As an immigrant, I will never forget the pain of being separated from my father
It was more than 60 years ago — March 27, 1956 — and my family was waiting at the Port of Palermo in Sicily to board the SS Queen Fredericka. We were emigrating to America.
An official- looking man at the gate checked our papers — first those of my mother, then those of us five kids. He probably checked my papers last, since I had been crying nonstop on the train all the way from Altavilla Milicia.
My father, though, was held back, and they asked him what political affiliation he espoused. Never having had any political affiliation, my father thought about the only political person he knew — Angelo Caruso, our godfather, the godson of the King of Italy and a pioneer of Italian Eurocommunism — and answered, “Comunista.”
They took my father away immediately, telling my mother he could not go to America.
I cried for the next two days on the ship. When we arrived in New York seven days later, I asked my mother and grandmother every day when Papa would arrive in Chicago. I don’t remember any specific answers because they had none.
The separation and the crying lasted one year. In my family’s hometown of Altavilla, there were only three telephones in those days — at City Hall, the post office and, I believe, my godfather’s home. They had to run to the house of the person called and notify them to go to the post office for a call from America. Then the person in America would call you back. We did not call very often that year.
A fellow named Joe McCarthy, a Wisconsin senator who didn’t like people whose surnames ended in vowels, kept us from coming to America when we first petitioned to do so in 1949. It wasn’t until 1956 that Rep. Sydney Yates, a member of Congress who represented Chicago’s North Shore, managed to get our application approved.
Some would say that waiting seven years to come to America, and then crying for a year because you missed your father, was a small price to pay for Americanism.
Try it when no one can explain the “why” to you. Try it when you’re five. Send letters to letters@ suntimes. com. Please include your neighborhood or hometown and a phone number for verification purposes.