Since the beginning, America has been a place where people believed in dreams. For 130 years, generation after generation, the tired and poor from every part of the world have taken Lady Liberty at her word and come here to take their chances at making their dreams a reality.
I am the product of those immigrant dreams. My grandparents all came from Italy. Not the Italy we know today, but the southern regions of Italy that had only become part of the unified country in the mid-nineteenth century, was already impoverished by lack of industry or natural resources, and had then been devastated by the first world war. They escaped the dead end, hopeless landscape of their birth and came looking for the American Dream.
But that was part of what they believed the American Dream was about. Overcoming hardship.
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My father’s father, Giuseppe Armentano, was born in Reggio, Calabria which sits at the very tip of what they call the “boot” of the Italian Peninsula. His mother was Maria Fazio from Messina, Sicily just across the Messina Strait from Reggio. My mother was also the child of Italian immigrants — her father was born in Bari, a city in the Publia region of Italy, and her mother was from Naples in Campania.
They brought with them the traditions — pasta and gravy on Sundays and seven kinds of fish for Christmas. But they were set on making their children into Americans. They insisted on English being spoken in their homes and they adopted the American traditions. There were incredible distinctions between Italian-Americans and Italians. Their experience was so different because the Italian-Americans, the children of the immigrants that arrived in this country in the aftermath of the Great War, wanted their offspring to be Americans. They wanted them to have the opportunities that Italy could never have afforded them.
It’s hard to imagine now the prejudice that those first generation Italian-Americans faced. They were called “Dagos,” “Wops” and worse. They were hammered into stereotypes and expected to conform to them. To try to break their ties to the stereotypes some Italians changed the way they spelled their names, or at least how they pronounced them, to avoid the telltale vowel sound at the end that meant you were of Italian descent. Children were drilled on diction to try to break their Italian accents.
I feel pride in knowing that I carry the bloodlines of all four of the southern regions of Italy. But for my grandparents, and even my father, they might have taken pride in being Italian, but it was also a hardship.
But that was part of what they believed the American Dream was about. Overcoming hardship. And holding onto dreams. My father, Pat was so smart, so popular, and so enterprising that his brothers and sisters were convinced he was destined to be the first Italian President of the United States. But that wasn’t his dream. His dream, and his gift, was to be an entrepreneur.
He started living that dream at the age of eight when he made up his mind to earn the money to buy his mother an electric refrigerator. Those were the Depression years, my father was born in 1929, and refrigerators were expensive. But he got a shoe shine box and recruited his brother Neil, two years older, to make the nearly two-mile trek with him from home to the bustling street below the Mount Vernon train station. He saved up $175.00 which was just enough to buy his mother that refrigerator less than a year later. And that was his first business.
It isn’t easy — it wasn’t easy when my father struck out on his own almost 50 years ago and it isn’t easy today — but it is possible.
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His second business was Patsems, Inc., which he started out of a tiny garage with no customer list and almost no capital. Through tenacity and hard work, with my mother taking care of the accounting and administrative work, he grew that company to nearly $2 Million in less than 10 years and then more than doubled that when we acquired Paraco Gas in 1979.
Today, following the principles he laid down, as a result of that same work ethic, trial and error, maximizing opportunities, and holding onto the dream, I’ve stepped into his shoes as the CEO of Paraco Gas which now has more than 400 employees and sales of $200 Million a year.
It seems that most of the American Dream stories we’re told today are about brilliant innovators. They’re usually in technology — building internet platforms or applications — or they’re in online sales. And they’re creating something the world has never seen.
But that isn’t the original American Dream. The true American Dream has always been one of character — of building a business on sound principles, creative risk-taking, investing in people, and doing the right thing. And that is how my father built the legacy of Paraco Gas, and how I strive to care for, and grow, that legacy today. We aren’t a company built on trends, fads, or innovative technology. Our product isn’t exciting or sexy. We sell propane.
What we are is exactly what my father intended — a company still working to improve, still investing in people, still creating opportunities where others see problems, still committed to doing the right thing. And those are values and attributes anyone, from any walk of life, can emulate. It isn’t easy — it wasn’t easy when my father struck out on his own almost 50 years ago and it isn’t easy today — but it is possible. And possibilities are all any of us really have to work with anyway.
My father was proud to be born in this country (that’s him with my son and their own “Lady Liberty” above) and he was always grateful for the opportunities that being an American afforded him.
Today I’m raising a glass to my father, the quintessential entrepreneur and proud American. And I’m raising a glass to all of you American Dreamers, wherever you are and whatever your dream.
The story of my father’s legacy and Paraco Gas will be published this year. To be part of the story as we near the launch of the book please follow us on Facebook or twitter.
Originally published on Medium.com
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Photo: Author’s own
What really is the American Dream? http://strengtheningbrandamerica.com/blog/2016/12/what-really-is-the-american-dream/
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