U.S. Migration

My grandfather left Romania as a boy in 1913. He was born near Timisoara at the turn of the century in 1900. From Ellis Island in New York City, he traveled to find work in a Philadelphia factory. Detroit was the most powerful city for manufacturing cars in the country, so my grandfather moved to Michigan. Migration makes the United States great. Men move to build railroads. Cowboys shuffle herds of cattle across the plains. Miners cross snow covered mountains in wagon caravans to seek the freedom to practice their religion in Salt Lake City, Utah. I have traveled the world and talked to foreigners who are amazed to this day at the way Americans travel to seize opportunity. Business men in Central Europe admit, “We were brought up under Communism. You needed a special permit to travel to the next village.” Petaluma, California is a city between San Francisco and Santa Rosa. San Francisco is where I attended college. Santa Rosa is where I graduated from high school. The drive between the two cities is less than an hour in distance. There are friends I know in Petaluma that are over thirty years old that have never ventured outside of Petaluma. These adults have never crossed the Golden Gate Bridge. Never seen a single building in San Francisco less than one hour away. This is normal in most countries. I travel overseas and meet people that have never left their town, community or village, especially in high mountain areas where the snow falls heavy like Uhersky Hradiste between the border of Czech and Slovakia or Svilengrad at the border of Turkey and Bulgaria. The families I dined with treated me like a monkey that escaped from the zoo. If I was drinking in a bar, mothers brought their toddlers inside so that the children could hear a foreigner speak with a funny tongue. The beer was strong. The tobacco smoke pungent, especially since the weather was cold outside. Fresh air never enters the bar unless the door is opened to let a person inside. Under leaders like Tito, Khrushchev, and Stalin, travel was a challenge. The people of the United States are encouraged to travel. Engineers leave Houston, Texas to build software applications for Microsoft in Seattle, Washington. Pennsylvania coal miners share rides to Rock Springs, Wyoming to drill oil. Americans migrate to find opportunity. Sammy Davis Junior danced at vaudeville theatres across the United States until he found a home for himself in Las Vegas, where he joined neighbors like Tony Curtis, Dean Martin, and Lefty Rosenthal. The Nevada city is full of celebrities that call Vegas home.