Mrs. Hanabeck

I am looking at an extract of my grandfather's birth registration. Thomas Alexander was born in Paisley, Scotland on November 21st, 1885. He was the son of John and Mary Alexander. John was a journeyman iron turner, which meant he machined iron and other metals. They were young, maybe in a bad spot – they married just three months before Thomas was born – and they were poor. They likely lived in a tenement like the one in the photo above, one of the few remaining Victorian-era tenements in Paisley.

Paisley was known as a thread industry town (the Paisley pattern is named for it) and a brick-making center, in addition to iron and steel. It was a smokey, hard place and while some people got rich off the mills of Paisley and nearby Glasgow, the John Alexanders of Paisley did not and never would.

So, when my grandfather was a boy, John and Mary packed him up, along with a few belongings, stepped aboard a ship, and sailed across the Atlantic Ocean.

Meanwhile, my grandmother's family, including her two parents and her older sisters, boarded another ship in Copenhagen, Denmark and made the same journey. Grandma, Johanna Petersen, would be born shortly after the family arrived.

The Petersen girls were musical (a talent that skipped my generation, much to my dismay), and good singers, and so grandma went into vaudeville. She appeared with Sophie Tucker, which, today, would be a little like saying she appeared with Taylor Swift. I have a makeup mirror inscribed to her from her fellow vaudevillians: "Butler, PA 1914."

Family lore – the story told by my grandmother, at least – had it that Thomas Alexander, a bit of a rogue by this time, walked by the Petersen house in Cleveland where the family was out on a porch making music, pointed at Johanna and said "I'm going to marry that one." He'd already been married at least once, but was apparently ready to do it again. And so they married.

My father, Robert Alexander, was born in 1921. Sophie Tucker sent a baptismal dress. He was a first-generation American.

He loved Cleveland, then one of the largest cities in the country and a manufacturing powerhouse. And one of the reasons he loved Cleveland was the people who populated his neighborhood, a lot of working class immigrants. My grandfather was a tool-and-die maker. He'd worked in the early auto industry, then in an independent tool-and-die shop. The people around my dad did similar work.

They were Czechs, and Hungarians, and Poles, a few Italians, and a few Black kids. Mrs. Hanabeck (I am not sure of the correct spelling) lived next door and she made potica, a kind of sweet walnut loaf popular among Slovenians and other eastern Europeans during holiday times. Mrs. Hanabeck always gave a warm slice to my dad.

As a kid, I heard about Mrs. Hanabeck every Christmas time.

Here's another story I heard from my dad. I heard it so often, in fact, that I came to believe it formed an important part of his sense of right and wrong. He joined the army during World War II, in part because he was classified 1A by his local draft board and he figured he was going either way, so he might as well volunteer.

He was sent to an army camp just outside of Atlanta, Georgia. It was the first time he'd ever been to the South, the first time he'd been much of anywhere. Soon after arriving, while wearing his uniform, he stepped outside the camp gates with a pass in his pocket. He was heading into the city for a good time. He caught a city bus when it stopped at the gate, as did a few other soldiers, including a young Black man from Detroit who sat down next to my dad.

The driver, seeing where the Black soldier sat, got up out of his seat behind the wheel, walked to my father's seat, and ordered the Black soldier to the back of the bus. The Black soldier objected. The driver put the palm of his hand on a .45 holstered at his hip.

My father told this story almost to the day he died and it always ended the same way: "He had on the same uniform I did."

We have long been cursed with unreasoning nativists and racists. The Immigration Restriction League was formed by several Harvard men, prominent Brahmins, in 1895 when my grandfather was ten years old and still in Paisley. "During the past decade," one league pamphlet declared around 1913, "there have come to this country from abroad each year nearly one million human beings whose blood is to be mixed with ours in the production of the 'American race.' Yet infinitely more care was taken in the selection of the few cattle which were imported for breeding purposes in this same period than anyone thought of taking in the case of these millions of men and women and children. Our public health is being well protected against diseased cattle, but we have not as yet done nearly as much as we should to guard against the far greater danger that lies in bad human blood."

Today, such nativists and racists hold high public office and say identical things. JD Vance has sided with people who don't want neighbors who are different from they are, or speak a different language. But Mrs. Hanabeck, and all of the other immigrant neighbors in Cleveland, made my dad's life bigger, and richer, and his witnessing of racism in action taught him a valuable lesson about what he was about to fight for.

I am a second generation American. I am a first generation college graduate. My story is an immigration story. It's the best kind of American story. It's a story Alex Pretti and Renee Good, and all those amazing people in Minneapolis believe in because they know, like my dad knew, that they're bigger and richer, their community is bigger and richer, and their nation is bigger and richer with all kinds of people in them.