Seven Seas Airlines DC-4 / Copyright Ian Macfarlane
Source

Dad, 1961.

Additional Media:

Dad’s Sketches
Detroit Newspaper Article (English)
Epilogue Letter (French)
Newspaper Article in DNA Newspaper (French)

My father was 21, the United States was at the height of its empire, the new cultural capital and my father wanted to see it first hand.

My father was living in Strasbourg, France at the time and found out about a scholarship program that still exists today. The program: the Zellidja scholarship; would be awarded to “future leaders” who would submit a project to study something in their field of interest in a foreign country with a shoestring budget. Projects would be voted on by the committee of regional education academies of France (the public education system in France is broken into different “academies” that govern the educational system in their respective regions).

My Father submitted a project where he would study the US Car Industry over the course of a month. The academies saw the project, and then rejected it, deeming the allocated budget was too low to be feasible. Not completely satisfied with the concept of “no”, my father set out to prove them wrong. He wrote to airlines and ocean-liner companies stating his project, he received letters from the airlines stating that as IATA members, they were barred from using unqualified crew-members on flights.

With $60 in his pocket and a letter of rejection from the French Ministry of Culture, my dad took his bicycle and started riding to the United States. First stop, Luxembourg; at the time, Luxembourg was one of the few places non-IATA airlines could operate easily; charter airlines with a more relaxed view of labor practices. He needed free passage over the ocean or the trip would be over before it began. He made it about one hundred miles before he got tired of biking, ditched the bike on the side of the road and hitchhiked the rest of the way to the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. All the airlines had their local offices in an administration building on the airport grounds, my father went door to door to each one, without much luck. He then stumbled upon a long corridor with a big door at the end with no name. He knocked on the door and heard “come-in”. Inside was a big office with a man behind an ornate desk a couple of chairs and a meeting table, the office was far oversized for what it contained.  The man looked at the little shit that just came in through the door. My father told him his story; the scholarship, the rejection from the academies, the rejection from the civilized airlines, the ditched bike and the hitchhike to the Duchy culminating to the present moment. The man behind the desk: “If you had told me any other story I would have thrown you out of this office, it is so incredible that I believe it, I will let you fly on one of my airplanes”. It was his first time on a plane, the flight route was Luxembourg, Reykjavik, Idlewild New York on a DC-4, state of the art then, still in service in Latin America on “routes” still not served by IATA airlines. My dad had a tent, the tent was lost at the airport, he had made arrangements to spend his first night at the YMCA youth hostel on the upper west side of Manhattan. By the time he got there at 9pm they told him that he was too late, his room was given away and that they were fully booked. No room, no tent, he set out for Central Park. He thought about sleeping on a park bench but opted instead for cozy protection of big bush. It was a good decision, he was awoken at 2 in the morning by the police yelling at someone a few feet away who thought the bench was ideal, that man was sent on his way by New York’s finest. He fell back asleep but mosquitos got the better of him at 4 or 5 o’clock. He awoke to see the sunrise on the city, he still remembers the rumblings of the newspaper delivery trucks delivering the newspapers to the newsstands scattered around the city.

He did have the address of an exchange student, John Schwarz that they had received about a year earlier in Strasbourg. He found the place which overlooked Washington Square Park, John’s mother Hilda was in city government, possibly City Treasurer or Comptroller. Het was invited to stay over and that that night they were hosting a black tie formal dinner. My father, the day after spending his first night in the Americas in a bush in Central Park was now at an elegant table with city bankers and government officials. They started serving a dish that he had never seen before, corn on the cob. He had no idea how to proceed on how to eat it, so he started trying to cut it with a fork and knife, he heard a few snickers and and saw small smiles as other guests devoured their corn as if they were playing the harmonica

He soon left New York and hitchhiked to Cleveland where he had the address of a friend of his Father, the president of a local bank there. From there he took a bus to Detroit where the banker had arranged meetings with vice presidents from General Motors and Ford. After arriving in motor-city, he was being chauffeured around in Cadillacs and Lincolns that were the size of an aircraft-carrier. My father told the vice-presidents his story and they helped him out, the GM VP invited him to stay at his house and paid him to test out prototype vehicles, he also landscaped and did odd-jobs to help him pay for food and the bus ticket back to New York.

It was time to head back home, he planned on staying a month and ended up staying a month and half. He arrived at Idlewild airport (now JFK) just to find out that “Seven-seas Airlines”, the non-IATA airline that brought him into the US surreptitiously had gone bankrupt a few weeks prior. He knew the music, he went from airline office to airline office once again, this time so he could get back home, this time he could be considered a crew member since he served on the now defunct seven-seas airline. He stumbled upon a young spokeswoman for an Irish airline, she invited him to a Manhattan soirée. The next day after he woke up beside her, she said he was on the flight manifest as crew for the afternoon empty ferry flight to Dublin. In Dublin, with the Irish airline crew manifest in hand he approached the Captain of a KLM flight scheduled for Amsterdam Schiphol, started to tell his story. The captain said, “I’ll take you, on the condition that once we are up you tell me more”. Once airborne the pilot came back to the cabin leaving the first officer the yoke, and listened to the rest of my father’s story. Once in Amsterdam a passenger that overhead the Captain and my father speaking, offered to drive him to the Hague from which, he hitchhiked back home to Strasbourg.

He loved the United States and is grateful for all the opportunity that the people of this country provided. On paper the trip was a fool’s errand, his stubbornness, some friends and with plain old luck he pulled it off.

He would return to the United States, but not quite yet, within a few months he got a scholarship for a Pilot’s license, and then a draft letter join to the French Air Force in Algeria.

Additional Media:
Dad’s Sketches
Detroit Newspaper Article (English)
Epilogue Letter (French)
Newspaper Article in DNA Newspaper (French)

Errata: 1. Scholarship name is Zellidja (corrected from Zelidja) 2. Amount Brought by my father to the US was USD $60 not $200 as previously stated.

Chapter I: Parallel opposites

Where they grew up.
Alain Edouard Richard: Born July 28th, 1939 in Strasbourg France 10 miles from the German border and 15 days before the Nazi invasion. Within days of his birth, the whole family left Strasbourg headed for Lons le Sonnier deep in the Jura mountains. Once there, and my grand-mother and children settled my grandfather returned to the front in Alsace to fight. He was captured by the Nazis and imprisoned in a POW camp. He attempted to escape and succeeded on the second try with the help of the garbage men who hid him in a garbage truck on the way out of the camp. He took the last train out of the east and joined the family in the Jura.
He was no longer on the front but he was still in the war; in Lons, he joined the Resistance, becoming “chef de maquis”. My father wasn’t told much about my grandfather’s role in the resistance, my grandfather never talked about it. My father did manage to sneak a story or two out of one of grandfather’s friends after the war, it wasn’t much, besides the usual paranoia; wondering if other maquisards were collaborators they had also ambushed at least one German military convoy, killed every last soldier.
It only dawned on me as I write this now that my grandfather probably never wanted my father to see him under that light. What is an act of heroism in a time of war, when brought back to the absolute, is still taking a man’s life. I never really knew my grandfather, he died when I was three, but he was a legend, always jovial, with an eccentric panache that my father inherited, that’s how he lived and wanted to be remembered. Yet this is a story that still has to be told. The only trace of it beyond what my father can tell me is a plaque on my grandfather’s grave from his fellow fighters “A notre camarade d’armes”; today also most likely passed away.
By the time my father was 6, the war had just ended, but that’s when his story really began. Following the war, my grandparents thought it would be good for my father to go to summer camp and enjoy the countryside with other kids and forget, to the extent possible, the too real life life back in the burned out cities. On one of the weekends, he went back to Strasbourg to be with his parents, he seemed a bit ill and thinking it was a cold or the flu, my grandmother brought him to doctor. With one glance the doctor knew it was more than a cold. Today tuberculosis is practically eradicated from western civilization and thought to be a fatal disease of the past. That past was my father’s present, he was given six to eight months to live by every single civilian doctor my grandmother could find.
The war was over and so was the resistance, my grandfather returned to government, where he had worked before the war. As a part of the peace treaty, France would occupy the Saarland, a small coal rich region north of France and east of Luxembourg. This region like many border regions in the area bounced between France and Germany pretty much since the beginning of the concept of the nation-state. France would occupy the region until 1956, after which the local population would be able to choose to remain in Germany or choose to or to remain a French territory. As a member of the French governing administration, my grandfather, Robert had access to whatever victorious governments gain access to after a long vicious and protracted war. He had a son who so far had beat the odds, but the odds were catching up and he was dying. He tracked down the game changer, in a prison camp, he found a German doctor and proposed a deal: “freedom and your clinic if you cure my son”.

Dr. S_. returned to the clinic in Saarbrucken. It still exists today but the buildings of the day are now a car park and patient housing. My father shared a room with another young offspring of war. As kids would they would compete, one of their competitions was to determine whose father was more powerful. Opening argument went to my dad who presented his candidate, a member of the Occupying French government, former resistant and had a side arm at all times. The rebuttal candidate was a high ranking Nazi who had shot paratroopers and kept their skulls in a personal collection. When that father visited, the boy pleaded him to confirm the story, the boy was immediately told never to repeat that story to anyone. My father told my grandfather what happened. The next day the German boy was gone and my dad never saw him again.

My father did get better, made a full recovery and returned home, first to the house my grandfather had taken next to the Hospital at Virchlowstrasse, then a few kilometers north of Saarbrucken in Scheidt. The house in Scheidt was the biggest house in the town with an imperial garden that overlooked the town below. The owner of the house moved next door after the governing administration requisitioned it (ie. took it). He still came to the property to maintain the garden, he was a large German fellow who had his house taken from him, add to that the occupant of that house was a small french boy who would call him names and add to the rancoeur.

The house on Virchlowstrasse (on the left)

The house in Saarbrucken on Virchlowstasse still exists though it has become a multi-family dwelling. The house and garden in Scheidt were long gone, transformed into about 30 single family houses. The next-door chalet still stood, and my father regrets having treated the owner so horribly, as he put it “kids are cruel” he didn’t know better.

My father as we took a side path on the edge of the former house property in Scheidt. Nothing remains but the path, some trees and a gate.

We are parked somewhere where hos old house used to be. Everything in sight was not here before.

In 1955 Saarland voted to remain in Germany, within 10 years the foundation of a lasting relationship between France and Germany was formed, laying down the basis of economic and then political partnership leading to the longest period of peace in Western Europe since ever. My grandfather returned to Strasbourg and retired from government before being called back to service for another government who needed someone with connections on the ground, he worked for the United States.

Sylvia Maria: Born Feb 6, 1940 in Manila, Philippines, Commonwealth of the United States of America. Born a few months after the beginning of World War II and a year before the invasion of the Japanese Imperial Army.

My mother was born into a typical Filipino working class family. Her father was a laborer and my grandmother took care of the family; altogether they had thirteen children. There was no sadness in her voice, a little lighthearted smile even, it wasn’t bad, it was just the way it was, large numbers of children, some would survive, some wouldn’t  Unlike my father’s childhood on the other side of the world my mother’s experiences during the war were uneventful. When the United States started bombing raids on Manila to drive out the Imperial Army, my mother was in the same dugouts and trenches as the Japanese soldiers and the rest of her family. After the war, the United States army returned, the kids would play with the soldiers and ride the army jeeps around. Today public transportation is still provided by small jeepney owners who run elongated jeeps built locally that can seat about twenty people, its the most visible sign of the post-war attachment to the United States that carries on to this day. One US soldier who couldn’t have children even wanted to adopt my mother who was five at the time. The soldier and the United States left after the Philippines gained its independence.

My mother from her room in the Manila Hotel, trying to place the different parts of the city from her time. Everything has changed, though the staples of Philippine life remain.

My mother reviews the the city from the Manila Hotel.

My mother continued her studies and eventually graduated from college in Manila all while working with her two older sisters to support her younger siblings and parents who had moved back to their home province in Cavite. After graduating from college she worked at a US relief agency; Church World Service, then the Australian Embassy and eventually she came to work at the Asian Development Bank (ADB) in Makati. ADB is a development bank which serves a similar role to that of the World Bank but on a regional level. She worked for a Canadian economist who saw in my mother a hard worker and became her mentor. While working at ADB she saw many of her friends emigrating from the Philippines to the United States, Visas for the United States were impossible to obtain so thought about Canada. She asked Dr. Mendels, her mentor how difficult it would be to get a job and visa to Canada. Dr. Mendels asked how soon could she leave; “july” was her most random answer. A few days later, one of my mother’s colleagues was having dinner at the Mendel’s residence and was seated next to the Canadian Ambassador to the Philippines. Apparently the topic of conversation was how smart and hard working my mother was. The next day Dr. Mendels went to see my mother and said the visa was all arranged, all my mother would have to do was to pass a medical, she had two months to get pack up her belongings. She was caught completely off-guard, she did not expect things to happen so quickly, or even to happen at all. Her family was very close knit, with her parents aging she said she would only be gone for two years and would be back soon. Her mother knew it would be longer than that, much longer.

Imus, Cavite, where my Mother spent part of her childhood before moving to Manila.

Jeepneys, made by Artisan Mechanics haven’t really changed in the past 50 years and form the backbone of transport for most Filipinos today, though economic development may begin to dwindle this part of Filipino life.

This picture would have been very much the same if shot at the time of my Mother’s childhood. The green house in the back is where she grew up.

The bridge behind the family house.

She had to borrow for airfare and life startup costs to get there. She knew nothing of Canada and was unfamiliar with the concept of cold, let alone a lasting cold called winter (history repeated when I moved to Montreal in January of 2005, first day there my beard froze solid). There she was, a petite Filipina now living in Toronto. She found a job at Price Waterhouse and a supplementary job at night to quickly pay back her debt. She started getting used to Canada, had built a nice clique of friends, most of them from the Filippino community. She also had a responsibility vis a vis her family, she sponsored her niece, her brother his wife, children and then her younger sister and husband to move from the Philippines to Canada. After Price Waterhouse she worked at Xerox, she loved Canada and was immensely grateful for the opportunity, though she always had her eyes turned towards the United States.

Her family duty settled she went on a scouting trip to California; San Francisco and Los Angeles. She found Los Angeles too hot (I write this from my home in Santa Monica California in disbelief), she interviewed for position at U.C. Berkeley and got the job though they were not able to arrange a work visa. When she returned to Toronto she applied to the World Bank in Washington D.C. and the United Nations in New York. She was accepted at both and chose New York.

Hindsight is twenty/twenty, but I’m glad it was New York. It was on the 32nd floor of the United Nations Headquarters that she met a Frenchman with a bad reputation; my dad.

The Manila Sunset hasn’t really changed since my Mother’s day.

Chapter II: Algeria and the stolen tent

Next/Bientot

Some patients being measured for height for the medical records

Some of us are born a bit different, born with something called a cleft-lip or palate. Basically the tissue between the mouth and the nose did not completely form while the baby was in the womb. In the case that the it is a cleft-lip, the skin under the nose did not completely form, in the case of a cleft-palate the roof of the mouth did not form completely leaving the mouth open to the nasal cavity above. It can be either condition (lip or palate) or a combination of both. Either case can completely be operated on completing the face. This type of deformity occurs all over the world but has a higher possibility to occur in developing countries.

In 1982, a small team of doctors from Norfolk Virginia went to the Philippines to operate on children with the affliction. They were overwhelmed by the how many children were affected by this condition. When the mission was over they told the children they simply didn’t have the time to operate on that they would be back. Come back they did, and not only to the Philippines, but to over 300 sites all over the world providing surgeries to over 200,000 children over 30 years.

I followed an Operation Smile mission for the first time in 2008 in East Timor when in cooperation with the US Navy they operated aboard the USNS Mercy, a hospital ship that was docked in Dili harbor. I followed the team as they work around the clock for a week to change the lives of complete strangers. It takes from an hour to two hours and a half to change their lives completely. I followed them again in 2010 in East Timor aboard the USNS Mercy.

For some strange reason, for the last few years, I spend Thanksgiving with my parents in a different city and country. This year my parents were assisting in the 30 year anniversary mission in the Philippines, a massive undertaking to have multiple missions running at the same time in the Philippines, back where it all started.

I spent a few days catching up with my parents, (they live on the other side of the planet from me) and rediscovering the Philippines. I hadn’t been back in over 18 years, (I’ll write about that in another entry), the mission would start on the last two days that I would be spending out there. We flew to Cebu where we would meet up with an Operation Smile team that flew in from all points of the world. The first day was screening, where kids with the cleft lips and palates would see the OpSmile team and be evaluated to see if they could help them out. The line just keeps getting longer and longer as children and their parents stream in from all over the southern provinces to come see the team. It’s an impressive system put into place that makes sure that every child is evaluated by each member of the medical team to make sure that these kids will be taken care of. Everyone is in good spirits, kids running around playing and laughing; realizing they aren’t the only one with clefts; doctors, nurses working hour after hour at what they do best with a direct outcome of happiness.

Still at the end of the day, there are still more kids and parents waiting, when the evaluations are closed for the day, there is only so much you can do. Some will be looked at the next day as the team evaluates for a few more hours, but it won’t be enough. These kids are amazing, most are too young to understand what society thinks of their disability. At the end of the week, the Operation Smile team would have accomplished 200 operations, 200 new smiles, 200 lives back on track. Yet there are many more, so there will be more missions, more local surgeons trained by OpSmile to handle these cases.

I have a job, I design airports. It’s bullshit compared to what these guys do. Help out if you can.

DONATE NOW, HELP NOW

For Canadiens, Gatineau is Gastineau here.

I just had breakfast with a friend who besides seeing at a few heavily beveraged parties I hadn’t caught up with. After catching up on the fun and drama of being in the indefinable age group in Los Angeles the discussion shifted towards politics and found its way to the Occupy* movement. I voiced general support for the concept though I was unclear as to what the defined concept was, my friend thought it wasn’t necessary though agreed that there are issues with the economic and political systems in place today.

I had to find out more, so I drove out to City Hall in downtown Los Angeles to see first hand what was going on.

The Los Angeles City Hall is 32 story building completed in 1928, chances are you have seen it on TV or countless movies. It shares a city block with parks on each side, the park on the west being three times larger than that on the east.

The OccupyLA movement took hold of both parks, the east park is little more than a lawn with no shade, but nonetheless filled with tents and signs against capitalism, war, banks, the monopoly guy among others.

The west park, is not only larger, but is a mini forest with a central “square” to which paths from the four corners of the park lead to. Tents occupy the entirety of open space, there were porta poties to the north, a shower tent, a medical tent, a mobile kitchen, a day care for small children, recycling corners and other facilities. The area was surprisingly clean, no litter or graffiti anywhere. Though the people here had the intention of staying here as long as necessary, they seemed mindful of their surroundings and taking care of it.

There isn’t a sterotypical inhabitant here. They array of diversity was quite large; union workers to hipsters, children to grand-mothers. While many of the people here would seem to be your usual suspects in movements such as these, many just seemed to be the average Americans you wouldn’t stereotype when you see them. I didn’t expect to see Ron Paul supporters but they were there, right next to the protesters damning Bill O’Reilly, Anne Coulter and Rush Limbaugh.

To say the least, this is not a unified movement. There are many signs and many demands, but the central core of protest is centered around the banking system and the influence of corporations on the lives of Americans.

I don’t agree with many of the signs there. I do believe in a market based economy. The issue for me lies in the long and steady deregulation of the financial sector and the political access that special interests have based on political contributions. This is where I stumble, I can’t write exactly why the financial sector has failed simply because I can’t fully understand it. Most systems and constrained by physical imperatives where it be in medecine, materials, aerospace, engineering, electronics etc.. the basic science determines what can be done and what can’t. Innovation is discovering how to find new ways to make products better, cheaper or entirely new but still within the realm of what is possible. Any system needs parameters for it to function, rules that determines what works and what doesn’t, and these rules also ensure that the system functions on the long term.

The financial and political systems that we have in place are not bound by any physical science, these systems are entirely man-made including the boundaries in which they operate. Being man-made they can be prone to human error/other. The financial system has been created in order to benefit the short-term gains, its long-term survivability was never envisaged in its design, the political and legal, all man-made systems, have been redesigned from their original intent to support the unsustainable financial system.

There is place for creation of wealth, for upwards financial mobility, but there needs to be rules that allow that to happen without other parts of the system failing for that to happen and to ensure the long term viability of the system.

This movement is necessary in many ways to bring the discussion back to the center. The United States is a nation of extremes, it has to be big for people to take notice. Over the last two years, the extreme right of nation through the tea-party has driven the national dialogue from the center to right of center. The existence of this counter-movement to the left at the very least brings the conversation back to the center.

I talked to Lucy, I asked her how long she had been at the park, she said pretty much since the beginning over a month ago. The only time that she took a break was when she went to St. Louis to visit her son, but she saw an occupation there as well and spent the day there too. She told me that in June she lost the love of her life, she had spent three wonderful years with him and lost him to pancreatic cancer, she wasn’t expecting to find her soulmate when she was 76, but she did. At the end of the day these are just normal Americans following that part about the pursuit of happiness.

Now she sits in a forgotten corner of the California desert hoping to roar again. The purest definition of Power.