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A Dramatic Memory on the Eve of Obama’s Election

Published January 10, 2009 family , Politics 1 Comment
Tags: brownsville boys club, civil rights, family, Irving Levine, John Preston Ward, obama

Recently on our family listserve, my grandfather Irving shared an essay memoir he wrote to the Obama campaign. It’s a moving recollection and reflection on his own involvement in the civil rights movement, something I’ve been meaning to write about for a while. After asking to see if he’d be ok with it, I’m now happy to share it with you. Enjoy!

A Dramatic Memory on the Eve of Obama’s Election

Irving M. Levine

One month after the dramatic election of Barack Obama, I celebrated my 79^th birthday with renewed hope and considerable glee. The day, December 7^th, always evokes vivid memories of my 12^th birthday in 1941. There wasn’t much to celebrate, of course, as I sat by the radio, hour-after-hour, hoping and praying that despite massive losses at Pearl Harbor, we might still prevail as a nation. Thank god that we had chosen FDR as our President. His indomitable spirit, inspirational character, and transformational leadership rallied us to victory against truly evil forces seeking to dominate the world.

From those times of dark shadows to today, my life’s journey has been a good and lucky one. Born into poverty, two months after the stock market crash of 1929, I grew up in a neighborhood largely populated by Jews, Blacks, and small enclaves of Italian and Polish families. We lived in the heart of Brownsville, Brooklyn—home to Murder Incorporated—and our fates were up for grabs. For my three brothers and me, poverty and high-crime would not prove to be a knockout blow. A close family, mutual aid, the WPA, and our parents’ good character got us through the worst of times. But for many of my street-corner buddies, their lives went the wrong way. Dozens ended “up the river” or died of drug and gang activities.

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Rediscovering Family History and Heritage via the Interwebs

Published December 29, 2008 family , Politics 4 Comments
Tags: family, history, JohnSantoSr

I remember in the late ’90s when I first figured out that the internet could be used for research, I tried looking up both of my grandfathers to learn more about their civic and political lives. I’ve grown up with my maternal grandfather telling me for years about the work that he did in the civil rights movement, and hearing about my paternal grandfather’s political involvement secondhand. My dad’s father particularly intrigued me, as I never really knew him, but had heard a lot of interesting (and sometimes conflicting) snippets about his political involvement.

But when I looked them up, I came up with scant results. For my maternal grandfather, Irving Levine, this wasn’t really as big a deal, as I was able to go to him directly and hear it from the horse’s mouth. But for my dad’s father, John Santo Sr., the few things I was able to find just brought more questions.

The short story I’d always been told about him was that he was a powerful labor organizer in the US who ended up working for the Hungarian Communist government, and eventually defected from said government after seeing the levels of corruption that existed there. This was the short version, and I’d finally decided that I wanted to look into the long one.

I would search every year or so, and for a long time the only items of interest that came up were websites about L. Ron Hubbard’s FBI files being finally available to the public through the Freedom of Information Act. (For those that don’t know, L. Ron Hubbard is known somewhat infamously for being the father of Scientology.)

The sites had lists of all the recent FBI files with of people with last names starting with H that were released under FOIA sometime in the late ’90s. Obviously, my grandfather’s name had been John Santo, but I’d heard from my family that he had a number of aliases, and it seemed that one of them was Desideriu Hammer, which was listed on these pages. Given the amount I knew about my grandfather, I wasn’t exactly surprised that the FBI had files on him.
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