visit family and I just stay quiet because that’s not possible for me. Most of my family is in Mexico. I have like thirty aunts and uncles that I have never met. It saddens me that I have so much family but in a way I don’t. It would be awesome to meet all my cousins and be able to go hangout at my grandma’s house whenever my parents aren’t home.

I have met one of my grandmothers only once and my other grandma comes to visit once every two or three years. I think that’s why my brother and my parents and I are so close. We aren’t surrounded by anybody, we’re isolated from everybody else.

Gallacher: Do your parents ever feel like they made a mistake coming here?

Ramos: They have always told me that they’ve never regretted their decision because they have seen my brother and I succeed in high school. We’ve been good students and we’ve learned a lot. They are really happy that we are both fluent in English and Spanish.

Gallacher: How are you doing in school?

Ramos: I currently have a 3.5 GPA. I’m a senior and enrolled in nine classes this semester. I’m eligible for Honor Society, involved in student council and I play varsity sports. I’ve also been accepted at three universities.

Gallacher: What do you want to do after college?

Ramos: I want to become a history teacher and come back to the valley and teach. I like helping my peers in school. Teaching seems to come natural for me. I like being able to help others learn. I like history because it allows us to look at the past and learn from the people who came before us. My history teacher gave me a quote that I think says it best,

“those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”.

Gallacher: Which of your teachers will you model yourself after?

Ramos: Most all of my teachers have given me something that I will use in my classroom. My teachers have really influenced me because I see how they are always working for the best in a student. I know they are getting paid, but so many of them show care that goes past that. Many of them have helped me personally and reached out to me as a person. I want to do that for other kids.

Gallacher: What’s it like to grow up in a country that still hasn’t really embraced you? Ramos: I have lived here since I was two, so I have embraced this country. Sometimes it feels like the country hasn’t embraced me, and the government may see me as just another statistic. But I look around and all my friends, everybody that I know, has embraced me. They see me just like any other American. So I feel that the local community has embraced me. It’s just the government that hasn’t yet.

Emmanuel

2010-12-13T07:08:00.000-08:00

Intro: Emmanuel (not his real name) was recently granted permanent resident status, but his parents are still waiting. He graduated from high school with honors and earned a scholarship to a private college, where he has excelled. The New York Times estimates that there are 800,000 young Latinos, like Emmanuel, in this country who would like to step out of the shadows and serve the only country they have ever really known.

Emmanuel: I came to the United States, about ten years ago, from Mexico, when I was eleven. We moved to the United States for a better life and more opportunities for my parents to find jobs, and for my sisters and I to have a better education. I was raised in a small town near Mexico City. My dad had a small bakery and my mom stayed at home with us.

We flew to San Francisco with my uncle and my aunt who lived there. They loaned us a car and we then drove all the way from San Francisco to western Colorado. We left really early in the morning and I went to sleep in the car. When I woke up and looked out the window, everything was just white. I was so excited. I had never seen snow before. My dad pulled over and we all got out and played in the snow.

Gallacher: Did you know you were going to stay?

Emmanuel: I was really too young to understand what was going on. I was just excited to be in a new country. I didn’t have any idea that we would stay here for ten years.

We came here with two suitcases for all five of us and, within months, we had a house, furniture, everything. We came during the time when tourism and construction was booming, so my dad and mom were able to find jobs right away. My dad did construction and my mom worked in a hotel.

Gallacher: What was your first experience at school like?

Emmanuel: It was really nerve wracking. I was really scared because I didn’t know the language at all. I remember the first day I went into the middle school. We went into the office and, with the help of a teacher who spoke Spanish, my parents told the principal that I wanted to be in school. So the principal sent my parents to get me vaccinated and I came back that same day and started.

It was April so sixth grade was almost over. That summer my uncle had a friend who taught me English so, by the time I came back in the fall, I was able to read the textbooks and understand a little bit. I stayed after school every night for about two hours and my ESL teacher would sit with me and help me figure out my homework. He taught me a lot. I don’t know what I would have done without him, because my parents couldn’t help me and there were some nights when I just sat and stared at a book that I couldn’t understand at all.

Gallacher: There must have been days when you felt strange.

Emmanuel: Yeah there were days when I couldn’t wait to get home to a space where I felt comfortable, with my family. I remember one day, when I was in seventh grade, there was an after-school event and parents were invited. My parents were working so they couldn’t come. The event was over at 6:30 and I waited outside for them until 8 o’clock.

I didn’t know English and didn’t know what to do. We didn’t have cell phones then. I was thinking that my parents had gotten lost somewhere and couldn’t find the school.

Gallacher: Those first years must have been a difficult time for your whole family. Emmanuel: I think it was hardest for my mom. My dad had visited before but it was the first time for her. She left everything behind-relatives, a whole life out the window.

My parents were always working. They wouldn’t get home until 6:30 or 7. We would see them for a couple of hours a day. They had to work weekends. We hung out with my dad on Saturdays, but my mom worked Saturdays and Sundays. We always went to church as a family in Mexico but that tradition was replaced by work. Our custom of “family Sundays” wasn’t there anymore.

Gallacher: How did your family hold it together? You’re talking about the dissolution of traditions, which can be a dangerous thing.

Emmanuel: I think we all understood that we were adapting to a new life and that everything was going to be completely different now. We understood that my parents were here to work and we were here to study. It was a really straight up life: we go to school, parents work.

I was the oldest so I realized that I had to pave the trail for my sisters. I knew that whatever I was going to do with my life my sisters were going to follow. I thought that if I dropped out they would drop out. I felt that there were a lot of responsibilities on me, but I think knowing that helped me push on through the hard times and do it for my sisters, as well as my parents.

Gallacher: Do you remember a particularly hard time.

Emmanuel: I remember, during that first year, getting angry with my mom and telling her she was working too much. I was young and I was thinking that she wasn’t taking care of her family. She let me vent and didn’t say much back. She just kept telling me that she had to work hard. It wasn’t until I was a junior in high school that I really understood why she had to work so hard for us.

Gallacher: What was your role in helping the family adapt to this new life?

Emmanuel: It was mainly as translator. I remember going to the pharmacy and asking for the family’s prescriptions. If my parents had a question about a bill, I would call the company and get the information. I was doing this when I was twelve years old, so it really helped me learn a lot because I was doing things that adults do.

I really tried to keep my parents involved in what I was doing in school and teach them about the culture here. I tried to help them understand what was going on. In high school, I was always involved in sports and community things, so I was able to take the things that I learned back to my house and teach my parents.

We came from a completely different culture. The way of life as immigrants in the U.S. is completely different than life in Mexico. Immigrants come here knowing that they have to work a lot. They don’t look back and they don’t look around. They miss out on a lot of things that are going on in the outside world because they are so focused on working.

Gallacher: You have been an exceptional student throughout high school and college. What was your motivation?

Emmanuel: It was definitely my family. My family was there for me and helped me get through the rough times. Even in college, taking hard tests, I would be studying for days and days and days, and I would be thinking, “I have to do this for my family and no one else”. They depend on what I do, from now on. I can’t just give up and go out and find a job that doesn’t pay well, because I need to find a way to help my parents.

My parents came here to give us a better life and I feel the need to repay them somehow, repay them for their sacrifice-leaving a whole life behind. I need to give back to them as they grow older and are less able to work. I need to do something with my life because my sisters are looking up to me. Every step I take is for my family.

Andrea Suarez

2010-12-06T10:04:00.000-08:00

Suarez: I came to the United States, fourteen years ago, from Mexico. I was on a quest for adventure. I really wanted to meet new people and see new places. I was planning on skiing with friends for a few months and then moving on to Japan to make a living. My parents were in the process of leaving Mexico City and moving to Japan and I was going to join them there, but I never made it.

I came with a couple of friends and, after two months, they left and I stayed, all alone. I had decided to stay for six months and work on my English and my independence.

A week after I got here, I found a job as a nanny. I was doing that for forty hours a week and also working at McDonalds for forty hours a week. I was exhausted, but it felt good. I had never done anything like that so I was pretty proud of myself. I was thriving on that high-speed energy and pace. I couldn’t do that now, but I was young then.

Gallacher: You said that you were lonely. Did you have a hard time adjusting to the United States?

Suarez: It was hard for me because life in Mexico City was so different than here. I missed my friends and the pace of the city. There was always something to do: concerts, movies, going to a museum with friends. It never stopped. But here I felt very isolated. I met many people who spoke Spanish, but I couldn’t relate to them very much. So, I surrounded myself with people who spoke English. Most of my friends were English speakers.

Gallacher: Was that because you were from the city?

Suarez: I think that had a lot to do with it. We didn’t have a lot in common. I admired them for many reasons. They had come here to make a living, to send money to their families. I was here just for the thrill. In a way, I was just a kid playing grown up. They had a much greater responsibility and real need for a job.

Everything came easy for me. I came knowing the language. I listened to a lot of American music growing up and went to a lot of art films.

Gallacher: I have heard that life in Mexico City is very different than the rest of Mexico.

Suarez: Yes. It is such a cosmopolitan place. You have access to everything: films, music, art in all its forms. It’s a culturally rich place. It was always life in the fast lane and I really enjoyed that pace. But then, I moved here and learned about a side of me I didn’t know. Gradually, I learned how to go for a walk and enjoy the outdoors. That wasn’t possible in Mexico City. It was all smog and traffic and crowds of people.

Gallacher: How long did it take for you to develop that appreciation for the outdoors?

Suarez: It took about a year. I went back to Mexico after being here a full year. I was going to reconnect with friends and make a decision about what I really wanted to do with my life. I remember when I landed in Mexico City I was shaking. It was such a cultural shock for me. I remember thinking, “I still have money in my pocket. I’m not getting off this plane.” It was then that I realized how much I had changed. I could never live in Mexico City again.

My friends all thought I was crazy. “Just give it a month and you will be your old self again,” they said. But I just couldn’t fit in anymore. I got so used to living in the mountains and I wanted to come back so bad.

Gallacher: You said you were on your way to Japan when you came here. What was that connection?

Suarez: My dad is Japanese and a naturalized Mexican. He and my mom wanted to get out of Mexico City and away from all of the noise and congestion. My sister was still very young and they were looking for a safer place to raise her. My dad’s family had invited us back to Japan. I was supposed to join them there. They moved to Japan a month after I came here. That was fourteen years ago.

Gallacher: How did your dad end up in Mexico?

Suarez: My grandfather was the second of six children. His family had a major debt and, traditionally, it is up to the eldest son to take responsibility for paying it off. My grandfather’s brother had traveled to Peru to work and send money back. But shortly after he arrived, he got very sick and was unable to work. That meant that my grandfather had to take his place.

He had just gotten married and was expecting his first child, but he had to leave his family and move to Peru and work on a ranch for about ten years. He didn’t get to know his daughter. So, after ten years, working so hard for somebody else, he didn’t have anything for his own family. That’s when he decided to come to the United States to work and save some money and return to his family in Japan.

He worked at various jobs in the United States for about a year and was working his way back through Mexico when he stopped at a ranch in Chiapas. He stayed there and worked for a family and finally saved enough money to buy a ranch of his own. That’s when he went back to Japan to get his wife, meet his daughter and bring them back to Mexico with him.

Gallacher: So he was a Japanese cowboy.

Suarez: Yes, people say he was a “horse whisperer”. He had a real special touch with horses.

Gallacher: How did the family acquire this debt that he had to pay off?

Suarez: It was just after the First World War and the Japanese government was very unstable and so was the economy. Thousands of Japanese people were leaving the country and looking for work. They established huge colonies in Mexico, Peru, Brazil and other Latin American countries that are still there. They are very closed communities. My dad attended a Japanese school all the way through high school.

My grandparents eventually sold the ranch and moved to Mexico City where my dad was raised. My grandfather went into the grocery business and eventually owned a chain of convenience stores.

My dad decided to do something different. He opened his own office supply store where he also sold gifts and novelties. That’s where my dad met my mom. She came to work for him. They got married and worked very hard to build up the business. At one point, they had six stores.

My dad was leaving home at seven in the morning and returning at nine o’clock at night. It was exhausting work that started to be too much for my family. Chain stores were moving in and our stores were being broken into. My parents had had enough. They sold off the stores and began to make plans to leave for Japan.

Gallacher: So it was back to Japan, where your grandfather had started. Did you ever get to visit his ranch?

Suarez: Actually, I went there with my parents, when I was about four years old. I remember it was full of butterflies. It was a magical moment. I don’t know why, but there were tons and tons of butterflies. They were everywhere. I remember my mom saying to me, “That’s your grandfather. He has come to visit you”. I thought that was the most magical thing ever.

Note: Andrea lives in Carbondale with her husband and her two young sons.

Nancy Crenshaw and Vinko Tavcar

2010-11-21T07:27:00.000-08:00

Listen to Nancy's story

Intro: Vinko Tavcar died last week at the age of eighty-eight. Here his daughter, Nancy, recounts her parents narrow escape from Yugoslavi-Croatia at the end of World War II.

Crenshaw: My parents, Vinko and Ana, escaped from Yugoslavia-Croatia together at the end of World War II as the country collapsed. My father was a soldier with the *Ustase and stationed in Rijeka near the Italian-Croatian border, so they started from there.

Dad had been ordered to join his unit which was retreating to a town in Austria called Bleiburg. He was in Zagreb (100 miles to the north) at the time and got permission to come home and make sure Mom and the baby were safe before he rejoined his unit. He decided, on his way home, to make a run for it. If Dad had followed orders, he would have been killed in what turned out to be a death march. Mom was waiting with the city in flames, the train station had been blown up. She said it was like hell-black smoke, flames, people running and dying in front of her.

She grabbed the baby and a bag she kept packed all the time and ran, first to an aunt who refused to take her in, and finally a cousin whom she convinced to let her spend just one night, only one night, because if they had been caught there, everyone would have been killed. The next morning there was a knock at the door. It was Dad “Ana,” he said, “get your coat, we have to go now!” The baby would not have made the journey, but the baby was safe with the cousin. She would just claim it as her own.

They made their way through Italy, walking and hiding. They walked for days and days and covered almost seven hundred miles on foot. They had to be very careful because they didn’t know if the people on the roads were their friends or their enemies. Sometimes they hitched rides with people who would have murdered them on the spot if they had discovered that my father had been a soldier with the Ustase.

They had many close calls along the way, but the closest they came to being captured was one night in Italy. They had just crossed from the north and were making their way to the refugee camp that was being set up in Fermo, Italy to the south. They found refuge with an aunt they had never met in a little town in the north. Dad left Mom with her while he went to check on the train schedules. He never came back that evening.

Hours went by while they waited and worried. Finally, there was a knock and the aunt unlocked the door, which was something she had been cautioned never, ever to do. Two men, dressed in suits obviously secret police, forced their way into the room. Mother made it to the window and down the fire escape and ran across the street to a pharmacy where she called for help. There were British Military Police stationed throughout Italy at that time and they came to her aid.

The two men were rummaging through my parents’ things and preparing to take my cousin into custody, when my mother and the MPs showed up at the room. Somehow, the two men were able to escape.

Meanwhile, Dad was making his way to the train station when, suddenly, a man on the street, someone he had never seen before, pointed at him and began shouting, “That’s him. That’s the man who murdered my family.” Two MPs, who were standing nearby, grabbed my father and clubbed him on the head. He was taken to a munitions

storage facility and locked in a room. The police questioned him throughout the night and it was early morning before they determined that he was an innocent man. The English officer took Dad to the barracks and fed him a nice, warm breakfast and let him go.

My mother was awake all night worrying about my dad. Finally, in the morning she decided to take the risk and go looking for him. They met in the middle of the street with their stories of the night. That was just one of the many experiences along the way.

They finally made it to the refugee camp in Fermo and lived there for two years, while they waited for permission to immigrate. They had applied to the United States, but Argentina opened up first. They saw the move to Argentina as their opportunity to escape and avoid the risk of being repatriated to Yugoslavia-Croatia, where they would have been murdered. Once they were on the ship to Argentina, they were safe, but up until that point, they were worried constantly about being taken.

They lived in Buenos Aires for about three years. When their immigration papers to the United States were finally approved, they packed everything they had into a single black trunk and flew to the U.S. through Cuba and on to New Orleans and, eventually, Raton, New Mexico, where they had an aunt who owned a café.

Gallacher: What was their situation during the war?

Crenshaw: In 1941, Yugoslavia was invaded by the Germans and the Italians. Croatia declared its independence from Yugoslavia and formed its own army. My dad joined a special unit called the Ustase. Their entire objective was to retain autonomy, which Hitler promised. Hitler was trying to make his way to Greece and so my dad fought with the forces that allowed Hitler to enter the country.

When things started collapsing Italy surrendered and joined the Allies and then, finally, Germany collapsed and Russia was advancing from the north. This caused a mass exodus of people because anyone who was opposed or was related to anyone opposed to the Communists was being persecuted, thousands died.

Dad, being a soldier with the Ustase, would have been killed, had he been captured. They always intended to return when they were out of danger, but much of the killing began after the war so it was years before it was truly safe again.

Gallacher: Did they ever reunite with their child?

Crenshaw: Yes, actually my parents had two children that they had to leave with relatives: my brother, Tony, and my sister, Renata. They were brought to the United States when they were nine and ten years old by the same aunt who had convinced my parents to come to the States. She took a $1000 that Dad and Mother had borrowed from a bank and bribed some officials in Croatia. She convinced the authorities that she was adopting the children herself.

It turned out to be a very difficult move for the children. They had spent most of their life, to that point, living with their grandmother. And suddenly they found themselves in a strange country with parents they didn’t know, attending public school where they were teased and picked on for being different. They spent a lot of time crying and begging to “go back to Grandma.”

Tony and my sister eventually adapted to life here, but never really assimilated completely. I think that early experience always left them feeling displaced. Their experience was very painful and, because of that, it wasn’t talked about. People want to forget painful memories and put it behind them.

Gallacher: Have they been able to put it behind them?

Crenshaw: I think they’re happy. Unfortunately, I don’t see them very often, but they have their own lives. Neither of them has been back to Croatia and their memories of Croatia have faded. They have adjusted as well as can be expected.

There were essentially two families. My younger sister and I were born several years after my brother and sister arrived from Croatia. The difference in age and culture was difficult to overcome.

Gallacher: Did your parents make the adjustment to the U.S.?

Crenshaw: Dad and Mom really tried to assimilate. The first year was the most difficult. They took classes from a retired schoolteacher who lived down the block.

Mom worked for Aunt Milca and Dad worked in a bakery at night and an auto shop during the day. They saved up enough money that year to move to Denver, where Dad went to work as a machinist.

Dad picked up English pretty fast on his job. It was harder for Mom because she stayed home to take care of us. She got along, but she always had one foot in the old world. That was the structure of Croatian families. The dad brought home the bacon, and the mother took care of everything else.

My parents always stressed the importance of being an American. They spoke Croatian with one another, but only English with us kids. These days, people are encouraged to keep their culture, practice their customs and prepare the foods, but when I was growing up it wasn’t desirable to be foreign. Being from another country and speaking with an accent was a negative thing. I remember being ashamed to say my dad’s name when I was asked the first day of school. I could hear the kids giggling in the back when I said, “His name is Vinko Tavcar.”

*German, Italian and Hungarian forces attacked Yugoslavia on April 6, 1941. On April 17, representatives of Yugoslavia's various regions signed an armistice with Germany in Belgrade, ending 11 days of resistance against the invading German Army. More than 300,000 Yugoslav officers and soldiers were taken prisoner.

The Axis Powers occupied Yugoslavia and split it up. The Independent State of Croatia was established as a Nazi satellite state, ruled by the fascist militia known as the Ustaše that came into existence in 1929, but was relatively limited in its activities until 1941. German troops occupied Bosnia and Herzegovina as well as part of Serbia and Slovenia, while other parts of the country were occupied by Bulgaria, Hungary, and Italy.