Peter that was a very nice story. I arrived in the US in the same wave as you did, in late summer of 1981 on a Pan Am jumbo jet from Austria half filled with asylum seekers from behind the iron curtain. I was four. My parents got $50 in NY but had some schillings as well which they were unable to exchange. We got into Austria by crossing over from then Czechoslovakia on foot under the cover of darkness.
In Austria we stayed in a Gasthoff (this was January) that was very happy to have the income (from the Austrian government). Many countries took the asylum seekers from Poland that were engineers and scientists like my father from Austria, cheif among them Canada, the US, UK, and Australia. For some reason you needed to get directly to West Germany, Norwaym and Sweden to apply for asylum successfully there and if you had already been in Austria before being granted asylum, you were unable to, but the Austrians assisted you by finding a place for you to live and helping to get you out to one of the other countries (there were and are to this day some nationalistic and xenophobic parts of the political spectrum and population).
When we made it to the US we were sent to a city in IL soon after being in a hotel in NY for one night. There wee slept on cots in the gym of a school. Then we were sent to a family was paid to be our sponsors. This family was terrible and stole all of our money and the sponsor money and put us in an attic above some drug makers that they rented to below. On day my father, knowing only German and Polish, walked-out, picked a direction, and made his way through a large forest until he located a road. Then he followed the road and made his way to a McDonald's parking lot. There he stopped everyone and tried to find someone that spoke Polish or German. It is amazing he was not arrested, but eventually he met an older woman that was German. We stayed at her son's house for a night and then we were sent to another camp.
Eventually a Catholic parish sponsored us. By that point the borders were no longer as porous and the families that they were supposed to sponsor never made it to the US. The parish found us a Czech/Slovak couple to stay with and things were largely great from that point on. When we moved into our first place the landlady was terrible though and we needed to heat the apartment with the stove open in the kitchen, that was probably the last of the crummy occurances though.
The pastor bought my father a huge Buick Electra. That was my first American car experience. It was wonderful, though my father only had experience with air cooled engines before that and suffered terrible burns when he tried to fill the radiator. The next car was a Ford Grand Torrino station wagon, followed by a Chevy Impala, all cars that my father was exceptionally proud of.
@mzs: What a story. Ours was much less dramatic-although I suspect if you walk long enough, you'lll find someone who speaks Hungarian. Space aliens, for instance.
@Peter Orosz: I actually run into Hungarians relatively often. There are a number here at work (physicists and engineers) and with an affiliated University, and then there are those that married Polish women which I know. Most of the Hungarians I know of my parent's generation that fled in the same wave left via Italy.
In fact in my previous life I was a (not yet) failed mathematician. One summer I did some NSF funded research with an adviser at Bloomington that recommended a Romanian professor at ELTE to continue. So I spent six months there with another student in Budapest. Sadly we did all our work in English so basically all I can remember sounded something like this (I can't do diacritics on this keyboard, so I'll sort of pretend Hungarian is Polish where it is basically the opposite):
szajnosz nem ertem, kiczit besejlek magyarul
We lived in the apartment that had been occupied by the mother of Paul Erdos. She had collected all of his publications in two rooms. You cannot believe how incredible a treasure trove this was to two geeky math students. Our landlady was Vera Sos, even more unbelievable. Also Szeged is a gorgeous city with a very prestigious university, I visited one weekend.
Nice tale, I have almost carbon copy photos of me near a '73 AMC Hornet hatchback. I loved the heavy door so much I kept opening and closing it until it sagged on the brackets.
This Omega might be a V8, but more likely an I-6 or V6. Most cars then still came with steel wheels, so it's really hard to tell. These must be super-rare by now.
Despite not being American, and not having seen many old, V8, huge, lazy but nevertheless extremely charming cars, I still adore big V8's in a rakish car.
As long as those V8's don't make 190 hp.
PS That elegy says exactly how cars should be in my wildest dreams. My vision of Utopia. What a beautiful world.
@Accordius killedius Malibius.: No, it's either the four door or the more uncommon "Tudor" two door body like I have. It's got a flat back, not sloped like the earlier Futura sport coupe, and the end of the quarter panel window is also angled wrong for the sport coupe. Here's a crappy cell-phone pic of mine for reference:
Well that as just touching. My formative years were spent with far less glamorous cars. First there was a company jeep which I remember nothing of other than my dad flipped in in Dubai. Then in Rhode Island we had a Dodge Omni of which my memories consisted of long drives down the coast to nearby museums or Boston. I also learned about cold and the brittleness of materials when I snapped the front grill down the center as I tried to climb up on the hood one cold winter day. I think my love affair with cars had more to do with the hot wheels my parents bought me than the cars they actually drove.
@JamesHunt||ShhhI'mHuntinWabbits: When I was born, my parents owned a Sunbird. They later bought an early Sonata and replaced the Pontiac with a Sundance. I have no idea how I'm obsessed with cars, I have to assume I'm adopted.
If FromaBuick6 has to watch one more Chevy commercial, he's going to punch Howie Long in the face was starred
If FromaBuick6 has to watch one more Chevy commercial, he's going to punch Howie Long in the face was unstarred
@FromaBuick6: One of these days, I'm going to dig up my dad's slides of the rented Chevette we toured the West with. My dad liked the Chevette. He's not exactly a petrolhead, now, is he?
@Peter Orosz: Hey, at least they were rear-drive. Plus they...and of course they...don't forget about...okay, that's all the Chevette had going for it.
@Tomsk Яespects the BuЯbeЯЯy BanhammeЯ: Didn't weigh much either, and they were reasonably durable (enough so that a place I worked had a fleet of them, all of which were around 260,000kms when the odometer quit). Plus you could hoon and destroy one for pocket change, and no one's going to care.
06/02/09
In Austria we stayed in a Gasthoff (this was January) that was very happy to have the income (from the Austrian government). Many countries took the asylum seekers from Poland that were engineers and scientists like my father from Austria, cheif among them Canada, the US, UK, and Australia. For some reason you needed to get directly to West Germany, Norwaym and Sweden to apply for asylum successfully there and if you had already been in Austria before being granted asylum, you were unable to, but the Austrians assisted you by finding a place for you to live and helping to get you out to one of the other countries (there were and are to this day some nationalistic and xenophobic parts of the political spectrum and population).
When we made it to the US we were sent to a city in IL soon after being in a hotel in NY for one night. There wee slept on cots in the gym of a school. Then we were sent to a family was paid to be our sponsors. This family was terrible and stole all of our money and the sponsor money and put us in an attic above some drug makers that they rented to below. On day my father, knowing only German and Polish, walked-out, picked a direction, and made his way through a large forest until he located a road. Then he followed the road and made his way to a McDonald's parking lot. There he stopped everyone and tried to find someone that spoke Polish or German. It is amazing he was not arrested, but eventually he met an older woman that was German. We stayed at her son's house for a night and then we were sent to another camp.
Eventually a Catholic parish sponsored us. By that point the borders were no longer as porous and the families that they were supposed to sponsor never made it to the US. The parish found us a Czech/Slovak couple to stay with and things were largely great from that point on. When we moved into our first place the landlady was terrible though and we needed to heat the apartment with the stove open in the kitchen, that was probably the last of the crummy occurances though.
The pastor bought my father a huge Buick Electra. That was my first American car experience. It was wonderful, though my father only had experience with air cooled engines before that and suffered terrible burns when he tried to fill the radiator. The next car was a Ford Grand Torrino station wagon, followed by a Chevy Impala, all cars that my father was exceptionally proud of.
06/02/09
I wanted to add that the German family that helped us out taught me my first English word, car.
06/02/09
06/02/09
In fact in my previous life I was a (not yet) failed mathematician. One summer I did some NSF funded research with an adviser at Bloomington that recommended a Romanian professor at ELTE to continue. So I spent six months there with another student in Budapest. Sadly we did all our work in English so basically all I can remember sounded something like this (I can't do diacritics on this keyboard, so I'll sort of pretend Hungarian is Polish where it is basically the opposite):
szajnosz nem ertem, kiczit besejlek magyarul
We lived in the apartment that had been occupied by the mother of Paul Erdos. She had collected all of his publications in two rooms. You cannot believe how incredible a treasure trove this was to two geeky math students. Our landlady was Vera Sos, even more unbelievable. Also Szeged is a gorgeous city with a very prestigious university, I visited one weekend.
06/02/09
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06/02/09
This Omega might be a V8, but more likely an I-6 or V6. Most cars then still came with steel wheels, so it's really hard to tell. These must be super-rare by now.
06/03/09
06/02/09
You can see it behind the sweet Celica
Young Danger taking it for a spin
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06/02/09
As long as those V8's don't make 190 hp.
PS That elegy says exactly how cars should be in my wildest dreams. My vision of Utopia. What a beautiful world.
06/02/09
even in the 80's we were buying foreign! the proof is all over that first picture!!
luv for the V dub >_<
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I woulda thought it was a Futura..
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Bitchin'.
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(Desperately trying to not say anything about Peter's mom.)
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