ALAN writes:

Western Europeans are now fleeing into Hungary to escape from the tyranny of diversity-and-multiculturalism imposed upon them by their governments.  Sixty years ago it was the other way around:  Families were fleeing out of Hungary to escape from the tyranny of Communism.  I came to know one such family.  They would find rich irony in that historic reversal.

One day in or about 1961, a new boy appeared in my class at St. Anthony of Padua parochial school in south St. Louis.  He and I were the same age but he was a little bigger than me and he spoke two languages, while I was still learning to deal with one.

I can’t recall precisely how we became friends.  Perhaps he asked me for advice or perhaps our teacher encouraged us to become acquainted because she knew I was a good pupil who wouldn’t steer him wrong and because his family lived only a block away from mine.

My new friend’s name was Leslie. Some fellow students taunted him because when speaking to his younger brother, he spoke in his first language: Hungarian. It sounded strange, of course, and some boys believed (wrongly) that they were talking about them when in fact they were talking only about family or personal matters.

Whatever they talked about did not bother me.  I saw no point in taunting them.  I was a loner of sorts, quiet, obedient, an only child, and somewhat naïve. Leslie and his younger brother treated me right, so I did the same in return.  Thus we became friends.  On some days we walked home from school together.  His mother had an appointment at some doctor’s office whose whereabouts were a complete mystery to her.  So my mother offered to drive her there. They became friends.

Leslie’s parents and their four children were one of tens of thousands of families who fled from Hungary in 1956 because they preferred to go on living rather than be tyrannized or murdered by the Communist goons who reasserted their power in response to the short-lived Hungarian Revolution. 

Their journey out of Hungary and into the safety of Austria was made partly by train, partly on foot and partly by motorcycle:  A family of six and the driver on one motorcycle.

Like other families fleeing from Communist-run Hungary, Leslie’s family were accepted into the U.S. as refugees in strict accordance with immigration and naturalization laws and on the condition that they would abide by American laws.

“The English language is the most important tie that binds us together as a nation,” Phyllis Schlafy wrote in 2001.  Indeed, that premise was implicit in American law in the 1950s.  That was why learning to speak English and adapting to the American way of life were required from immigrants or refugees like those Hungarian families.

A woman whose family had come to St. Louis from Hungary decades earlier recalled growing up in the 1950s:  “Every time I asked my father to teach me some Hungarian, he told me I did not need to know Hungarian.  ‘We live in the United States and we speak English,’” he told her.  [Emilie Victoria Fagyal, The Fagyal Family from Merk, Hungary, St. Louis: 2013, p. viii]

Along with many other such families, Leslie’s family came to St. Louis from Camp Kilmer, New Jersey.  A Hungarian priest in St. Louis welcomed such families to the city and helped them to get settled.  An initial step in the Americanization of such refugees was being taught The Star-Spangled Banner.

“St. Louis welcomed its first refugees from Red terror in Hungary,” the St. Louis Globe-Democrat reported on Dec. 2, 1956.  “As eight immigrants left their train, they heard the United States national anthem ringing through the Union Station concourse, sung by several hundred Hungarian-American welcomers.”

Note carefully that that was at a time when Americans were confident and proud of their identity and when the U.S.A. was the envy of the world.

What did the American flag mean to citizens living in Hungary under the tyranny of Communism?

In 1949, “the Communists sentenced my father’s father to ten years hard labor for having a small American flag in his possession,” wrote American professor Peter Schramm.  “At his ‘trial’, he was asked why he had the flag.  Was he a spy?  He replied that it represented freedom better than any other symbol he knew, and that he had a right to have it….”  [Peter Schramm, “Born American, but in the Wrong Place”, 2006, here]

Because the Fabian/Communist playbook had not yet launched its massive propaganda campaign for multi-culti and open borders, there was no reason in 1957 for citizens like Ann Corcoran to undertake a refugee resettlement watch. The Hungarian refugees were not moochers or criminals.  They did not agitate for “social change” or welfare handouts.  They did not make cities or neighborhoods unsafe. They adapted to the American way of life. They learned English. They respected the American flag. The priest said about them: “It is a victory for them that they are alive.”  [St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Nov. 2, 1956]

Leslie and I were altar boys, but we were no angels. Like all boys, we had occasional disagreements and exchanged boyish insults. But a day or two later, we forgot all about it and became friends again.

In 1961-‘63, all of us piled into the car for Sunday afternoon drives to flower gardens and Catholic shrines near St. Louis, like Our Lady of the Snows in Belleville, Illinois, and the Black Madonna Shrine near Eureka, Missouri.  Our mothers exchanged Christmas cookies. On many evenings, we set up a card table and played Canasta.

Learning English was easier for the children than for their parents.  At moments during those Sunday drives, their parents struggled to find the right word or phrase.  If perchance they chose a wrong word, it sounded quite funny.  But they had a good sense of humor and laughed with all the rest of us at their innocent mistake.

They also had a firm understanding of proportion and perspective.  Like many others in their generation, they carried with them what Edmund Burke called the “moral chains” upon desire.  Invariably they were modest, unassuming, grateful for things many Americans took for granted.  They were incapable of ingratitude.  Liberty for them was not an empty word or abstraction; it had concrete meaning. They could live as they chose, at their expense; speak freely; come and go; have more food and clothing available to them than in Communist-run Hungary—and did not have to worry about government harassing or persecuting them. To grow up taking such things for granted is one thing.  It is quite another never to have known such things and then one day to see them right there in front of you.

To borrow a metaphor used by James Stewart in his role as Jefferson Smith in the classic 1939 motion picture “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington:” For most of the Hungarian refugees, I imagine that their journey from Communist Hungary to American liberty was as if they had just gone through a long, dark tunnel and then emerged into the promise of a bright new day.

Leslie’s father had once intended to become a priest and even began his studies toward that goal.  In years long after, I said to his daughter: It is a good thing he changed his mind, else we would not be having this conversation and Leslie and I would never have met.

His mother was an excellent cook and took deserved pride in her Hungarian dishes and delicacies.  It seemed she was always in the kitchen, cooking or baking or planning the next meal.

Their family lived one block from the Catholic hospital where I was born and where my mother read stories to sick children during the World War II years.  After supper on some evenings in 1961, Leslie and I would stand outside his house and talk with their neighbor Bob as he worked on his light-blue MG sports car.  We never asked or expected him to take us for a ride.  It was enough just to stand there and talk with him and admire a little sports car that appealed to two 12-year-old boys whose esthetic appreciation of such cars had been inspired by the Corvette that Martin Milner and George Maharis drove throughout the USA every week in television’s “Route 66.” Bob had the car, but its magic lay in our imagination.  That was as wild as it got on that street in 1961.  At that same location in 2012, a man was shot dead and a woman shot three times in the back, and in 2015 a man was shot multiple times and left dead in the street. Unimaginable in 1961. The difference is as simple as black and white.

At one point they lived across from a tall bank building and joked about walking over there some evening to empty the vault. Then they lived one block from the Little Sisters of the Poor Home for the Aged.

On summer days and evenings, Leslie and his younger brother Jimmy and I walked along a busy street where there were three big stores:  A Sears department store, Schenberg’s Market, and a Ben Franklin dime store.  We walked inside to take advantage of the air-cooled interior, rode the escalators in Sears, and reconnoitered the candy department in the dime store.  If we walked to the Kroger grocery to get something for their mother, we always paused at the window of the Ozark Pet Shop to look at the birds, puppies, and aquariums of tropical fish.

In the half century since then, our school closed, the hospital was demolished, the bank moved away, the Little Sisters moved away and their building was demolished, Sears was demolished, and the other stores are long gone. In their absence, that neighborhood is now enriched by shootings, burglaries, armed robberies, nail spas, hair-braiding shops, spray paint vandalism, windows with Venetian blinds bent into heretofore-unimagined contortions, and people whose idea of shopping is to drive a vehicle through display windows at 3 a.m. (to avoid the crowds) and then speed off with whatever merchandise they select.

At a time when American television offered programs the whole family could enjoy, Leslie, Jimmy, and I talked about our impressions of “The Donna Reed Show,” “The Danny Thomas Show,” “The Real McCoys,” “The Rifleman,” and “Sing Along with Mitch.” Wholesome family comedy, good humor, moral uplift, and cheerful music. Not a hint of decadence or profanity in any of them.

On late-night television, Leslie and I had seen movie characterizations of English butlers, some of them named James. It seemed only proper to us that a younger brother should act as a servant.  So in a stroke of creative genius, we borrowed the name James and embellished it with a ridiculous pronunciation as Chimes.  Then we said to Jimmy, something on the order of: Oh, Chimes, would you open the door for us and then bring us a glass of Kool-Aid?  We thought we were funny, and even Jimmy was such a good sport that he played along with it. And how astonishing it is for me to realize that Jim is now older than his father was in those years long past.

Leslie and I walked along the streets in our neighborhood while debating the merits of songs we heard on radio.  We bestowed our seal of approval on Freddy Cannon’s “Palisades Park” and Pat Boone’s funny novelty song “Speedy Gonzales.” Bobby Curtola’s “Fortune Teller” was a song he especially liked in the summer of 1962.  We listened to The Angels’ “My Boyfriend’s Back” and debated which of the trio we favored.  He chose the blonde.  I chose the brunette.  We played baseball.  We played miniature golf.  We visited Italian friends of my mother at their home on a hillside in Collinsville, Illinois, and played with their pet Chihuahua named Pancho.

Sometimes when our parents visited each other and “just talked”, Leslie and Jimmy and I would head downstairs to Bowman’s Delicatessen, sit on stools at the soda fountain, and order Cherry Cokes and a small bag of potato chips. We were thrilled. We thought it was wonderful.

In 1964, their family moved to New York City, where they had relations.  A year later we went to visit them and they took us to Central Park, the Hayden Planetarium, the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, and the New York World’s Fair.  At the Fair, we walked through the Space Park and rode through the General Motors Futurama exhibit several times. How young and optimistic and confident we felt as we walked for hours throughout the fairgrounds. The future seemed to lie before us as welcome and agreeable as those magical warm summer days and evenings that remain evergreen in memory.

One day in summer 1965, Leslie’s father and I walked at leisure through downtown St. Louis and paused to compare impressions of the brand-new Gateway Arch, until the time came for him to board a Greyhound bus that would take him back to New York. Decades afterward, the Gateway Arch must have loomed in his memory as a reminder of good times his family had had in St. Louis, because his daughter told me that late in his life, when he had become frail and must have realized he would not live much longer, he expressed a passionate wish to see the Arch one more time.

Leslie and I shared an ironic sense of humor.  He was almost as goofy as I was.  We exchanged a series of letters in which we addressed vitally important matters like flying saucers, the “Batman” TV show, and the bloody ordeal in the act of shaving.  He signed one of his letters “William Shakespear”.

Five years later, my friend was gone. He died from natural causes at age 23.  In years long afterward, I told his mother and his sister that that was all wrong;  that Leslie had been a much better fellow than I ever was;  and that if there were any justice in this life, our fate would have been for me to die at that preposterously young age and for him to have a long, happy, and productive life.  I regret that that did not happen.

— Comments —

Col. B. Bunny writes:

This weaponization of third-world immigration is pure evil. Ordinary criminal act out of ignorance, sloth, impulse, greed, and mindless hostility but this “diversity” assault is the product of a high intelligence and is nothing less than distilled, shimmering evil. I recently ran across Ben Wattenberg’s comment that “The non-Europeanization of America is heartening news of an almost transcendental quality.” I don’t know his personal history but huge numbers of Jews found safety and opportunity in their new country, America, yet organized Jewry is one of the driving forces for the destruction of America through immigration that is beyond stupid and destructive. Nothing recommends it but Jewish organizations work their destructive agenda, as though the needs of foreigners displaced by wars so vigorously prosecuted under the banner of Israeli arrogance, paranoia and expansion take precedence over the needs of Americans. Prof. Kevin McDonald shows that a more general hostility is at work.

White Americans will never have with the new invaders the experiences that Alan had with his Hungarian friends. I read his story with interest as I spent a year living in the shadow of St. Mary’s Hospital and wondered if that was the hospital to which he referred. When I later attended Washington U. I’d go to movies in the Delmar Loop and ride my motorcycle there to buy fresh donuts from the bakery around midnight. Now that area’s a wall-to-wall set for TV crime movies. The old Soldan High School further east that had been the school for St. Louis society was even then an all-black horror of public education.

Society, to remain healthy, must have some automatic defensive mechanism that’s triggered at the first sign of anarchy. In better times in England, the suits actually did read “the Riot Act” to rioters and then all was well. Here, that mechanism never kicked in. Mayor Daley’s attack on the ’68 Convention rioters was the right thing to do (RTTD) but elsewhere it’s been nothing but surrender. I have to say that this stuff and incessantly contemplating they evisceration of the Constitution, the metasticization of the federal government, the flourishing of AntiFa, and the absolute REFUSAL to close the borders and deport mercilessly all lead me to conclude that where white America is concerned there is no there there. We surrendered without a fight and the lovely, highly educated millennials get excited by such things as student loan forgiveness and openings at Starbucks.

Laura writes:

It is weaponized immigration, but it’s unfair to call the immigrants “invaders.” They are not consciously participating in an invasion.

Also, it is possible to have the sort of positive experience Alan had with immigrants today. Many of them are kind, hard-working and extremely likable. Many are not infected with Marxist entitlement or resentment.

Col Bunny writes:

Yes, such experiences are possible. There are always people in any culture who choose refinement and reason. Kipling personally saw the nobility he described in Gunga Din.

It’s a bit like the joke that 97% if the lawyers make the rest of us look bad.

Some of the nicest people I knew in the Mekong in 1970 were Vietnamese clerks and Cambodian workers. One of our interpreters at a previous camp was said to have taken a bullet for one of the Americans. The uniform ascription of angelic characteristics or satanic ones, depending on one’s favored groups, is a sad thing now. Far better to think of everyone striving to improve and having their imperfections forgiven by merciful fellow humans.

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