Introduction

     My father has never been one to talk excessively about himself, but as my brother Alan, my sister Jean and I grew up, occasionally something would remind him of an event in his life, and he would share it with us. Sometimes these took the form of the classic, parental "When I was your age I had to. . ." speech that nearly every child hears, but often they were fascinating glimpses of other times and distant places.
     A couple of years ago, my sister Jean began pestering Dad to write these stories down. I don't when the word "autobiography" was first used, but it soon became clear that something more than a collection of anecdotes was afoot. After the family read the first draft, we barraged Dad with requests for missing tales. "What about the submarine factory?," "What about all your trips to Cuba?" and so on. He would shrug in exasperation and complain that the book was getting too long but he did add some of the stories.
     In 1918, as my newborn father lay in his crib, Civil War veterans were reading in the papers about the ongoing carnage of World War I, which was to claim thirty-seven and a half million lives before the armistice that November. A biplane carried a sack of letters into the air, beginning the first airmail service only 15 years after the Wright brothers flew at Kitty Hawk. It was the year that RCA began the first regular radio broadcasts. That year, a teenage Charlie Chaplin made Shoulder Arms. Irving Berlin had a hit song with Yip Yip Yaphank. America was two years away from Prohibition and the Roaring Twenties. Women did not have the right to vote.
     Now we are at the other end of the 20th Century. It was a century that may have seen more death from war than all the rest of history. Science has peered into the world of the sub-atomic, unlocked the mysteries of DNA and discovered thousands of new questions. Jet planes carry travelers above the seas where passenger liners once plied the waves at the speed of a horse gallop. Charlie Chaplin is available on digital video. Humans have walked on the Moon.
    At the end of that Century of Change, my father sat down at the keyboard of his computer to tell his story. This book is the result.

Bruce Poropat

© Cesar Poropat, 2000