A_Recollection

A RECOLLECTION THROUGH PHOTOS

As anyone can see by looking at this section, a lot happened to me during my early years in America. Not only had I married a beautiful American girl of Irish background, but my university education had also helped to put me in touch with someone who became a U. S. Senator, who felt that I may have become useful enough to campaign for a future president of the United States within my own community. The letter on the left was signed by Byron White, who became a justice in the U. S. Supreme Court. Nevertheless, when years later I returned for a visit to S. Miguel, I could not help being thrilled when I encountered the above horse cart parked at Canada de Belem de Cima. Somehow the scene took me back to my youth and although the island had evolved economically a great deal since my departure to the U. S. in 1946, the fact remained that there were still vestiges around that made going back worthwhile.

(LEFT) -July, 1956 - at Nahant Beach, Massachusetts.... Kathy and I married the following March....

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The greatest memories of all: Jane, Mary Beth, and Laura

(BELOW) -John and Isabel's 50th Wedding Anniversary Photo

Mary Beth: May 8, 1959
Jane, April 27,1962 Laura, Oct.14, 1964

ABOVE - To this day I still don't know how I qualified to enter Harvard. But then, the people at University Hall must have known something about me that I did not know. Although I am thankful for the chance that Harvard gave me, I look back nostalgically fully aware that - if my case is an example - several of us did not deserve to be there. But, then, I could really be the one of life's exceptions.

LEFT - Farmingdale, L. I., New York - 1960 Katherine a year after Mary Beth was born. As I look at the photo many years later, I still smile as I remember the questions I had to answer as to whether her beautiful hair color was real. Yes, it was.

One of my regrets is that not one of our three daughters inherited whatever genes are responsible for it.

For many years after I had moved to Missouri I had a great deal of difficulty going on a road trip anywhere in the state.. Somehow I could not separate myself from the small land plots that I had once known on S. Michael's Island, and which were highly treasured by whoever cultivated them, and the enormous spreads which lay uncultivated, or, at best, just growing grass for cattle winter feed. I often thought of my uncles, Manuel and Virginio da Costa, who'd do anything to work and rent even one tenth of most farms along the road. Manuel eventually came to America, where he worked in a produce-packaging house. Virginio stayed behind on the island - not too far from the house where he and my mother had been born.

Since oral history is a trait that most immigrants bring - and often keep - I knew that Virginio loved rabbit hunting. He did not own a gun for the purpose, but he did have a good fast rabbit dog. It was only natural for me to start one of our pleasant conversations by mentioning to him that there had been evenings in Missouri when I had spotted up to about a dozen, or so, wild rabbits enjoying the grasses in my garden. And you hunt them, my uncle asked. No, I replied. I have never hunted in my life. Furthermore, I enjoy having them in my yard.

And they don't eat at least your potato plants? In the Azores of my day, rabbits were the great enemies of any farmers who grew potatoes. Hunting them down, therefore, was a must and a way to augment a small farmer's protein intake.

My uncle smiled in his difficulty to understand America from a far-away island.

For all their beauty, the Azorean islands of my day, even though they were not too heavily populated, lacked enough land for a population that equally lacked education for a modern society. Most of its inhabitants were illiterate and, when they were not turning up the earth for crops of some sort, they were availing themselves of whatever the seas around the islands could provide The second irony is that, although they knew that those same seas connected them with somewhere else in the world, most could not describe which country, or continent, was nearest to them. Turning inward, therefore, was a trait of their isolation - a fact that made many of them poets of sorts who worshipped the immediate beauty of their environment and who, in the long run, helped contribute to a culture that refused to die.

It took my mother many years of anxiety to acquire American citizenship, and if it hadn't been for a promise that I made to a politically-connected and powerful Cambridge, MA, City Councilman (Alfred Vellucci) who talked to someone in the Federal Government, who talked to someone in the INS, chances are that she would have never acquired that citizenship - in spite of her great love and loyalty to America. Part of her problem was that she could never become fluent in English. Isabel J. da Costa Afonso Ponte eventually died in Bridgeton, Missouri. During her lifetime she paid thousands in income taxes to the American Treasury and, for all intents and purposes, was an immigrant from whom America profited handsomely. A good investment for her adopted land.

BELOW_RIGHT - Last Azorean Photo, December, 1945 - Relatives. Few Alive in 2006.

RIGHT - When these photos were shot the property was owned by my parents. Except for the lady on the last pictorial sequence, all the others are related to me. Furthermore, their eventual home became either the United States, or Canada. The two elderly people were my mother's oldest sister, Maria da Luz, and her husband, Joao Francisco da Mota. They both died in Connecticut. The two younger women on the top photo are my cousins Maria Jose, resident of Canada, and Isabel Soares who, until recently, lived in Connecticut with her husband, Jose&amp;nbsp; Soares, and children. Jose died recently.

The boy in overalls in top of the three photos is my cousin Joao Carlos, son of my Aunt Sofia, my mother's youngest sister who died in the Azores as a young woman.. Joao Carlos is now retired and living in San Ramon, California.

The property itself is now headquarters of a school . A photo of it, taken by my daughter Jane in January, 2006, is shown above.

My aunt, Maria da Luz, and her family moved into a small house at 12 Rua do Barao das Laranjeiras on Ponta Delgada. Prior to its existence, the house occupied a narrow strip on the north side of the property. It was only natural that shortly thereafter my mother, as the property owner, should invite other family members to see it - in fact, to take a photo with her and with me so that we would have a remembrance of it in America, where we were to migrate shortly thereafter..

In typical Azorean pride, most of the invited family showed up, all wearing whatever best clothing we had at the time. I don't recall who the photographer was. Suffice to say that, for economy reasons, Foto Rapida, the photo developing company, gave us a set of small prints from which we could recognize one another. The photo remained with several of those photographed for a long time and, since many are now dead, possibly with those who keep the memories of them alive and well.

As of this date, the house and the wall background for the lower photograph no longer exist. They have since been demolished and replaced by a school, as shown on the photo above .

It's also inTeresting to note that, although the house was for many years the last of six houses in a row on that side of the street, sometime in the later fifties, parishioners of S. Pedro's parish felt that the black wall should give way to the building of a chuch (Which would be incorporated within that parish but which would atract many people from the eastern end of nearby S. Roque as well as future residents who would occupy the nearby vacant land. S. Pedro, by the way, already had at least two other churches within walking distance of its main church. but, then, Ponta Delgada seems to have more church buildings per square meter than any other place on earth. Even if no Mass was ever heard in several of them, they were there nevertheless. CLICK

Note: It's traditional in the Azores not to let sycamores grow too high. The trees are usually trimmed at a young age in the fall remaining bare throughout the winter. In the spring the foliage comes back and the trees become shade trees. The above are no exception to that custom. I have seen a few places in Continental Portugal, Spain, and Italy where the same tree-control method is used.

LEFT -- Photos entered as contrast with those shot in the Azores. The first, which was also shot in December (In Missouri) shows Murphy, sort of hoping that its owners come out and play on the snow. The second, shot at Easter time, shows my son-in-law's aunt, Jackie Lipsitz, and Kathy (with my current neighbor's house in the background ) - a neighborhood quite different from the one in the Azores. The third shows Kathy as our granddaugther, Sarah Soffer, aged 2 at the time, tries to climb a maple tree in our Olivette, Missouri, backyard. In spite of the great variety of trees in the Azores, the islands don't possess maple trees. As the photos below will show, however, they do have palm trees even though their climate places those islands quite above the tropical circles.

There is a certain justice involved with the photo of my daughter Mary Beth and her family at the 2004 World Series 4th Game in St. Louis. Here's why:

In 1946, when I arrived in America, I went to live in Boston. I spoke no English, nor did I know anything about baseball. Later that year, however, while I was now in HIgh School, the expression World Series was on everyone's lips. Curiously, I dared to ask what was meant by it. It was then that someone explained the term and what it meant. It was also how I learned about a great Boston side, the Red Sox, a team that, according to my teachers was composed of the greatest players in the game - Ted Williams, Rudy York, Johnny Pesky, Dom DiMaggio, Bobby Doerr, Dave Ferriss, etc. . Although I remained ignorant of what baseball was about, I still decided to follow the Red Sox via radio broadcasts of that team's games - including the World Series seven-game set which the Sox eventually lost to a St. Louis club I had never previously heard of. Since I lived in the Boston area I was somewhat disappointed by the defeat - unitl I found out later on that losing in the World Series had become a sort of Red Sox Tradition..

Years later, the Red Sox played the St. Louis team, the Cardinals in subsequent World Series games and held on to their losing tradition. I had become a St. Louis resident by that time, although I listened to the last game of the Series while on a trip to the Annual Frankfurt Book Fair, in Germany. In 2004, however, I felt somehow that the Boston Club was finally going to get its revenge for all its years of defeats in that baseball Fall event.. To say, therefore, that I looked forward to the Series excitedly would be no exaggeration. My daughter and her husband, Allen Soffer, however, are avid Cardinal fans. And so are their children, as shown by the happy faces on the photo. Naturally, since I love them all, I felt sort of guilty about the grudge that I held against the Sox opponents in that Series - and particularly the St. Louis Cardinals.. Not that I cared, really. but, somehow, I wanted to avenge the disappointment that the fifteen-year-old boy from the Azores had suffered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1946.

The Red Sox did not disppoint me. They easily won he first four games of the Series...CLICK

The Azorean photos below are reproduced courtesy of the Municipal Government, Nordeste County, St. Michael's Island, Azores.

NOTE: I never knew my great grandparents. fact, at the time I was born, only my paternal grandmother, Maria Jose de Melo da Ponte, still lived, as well as my maternal grandfather, Antonio da Costa Afonso. My grandmother died when I was 10, in 1941. My maternal grandfather, on the other hand, lived to a very old age and died sometime around 1966. The above photos, however, are shown in order to give the reader an idea that the two above people, who were oruiginally from the tiny farm Village of Agua Retorta, in the Azores (Below), in many ways contributed a great deal to the eventual evolution of America. Their nine sons and one daughter (who have all passed away) today, thanks to their offspring and the offspring of the latter who are now architects, teachers, nurses, lawyers, engineers, techicians, businessmen, etc., presently holding several advanced degrees from some of the finest American institutions of higher and advanced learning. One of their great -great-great-grandsons is even one of Europe's foremost soccer professionals. (February 11, 2007).