I Owe My Life to a Lazy Immigration Clerk

My father told me a story yesterday I’d never heard before about my grandfather. In the early 1930’s, my grandfather was a 19-year-old German with no money, no prospects, and an abusive father. Rather than feeling sorry for himself, he decided to leave for America. This much I already knew.

At that time, immigrants from Europe were required to have sponsorship and at least $70. My grandfather had connections in a small German Bretheren church in New Jersey, and had saved just enough cash to buy a steerage ticket on a steamer bound for New York, with $70 left over. Like so many other poor Europeans, he boarded the ship and ventured towards the new world.

During the voyage, however, he lost $5 or so in a card game. On arrival at Ellis Island, he was a bit short of the required $70. This could have meant a one-way return trip to Germany — in which case he never would have met my grandmother in that New Jersey church, and my father, me, and my children would never have been born.

The story didn’t end there, of course. My grandfather changed his German money for dollars and asked for the exchnage entirely in one dollar bills, which he rolled in a wad. When the immigration clerk at Ellis Island asked for evidence that my grandfather possessed the required $70, he flashed the wad of sixty-five singles. The clerk, probably too tired, busy, or just lazy to count the singles, waved my grandfather into America.

And so, I owe my life to an unnamed civil servant at Ellis Island who neglected his duty to count grandpa’s money.