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Chapter 2 Starting Grid

      I think this is the greatest and best country in all the world, with its great sunlit spaces and its long long roads, and best of all the roads that are not made yet, and the stories that no one has told because they are too busy living them.

      —Nellie McClung (author and social activist), In Times Like These

Moving on Up

      So exactly how did I find myself in November 2014 tangling with the White House for permission to speak at a New York business conference? Well, it came about because five months before in June 2014 I had become the newest of five commissioners of the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The faraway journey that brought me there is a unique story in its own right.

There is a road in New Jersey that embodies the American experience and my own. Bloomfield Avenue stretches northwesterly away from Newark's gritty asphalt to the lush Watchung Mountains. Laid out in the early 1800s, Bloomfield Avenue was New Jersey's first county road. It arcs across Essex County, linking a series of towns metamorphosing from urban streets peopled by newly arrived immigrants to manicured lawns gracing mansions housing descendants of the Pilgrims.

      Bloomfield Avenue also arcs across my family's history. In the first decade of the twentieth century, my father's maternal grandparents, Loretto Onorio Greco and his wife, Maria Louisa, left the Valle di Comino in the central Italian region of Lazio. They traveled first to Paris and then across the Atlantic and much of the North American continent to the coal mines of Pictou, west of Walsenberg, Colorado. There they gave birth in 1909 to my grandmother, Fiorina, the second child of nine. Eventually the Greco family made its way to Newark's First Ward—then one of the largest Italian immigrant communities in the United States. There Onorio became prosperous as a property developer before returning to Italy.

      While in Newark, the teenage Fiorina met my grandfather, Celestino Fortunato Giancarlo, known as Charlie. He was born in 1903 in Lucca in the Tuscany region of Italy. His parents were itinerant laborers who would journey north each spring to work in northern European cities, mostly as masons and gardeners. Charlie's mother died when he was 12, forcing him to leave school for work. As a result, he never formally learned to read or write. His father remarried an Italian woman living in Paris named D'Agostino and started a new family. In 1921, at age 18, my grandfather and his older brother caught a ship out of Cherbourg for America, where they set to work as laborers in Newark. He never saw his father again.

      In America, Grandpa Charlie worked hard and rose to be foreman of one of the Irish run construction crews that built Newark during its heyday in the 1920s. Losing his job in the Depression, he labored by day as a brickmason and by night as a watchman at Newark's Budweiser brewery. He remained in building construction the rest of his life.

Grandpa Charlie's only child, my father, was born in Newark's First Ward in 1931 and baptized at St. Lucy's Catholic Church, the community's spiritual center. The church is but a few hundred yards from the start of Bloomfield Avenue as it departs Newark. In the early 1940s, Grandpa Charlie followed the avenue to its first stop, Bloomfield Township, where he purchased a newly constructed, two-story, wood-frame house along with the adjoining lot. There he planted tomato plants and fig and cherry trees. He was satisfied in that house and never lived anywhere else.

      Grandpa Charlie exemplified hard work, honesty, and no bullshit. He was a bit rough, but straightforward and loving. He was constant and clear where he stood. He didn't say a lot, but what he said was right. In his mind, a person does what he has to do without complaining or expecting a leg up.

      My father, born Ettore Giancarlo, was far more ambitious. His gaze was much farther up the road. He and my grandmother spent his first years in the provincial town of Sora, Italy, with her prosperous parents and younger siblings. My father was the first grandchild and enjoyed attentive affection. He returned to New Jersey with my grandmother before the Second World War, when he changed his name to its English translation, Hector. As the war ended, he was a high school cadet at La Salle Military Academy, a boarding school on Long Island. He developed into an excellent rifleman and a concert quality violinist. He had good looks and charm and craved excitement, especially the thrill of fast cars that he hoped to afford one day. His marksmanship made him popular, his musical virtuosity got him a college scholarship, and his smile and vitality enthralled more than a few girls, including my (very attractive) mother.

      My mother's sights were also set up the road, much farther along Bloomfield Avenue. She was born Ella Jane Schwarz, the year after my father was born. Like him, her ancestors were immigrants, but of a more educated class. Her paternal grandparents were upright and Germanized Poles, who immigrated to Berlin in the 1800s. Her great-grandfather, Josef Alfons Schwarz, taught pharmacology in the 1850s at the city's renowned Humboldt University. His son Wladyslaw, called Walter, emigrated first to Brooklyn and then Jersey City, where he opened a pharmacy. His first child, Berthold, was born in 1898. Four years later, Walter graduated as a physician from Eclectic Medical College of New York City and saw the birth of his second son, Henry, my grandfather.

Both Schwarz brothers followed their father into medicine. In the case of my grandfather Henry, it was by way of Fordham University and Eclectic Medical College, in Cincinnati, Ohio. There in the 1920s, Henry met and married my grandmother, Florence Klinkenberg, the daughter of a prosperous Ohio building supplier and his Irish-born wife, Ella. The couple soon returned to New Jersey, living in the apartment above his suburban medical practice on what was then called Hudson Boulevard. There, he and Florence had two children, Henry Jr. and my mother, Ella Jane. Like my grandfather Charlie, Henry was hardworking, modest, and content.

      Meanwhile, Henry's older brother Berthold established his office in the center of Journal Square, Jersey City's fashionable downtown. Alongside his medical practice, Berthold served as a part-time health director for Bankers National Life Insurance Company, then one of the largest American