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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
And so, I owe my life to an unnamed civil servant at Ellis Island who neglected his duty to count grandpa’s money.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-178","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-spirituality"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p824rZ-2S","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=178"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=178"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=178"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=178"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}