My father was born in Campbell. But at sixteen years of age his father had ten acres of grapes in Campbell. He was a bricklayer in San Francisco. He and his cronies would come down to Campbell and party every week and then go back to San Francisco and work all week. They were hard workers and hard drinkers.

When prohibition came in they told my father that he could only make so many gallons of wine, and that wasn’t enough. I think it was only about 200 gallons of wine per family per year.

So my grandfather sold the ranch, packed the family up and went back to Belgium. They needed a reverse migration back to Belgium. Because the kids were all California – born, they did not acclimate very well to Belgian weather. Everyone got sick. It’s very wet and damp over there, so they decided to move to Bordeaux. My father lived there for sixteen years. He met my mother there, and they married.
My mother was six months pregnant with me when the threat of the German invasion came up. Because he was a U.S. citizen, my father decided to move the whole family back to America. I was born three months after they arrived, so I was a native – born Californian, but transplanted from Bordeaux. This was in September of 1938.

My aunt and my grandmother and grandfather were on the last boat to leave La Havre. They left port, when out to sea, and were stopped and boarded by The German U- boat. The Germans decided that this was a passenger vessel only, and let everyone go.

So that was the last leg of the Bricmont family coming back to the United States.

At home our native tongue was French. When I started school I spoke no English. My mother was still picking up English during this time, so my brother and I spoke French at home.

We went back to France in 1950 as a family. But my mother had left her mother, her father, and three sisters behind. She never really spoke much about this. My mother passed away three or four years ago now. I still have two aunts back in France plus a half – dozen cousins, plus nieces, nephews.

I don’t get back as often as I would like; I’m hoping to make the trip next summer. I never learned to read or write French but I could speak.

So that’s how we get back to California. I was a first generation Californian on one side of my family and second – generation Californian on the other side of my family.

My wife’s side of the family came over in 1880. Her grandmother, who died at 102, was born in San Francisco in 1898. So that makes my daughter the fourth generation Californian on that side of the family. That side of the family was all Italian until the time I got there.

We lived and worked in the agricultural economy of the Santa Clara valley. We picked fruit, cut apricots. It was the valley of the heart’s delight. As a kid I can remember driving along Blossom Hill road, the valley in full bloom. You could smell the sweet, thick scent of the flowers, and the whole valley was carpeted in white.