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d'Errico, cont.
As the first grandson of Pietro d'Errico, I was the next Pietro in a line extending back several generations in a family that owned citrus orchards in Rodi Garganico on Italy's Adriatic coast, an early trade outpost of Greeks from 8th century Rhodes. (As a boy, when I first learned that my grandfather's name stemmed from his grandfather's as mine from his, I occasionally took to appending III; later, one of my aunts saw this and corrected me: I was VI. Thereafter, I rarely appended any number). The d'Errico family had complex interrelations with another branch distinguished by an upper-case surname (thus, Pietro d'Errico and Maria D'Errico). It seems the lower-case were landowners and the upper-case were residents in the land, a remnant of the 16th century feudal system that began to collapse after Italian unification. In the late 19th century, my grandfather's father (who was also a doctor and winemaker) made some bad business decisions and lost the orchard lands, putting his children out of their inheritance and leaving them to fend in the emerging global diaspora associated with industrialization. My grandfather emigrated in 1914 in the wake of others who had arrived in Worcester, Massachusetts, followed the next year by my grandmother, father, and Aunt Angela shortly thereafter. Other siblings were born in Worcester. My grandfather managed to find work at American Steel & Wire i n Worcester. His vehement anti-Catholicism set the family apart from most other immigrants. He taught me about Giordano Bruno, the 16th century cosmologist burnt at the stake by the Inquisition for the heresy of teaching that the universe is in motion and without a "center." Another way of saying it is, the center is everywhere and life is always moving. April 2020
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Max Gitter, cont.
I have been extraordinarily fortunate in my career as an attorney and in my family. I have been married for fifty years to Elisabeth Gitter,* a professor of English; we have two children and three grandchildren; all live within a half-hour of our apartment in Manhattan. But even now, I haven’t fully come to terms with my journey from Samarkand to Ellis Island and growing up as an immigrant. Being “stateless” has had a lasting impact on me, even though I became a naturalized American citizen over sixty years ago. Achieving citizenship does not necessarily erase all vestiges of statelessness.

* Author of The Imprisoned Guest: Samuel Howe and Laura Bridgman, the Original Deaf-Blind Girl (Farrar Straus & Giroux 2001).

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Mike Gross, cont.
Drama: In March 1938 my Father Karl and his brother, Robert, were both imprisoned in harsh German concentration camps. One evening in May 1938 the Gestapo arrested them after hours at the family haberdashery in Vienna. The two brothers were imprisoned for four months in Dachau and then in Buchenwald for 5 months. My mother, a charming, attractive 21-year old, traveled alone by train from Vienna to Nazi Germany in Berlin to Gestapo Headquarters. She had with her indispensable documents – affidavits of support from distant NYC -based relatives promising to provide support for the prospective immigrants if need be. On the strength of those papers the brothers were released by the Nazis under orders to depart Germany within three weeks. They met the deadline. They booked boat passage to NYC from Rotterdam. Three weeks later they departed Rotterdam for the Statue of Liberty, in sight of which they docked after a sea-sick filled ride in January 1939.      As chronicled in a NY Times Sunday magazine article in the mid 1980s, not all trapped European Jews were so lucky. Many of them also had relatives already living in America. Yet many of these relatives refused to sign similar papers for their desperate family members trapped by the Nazis. These pitiful letters were reproduced in the NY Times article.  : Our family was lucky.
BTW, my folks’ last name Grosz was used in Vienna. They thought they were Americanizing it when they switched to double “S” while still in Massachusetts. So they changed their last name, but forgot to change mine! (I was only two years old and had not yet had a college degree, let alone a YLS law diploma)…. Decades later when I applied for a passport, I had to run through hoops to prove who I was since my Mass. birth certificate had the “sz” version. Moreover I had failed to keep a copy of the name change to “ss” which I had for a local state court in NJ. But the papers in our local County Courthouse containing the name change to “Gross” had been burned up in a fire, and state HQ in Trenton couldn’t find them either. Having by then gotten my law degree, YLS skills enabled me to argue my way to getting a new passport with my name spelled “Gross”. Some have said I should have kept the old spelling.


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Mike Parish, cont.
As mentioned, my granddad, John Mitchell Parrish, was in charge of the construction of the bank in St. Louis. My version as I heard it was that he worked for Frank Lloyd Wright. When I say he also built 70 Pine St in NYC, one block north of Wall street, I need to add that it was then the tallest building in the world and a masterpiece of the deco style with lots of marble and polished brass. It was also across the street from where I spent the first 15 years of my career before we moved uptown. He and his wife lived in a town in NW CT in Litchfield County where the County fair is held. He bought a house there, later named the Parrish House, also later sold to Paul Newman long after granddad died. His wife was much younger and one evening while she was lighting the kerosene or whale oil lamps for dinner while wearing a shawl, she lit the shawl on fire and was hideously disfigured to the point no one ever saw her face again. The elderly librarian in the town library told me that, and showed me the town history listing my granddad, but nothing about Wright. I suspect that had something to do with his playing around.
His name was John Mitchell Parrish, and grandma named my dad the same, but with only one "r" in the last name, and he always suspected his father was her boyfriend in later life who drove a cab and was nicknamed Smity. So, I was born as John Michael Parish to make it the same but different, plus he never knew he'd been named after his dad, or if he did, he still didn't know who his dad was until his mom died it, as aforesaid. So, I've always insistently been "Mike."
The Daltons did come from Kentucky, as did my grandmothers' family, all Scottish Royalists who fled Scotland after Culloden when Bonnie Prince Charlies was defeated, and they went with Daniel Boone through the Cumberland Gap before the Revolution, so our version of the story goes. The Daltons are sometimes compared to Jesse James, but in fact he was killed ten years before the Daltons made their two year run (ending up as part of a gang known as "The Wild Bunch").
My daughter was born in August 1977. We lived on 77th St., where they blow up the balloons for the Macy's Parade (Macy's Day parade to all real N'Yorkers). In late October my wife put the baby in a Snugli, if you recall them, and went shopping for birthday presents for me (11/9/43) and on the way home was attacked by a man who was living at the SRO on our block, sort of a halfway house where the superintendent had been found guilty of strangling a series of 6 or 8 governesses who worked on the block by going up the fire escapes and strangling and raping them, so it had been turned into a halfway house for parolees. He had a big fight with his roommate, and being a small man, lost it, then grabbed a corkscrew of the old Spanish type with a lot of wood, and went out looking for someone to hurt. He attacked Susan on Columbus avenue in the middle of the afternoon; she fell down to protect the baby and was stabbed -- puncture wounds, thank goodness, and the guy was arrested. I raised hell with the NYT about the City's using that location, on a well-off street lived on by numerous ritzy people, and the Times wrote a big story about it. The next day I got a call from my grandmother, living in Winder, GA, a town where as you enter it you see a sign that says "Bob Smith's Radial Tire (Formerly City Recappers)" and on the next block is the general store and city hall with a sign that says those things, and has Coca Cola bottle caps at each end of the sign. I told her not to be worried, everyone was all right, and that the fella, as she called him, would get what was coming to him. There was a long pause, and then she said to me '"Well, just be careful how you do it, Okay?" and I promised I would.
Daulton was my mother's real father's name, which is why she reverted to it after the stepdads had all died. My grandma met him while he was being inducted into the Army and getting his physical, and she was a 16-year-old volunteer -- and he then went overseas, came back gassed and ripe, as many of our unfortunate citizens are today, for being finished off, in his case by the Spanish Flu. My son's middle name is Warren, which was his name although I never met him. His first name is William,(my son's) as in Bill Bradley, for obvious reasons.
My peregrinations in more detail: Decatur for about 3 years until my dad came back, Fort Leonard Wood, MO, then Camp Polk, LA (jungle fighting, then he went overseas to the Pacific). Decatur again for a year or so. Darmstadt, Germany, 18 Leo Tolstoy Strasse, home of a former highly-ranked Nazi that was "requisitioned" for our family. 13 servants and 18 rooms with a deer park in back. We had a handyman who had 6 toes on his right foot and was a former SS soldier. Frankfurt, Stuttgart, then Chicago Heights (southside) , then back to Decatur when my dad was sent to Germany again. Pirmasens, Germany, Kaiserslautern, Germany, Baltimore, 2 addresses in Dundalk (in Baltimore county) where I had the pleasure of being schooled with all the kids whose fathers worked the docks and steel mills at Sparrows' Point. Then McLean, VA, just erupting into suburbia, where I raked leaves for Stuart Udall and others who lived along the Potomac, and eventually ended up valedictorian of the local high school and won the top academic prizes in English and history for the state of Virginia.