His
father was already here working. He had joined the U.S. Army during
World War I and got his citizenship because of that, and my father was
naturalized as a citizen because of that. He was the first one in the
neighborhood to go to college, and he then fought in World War II and
got the Distinguished Flying Cross with three oak leaf clusters as a
navigator on a B-24. He came back after the war, and he went to Harvard Law School on the
GI Bill. Imagine that, an Italian immigrant going to Harvard Law School
on the GI Bill in the 1940s. He was discriminated against as an Italian American at the time--the
gentleman was just talking about that--and he couldn't get a job at a
big law firm. So he went back to our hometown of Glen Cove, Long
Island.
Keywords matched
naturalized immigrant