I was born in 1944 in Sciacca, Sicily.

I love Sicily. I’d live there 6 months of the year in my home town if I could. It is a well held secret. It is gorgeous. I was there three months ago. I had to go bury my dad in Italy. That’s where he wanted to be buried. Two years ago I had him cremated and three months ago was the first opportunity to give him another job.

Here’s a picture of you and your sister standing in front of your house in. It is carnival. There are bullet holes in the background. I’m there dressed up like Abe Lincoln. The house was 500 or 600 years old. It looks the same but older now.

My father was an American citizen who got caught in the war in 1938 and couldn’t leave Sicily until 1948. He wanted to take me with him back to the US. I was 5 years old and my dad was 42. My mother stayed behind with my other siblings. She had children of her won previously.

I was born out of wedlock. My mother was married previously to a man that was really not a good person. My father hired my mother to be a housecleaner. He was a developer in Sicily. He had this house and he was caught in Italy because of the war, and couldn’t come back. My mother was taking care of his home and he started giving her money to help her with her family with the previous husband. In the meantime, he was brutalizing her. He and he complained to the authorities, and eventually they put him in jail. My dad took them in because he felt sorry for them

The Italian government and the Catholic Church didn’t allow for divorce. And even though her husband was in prison, there was no contact for years. Eventually my dad wanted to marry her. After we were in the US, the question came up how I was a son to my father, and there is no name on my birth certificate from my mother. He knew that the only way that he could get me into the US was by disavowing the fact that my mother didn’t exist.

Bu in the meantime, I was born Angelo Grova, father Raymond Grova, mother unknown. I got an American passport because my father was a US citizen, and I was on his passport when we arrived in the US. About a year later, my dad wanted to go back to Italy. What they discovered at the American Consulate was that my mother wasn’t recognized on my birth certificate. So they suspected hanky-panky and they tried to fix this “problem.” The figured that the law in Italy would not allow me to be declared an American citizen that I would never be allowed to go back if I went back with my father. I would have lived the rest of my life in Sicily.