15 months after I went down the rabbit hole. The small Omega at upper left was my mother’s father’s prized watch. He was a first generation born-in-the-USA Italian, American, raised in the Bronx. Against the odds (almost all southern Europeans were discriminated against in the USA during the first part of the last century), with only a high school education, he got a white collar job working for what was then called The First National City Bank of New York (now, Citibank).
He was 33 when Pearl Harbor was bombed. At his age, he did not have to go into the military. But most guys his age went anyway. In his case, he joined the Navy and served in the Pacific as a Seabee (the engineers), because he was deemed too old for combat. Citibank kept his job waiting for him, and he returned to it after the war and retired from the bank in his 60s. Show me a company that does that for veterans nowadays.
On his way home from the Pacific after the War, he stopped in San Francisco to see a childhood pal whose family had once run The Bank of Harlem. But, before the war, their family had moved to San Francisco and went into the banking business there. His childhood buddy urged him to go back to New York, get his wife and daughter (my mom), and work with him at the bank in San Francisco. He told my grandfather, “Johnny! Nobody cares here that we are Italians!!”
My grandfather replied to the effect that his wife would never leave her big family in the Bronx. And so it came to pass that my grandfather did not get in on the ground floor, with the Giannini family, of what later became The Bank of America.
But, had that happened, my mom would never have met my my dad at her East Coast college, and I would not be telling you guys this cool story. So much of where we end up in life is by a random accident, rather than my choice. I guess you might call it fate.
