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President Roosevelt once addressed the Daughters of the American Revolution as “My dear fellow immigrants.” This is a polyglot nation. Neither my wife Margaret nor I ever met our grandparents. Marge's parents were Bohemian but came to the USA in 1913 and first met in Minnesota. My mother was English, moved to Canada and traveled west to Vancouver where she met and married my father. He was born in the Banat section of Europe in what was then Austria-Hungary and is now Romania. After moving to Berlin, Paris, and London, he also went to Canada, ending up in Vancouver. They married and came to Chicago during World War One. The street where I grew up was a quarter mile long. Swedish, German, Irish, English, Italian, and East Indian families lived there. After graduation from the Central YMCA in Chicago I became a counselor at the Chicago Boys Club summer camp in Indiana where I met Tom Baron, Cosmo member. When he heard that I was attending graduate school at UIUC he invited me to become a member. I did, and it enriched my life far beyond my wildest expectations. My latest book, A New Birth of Freedom, is largely influenced by my experience at Cosmo. In attempts to make sense of American's claims of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” to the multi-national population of Cosmo, I had to do a lot of thinking about American claims about their ideals and their actual practices. Thinking about this claim also resulted in a lifelong interest in foreign students while teaching in the United States. My wife and I became family to Finnish, Yugoslavian, Chinese, and Swiss exchange students. Our daughter Beatrice spent a school year in South Africa. Our son Paul visited a Mexican family for a summer. He spent another summer on the Navaho Indian reservation. Our daughter Barbara spent a summer at the Santa Fe Indian Reservation. Barbara later went to Spain to study Spanish so that she could teach Spanish to Americans when she returned. She met Santos Morales, fell in love, married him, and ended up teaching English in a school in Seville. We are the proud grandparents of their children, Sara and Daniel, who are now University students. Santos had two sisters and two brothers and all of them have children. When Barbara married Santos we automatically became members of a Familia Grande. Marge and I have made twelve trips to Spain. Most often his parents, Antonio and Dolores, have a party for all of us—twenty or so. Every time we leave Dolores has tears in her eyes; she's afraid that she will never see us again. During my college teaching career I was Foreign Student Advisor at Coalinga Community College. At the College of San Mateo I became Immigrant Student Advisor and offered a course in American Institutions for Foreign Students. Think the Cosmo experience meant something to me? – “Ya lo creo!”
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