Against All Odds I Did It...... Why Can't You!!: The American Dream is Available to All of Us - Treasure it: Don't Let it Slip Away! It may be your only chance.

By Armando LaChina

Since my arrival in the US in late 1954, I lived, worked, and was educated in the greatest city of the world, New York City. Twenty years later while managing the most exclusive tennis club of Manhattan, I had the winter off that made me head south to Florida and the sun shine. It was only a few days after that I learned about the construction of the largest complex of tennis and living quarters in Fort Lauderdale, a large city north of Miami. The Florida weather and magnificent amenities of the club made it impossible to resist, so I bought an apartment there.Fifty years later, I am still living there where in 1988, I made it my only home. The book describes the pain to say goodbye to the city that saw my second birth and for which I nurtured still much nostalgia for the years I happily spent there. Now, after many vicissitudes, I am still happily living at the Lauderdale Tennis Club. Monika McGowan, my companion, a Colombia University graduate, who throughout the seven years in the writing of this book was an indispensable help. I take this opportunity to thank her for her contribution. As far as the book is concerned, I hope that the contents in it will inspire people who create insurmountable obstacles rather than looking at the opportunities before them. Those who can change their negative view can then achieve their ultimate goals.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Nov 3, 2022
• ISBN: 9781662405778

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Against All Odds I Did It…… Why Can't You!!

The American Dream is Available to All of Us – Treasure it: Don't Let it Slip Away! It may be your only chance.

Armando LaChina

Copyright © 2020 Armando LaChina

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING, INC.

Conneaut Lake, PA

First originally published by Page Publishing 2020

ISBN 978-1-6624-0578-5 (hc)

ISBN 978-1-6624-0577-8 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

The Beginning

All Together at Last

Preparations for the Future

Onto New Discovery

The Leap: From Factory to Office Worker, from Disabled to Professional Athlete

Women and Love

The Return to Italy and the Friendship with Lino Dussi

The Olivetti, the Master, Marriage, and Breakdown

The End of the Thirteen Years of School and the Beginning of my Tennis Career

Manager of the Buffalo Tennis Center

A Gamble That Was Worth It and the Mishaps with Horse Racing

The Town Tennis Club

Susan Folger Hanger

Vacation in Argentina

An Invitation Not Accepted and One More Time I Found Myself Alone Again

The End of What I Loved and What Cannot End: Susan, the Town Tennis, and Manhattan

The Joyful Years with Betiz

Two Economic Giants Betrayed Us

Betiz Enters the Workforce

The Fall of Stock Market and the Danger of the Declining Values of America

9/11/2001, the Fraud of Banks, and Felice’s death

The Tango, the Tennis, and the Drama with Betiz

Can Man Prove the Existence of God?

Gabriele and His Family, Tilapia Farm, Thievery

Dedication

To all who I have loved, who in each stage of my life have sustained me to achieve my aspirations.

A special mention to Monika McGowan whose contribution was invaluable in producing this book. Although the translation was done by me, I must confess that after 60 years of studying this beautiful language, Monika was always patient enough to correct my spelling errors. She gave me the confidence that the ultimate work would be done without faults. With much appreciation I thank Monika for her generous help.

From the top of the Everest of my eighty-one years, I’ve looked down…and I’ve written. This is the title of the original Italian version of this book.

Chapter 1

The Beginning

Before my arrival, a wonderful family was awaiting me; three brothers and a sister embraced me together with my father and mother. My father, orphan since he was a child, grew up with an elder brother, and both of them took on the burden of providing their two sisters and mother as their father would have done. As a result, he grew to be a strong and hardworking man. He met my mother, a rich family’s daughter, while he was a soldier serving in Syracuse. She was working at the family business, and it was there that they met and eventually married. Shortly after, my father, Pietro, and my mother, Grazia Fichera, emigrated from my mother’s hometown of Syracuse, the most ancient city in Sicily, to Benghazi, second most important city in Libya, an Italian colony since 1912.

Libya, Ethiopia, and Eritrea were recent acquisitions by the surging imperial Italy. Under the dictatorship of Benito Mussolini, Italy wanted to transform those lands into an extension of the Italian territory. Huge investments were poured into Libya to bring that country into the twentieth century in the attempt to seduce Italians to emigrate and live there. Libya is a vast territory at the north of the African continent, bordering Egypt and Tunisia and the Sahara Desert. At the time of the Italian conquest, it was a big desert of which 5 percent was inhabited. The discovery of oil was made after the end of the Second World War, right after the country was declared an independent nation. My father was a builder. There he found employment with the government where he worked for fourteen years constructing government, military, and civil buildings. On his own, he built six apartments, one for each child, anticipating the day when they would become adults with their own family. His dream was to live there with his children. Nevertheless, destiny betrayed him. All was lost as a result of the war.

In 1941, Italy, allied with Germany, was at war against England and France. The focus of the war at this time was in the north of Africa for the control of the Suez Canal, which was under British rule. As the British army were advancing toward Benghazi, my father was ordered to evacuate and go to Tripoli which was still in the hands of the Italian government. The nocturnal aerial bombardments had already conditioned my family that leaving Benghazi was their only option. Nightly, we left our home to seek safety, waiting out the end of the bombing and spend the night in the air-raid shelters. It was a terrifying siege. I was five years old, and I remember well the night runs with my family under enemy fire. At that time, in that war, innocent victims were in the frontlines as well. Indiscriminate bombing by the British spared no one, only the lucky survived.

As a government employee, my father was provided with a truck and a driver to evacuate the family across the desert to Tripoli. The order was so urgent as not to leave us more than a couple of hours before departure. We left with what we had on, leaving behind everything my father had built over the fourteen years he had lived there. He would never return! With our driver, we followed a military convoy toward Tripoli, capital of Libya. I, my four brothers, a ten-year-old sister, and my parents began a journey of about 1,000 km across the infinite Libyan Desert, under the unending threat of British airplanes shooting on us. This desert is part of the Sahara. The road we covered was the only way to reach our destination, which had practically remained in the state our workers had to abandon because of the daily bombardments. Driving on roads full of sand and potholes made by bombs made our going a constant stop and go, which lengthen the trip by many weeks. Our miraculous journey lasted a month, and eventually we made to our destination safe and sound, only by the will of God.

I wanted to describe the reason why we were attached to a military convoy exposed us to a danger of being killed for the wrong reason. Military engineers, the detachment where my father was working, was a military government wing that was responsible for the country defense. The truck we were given followed a military convoy of hundreds of military vehicles which were evacuating toward Tripoli, still in Italian’s hands. We were attacked by British airplanes every day, and the military convoy was attacked with bombs and machine-gun fire. The pilots had a perfect vision from the sky, and they could bomb us at will. During one of those raids, one airplane dove toward our truck, ready to shoot. My father and my eldest brother, Felice, were hastening to pick up the younger children to get off the truck when suddenly the airplane climbed up again and machine-gunned the truck ahead that was transporting Italian soldiers. The presence of the children and the good heart of the English pilot saved us from sure death. Telling all the mishaps of this epic journey would stretch this book to a length that honestly was not my intention.

Tripoli, the city that should have given us shelter for a brief period, necessary to throw the English invader out of Benghazi, ended up being another trap: it ended in enemy’s hands too, and we had to run away one more time back to Italy by air. It was a lethal blow for my father: fourteen years of sacrifice in order to give his family the comforts that destiny had denied him since he was a teenager when he lost his parents. Those years in Africa, in a totally different and hostile country, were supposed to be the real reward for a man who had given up his youth without ever allowing himself a rest. Even so, I didn’t remember him complaining about such an unexpected loss. My father would never return to Africa. On leaving, he gave our Arab servant the keys to the house, hoping that we would soon return to it. Thirty-three years later, they met; that servant was able to find my father who was now living in Syracuse. The servant was seeking consent to buy my father’s property; the deal was closed, and that last act ended the tragic story of our lives in Libya.

My family went back to where many years earlier they had sailed from. My grandparents put us up reluctantly, for a period, right after our arrival in Sicily. The idea of being back in our native country gave us a momentary feeling of safety while danger and death were elsewhere. This pause in the war was temporary. In December 1941, Japan made the biggest mistake of their history. Suddenly, without any provocation, the Japanese empire stroke a mortal blow to American naval fleet anchored in the port of Pearl Harbor, an American territory, in an attempt to nullify the sea power of the United States in the Pacific Ocean. The day after, the United States declared war on Japan and their allies, Germany and Italy. So the conflict became worldwide. With America entering the war, Italians and Germans were defeated in Northern Africa, and the war theater moved into Europe, where on July 9, 1943, the American and English navy invaded Sicily.

Before those events, night airplanes came to bomb the harbor of Syracuse in order to weaken any possible resistance in their landing. We were living three hundred meters from the harbor. Every night, since 1941, we had to go to the air-raid shelter to protect ourselves from the bombs that were falling very close to our house. Air bombardments caused many deaths and fires, creating panic among people. Worried, my father decided to rescue most of our family by sending us to North Italy where there was no war action yet. When we left for the north, my brother, Pippo, was fifteen years old, my sister Erminia was twelve, Umberto was nine, and I, who was the youngest, was five years old. My oldest brother, Felice, who was seventeen, and Vittorio, who was two, stayed with my parents. We left from Syracuse and moved to Central Italy to the region of Emilia Romagna. Our school was on the wonderful Adriatic coast in the province of Rimini, where the fascist government had built children schools for summer vacation. After the loss of Libya, those schools were assigned exclusively to the children of families who had to evacuate from Africa.

It was now that I became the main protagonist of this story. I remember to this day the panic that overcame me when my father hugged and kissed me goodbye. I was left in a small, hospital-like room, devoid of any human warmth that seemed to me more like a tomb. I cried my eyes out, then like every child, I fell asleep, maybe so as not to think how lonely I’d become, without realizing how that would have been my destiny for the next four years. Winter passed, and the beauty of spring in that enchanting place by the coast made me forget who I was. My brothers and Erminia had been assigned to schools suited for their ages, and we had no contact. Like other children, I used to spend my time playing on the sand or at the sea. The name of the village where our school was is Igea Marina. I think I was there less than one year. I don’t remember receiving letters from my parents or my brothers from that fateful day when I arrived. The common destiny of other children bonded us together and made us feel neither different nor abandoned. We understood that Italy was at war, and personally, I had already lived that reality, which I had not forgotten yet even if at the moment we were living in peace.

Nevertheless, on putting an end to that idyllic life, one afternoon, suddenly, while we were playing on the beach, two airplanes from opposite sides machine-gunned each other. The war that seemed to be distant from us abruptly reared its ugly head. In that precious and peaceful quiet, we heard war only during the radio news in which Mussolini kept on glorifying the great noble achievements of our armies, which were decimating our enemies in battle. As an adult, I came to know that all that propaganda was nothing but lies. Mussolini wanted us to believe that victory was only a matter of time. Nevertheless, truth was different. As Russia and Germany invaded Poland, Hitler then, after splitting that country with her ally, decided to betray her former partner, sending hundreds of thousand soldiers to invade Russia. In the meantime, Mussolini allied with Hitler, fearful of getting nothing from the spoils of victory, which seemed imminent in Europe, decided to enter the war attacking France and invading Greece, thinking it would be an easy morsel.

However, after months of fighting, Hitler had to come to the aide of Mussolini, who was about to experience another shameful defeat. In that conflict, thousands of Italian soldiers sacrificed themselves uselessly in the name of Italy. I learned about those historical facts only sixty-five years later when I was on vacation in Italy and I read a book about the Italian war with Greece. Although I’ve been very keen on the history of the western world, I have kept my distance from learning the details of the Italian role in that tragic conflict. One of the moments that often made me feel very embarrassed was when Americans denigrated me, reminding me how little honor Italy gained during the Second World War.

Our mass surrendering on the African northern front gave Americans the chance to laugh at us, saying, What’s the shortest book ever written? The book of Italian heroes during the Second World War! That’s not true. Soldiers who were sent to certain defeat, not fit to fight properly armed, without suitable support, of course, would ultimately succumb. As regards heroes, our men excelled in the Greek campaign and in their noble achievements as partisans. They substantially fought to throw Germans out from our territory and in catching Mussolini while he was trying to escape and afterward punishing him for the destruction that his madness had caused. For the record, Mussolini and his lover, Claretta Petacci, were murdered by