Family History

Ko did some googling on his great grandfather this week.

I don't know how we got to talking about it, but I ended up telling him a story that an older cousin, Cinny, had relayed to me when I was a young adult.

In the 1940s, my Opa was a chemist and physicist. I'm wanting to joke that he studied directly with Isaac Newton, but that doesn't make sense with where this story goes.

Anyway, one day he was at a cocktail party with some of the other eggheads, no doubt drinking straight gin strained through an unfiltered cigarette, and he speculated that it might be possible to split the atom and harness the energy, and then going on to explain how he would try to tackle such an exercise.

Well, he might have been on to something, because the FBI showed up and spent a couple of days asking him how he knew all of the things he had spoken about. This was a guy whose parents were German immigrants, and he had grown up speaking German at home and probably around his immigrant neighborhood.

Ko found this page where I am saddened to learn of my father's passing.

It reports more accurately that my Uncle Steve passed. This happened when I was still a child. Thinking about it today, I see that my uncle and father each took a separate branch of the two opposite life tracks available to C-students from the 50s.

My dad grew his hair long and spent time playing guitar, smoking dope, and dreaming of peace.

His brother became a cop.

A Liam and Noel Gallagher story, if ever there was one.

Here's a tangentially-related picture of my dad and me that's half a century old.