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A Polish-Colombian ancestry
By Ronald Kule of Sales Training Services, Inc.
I may be the only Polish-Colombian ever, at least the only one I will ever meet!
You see, my Dad was son of Polish immigrant stock that had arrived in America through Ellis Island in New York and migrated to the coal-mining hills of the Wyoming Valley of Pennsylvania, to a sleep town called Glen Lyon. He was the youngest of 15 sibling who gorwing up observed the trials and tribulations of coal miners eking out livings for their families from work deep under the surface of the Earth.
It was pre-union days that gave way to the struggles of organized labor that eventually shaped my Dad's political views to which he clings today, but that is not how I became who I am.
Dad, like many others and his brothers, was called to duty by his honor when the Pacific theater was opened on Pearl Harbor Day, December 7, 1941. The family name, Sekulski, would never be the same once the Navy got a hold of it.
It was common in those days for enlisted men with European names to see the mslashed into letters that would fit on a badge and be easily promounced by Sargeants and other officers not inclined to care about the past of their new recruits.
So it was that "Sekulski" forever after was dislodged for a newer, shorter moniker, "Kule." (I today often use this ruse to relax my sales prospects: "Yeah, my family name was Sekulski, but I was always Kule!" And the laughs always come no matter how many times I use that line.
Dad was selected for the Secret Service and stationed in Bogota, Colombia where messages from the highest offices in America - and I do mean the very highest - were encoded and decoded for traffic with the Pacific fleet.
There's not a lot my Dad can tell me about what really went on in his office there on a daily basis; he is sworn to secrecy to his death, but what he has told me is very interesting.
However, again I digress from my cultural bent.
It's when the local flower shop comes into the story that things get to the point.
On breaks from his post my Dad would visit with a friend, a female friend who later would marry the famous conductor, Leonard Bernstein, a particular flower shop. It was in this shop he first saw Beatriz Videla de Mallarino, eldest daughter of Vice Counsel from Chile, Humberto Videla. And he was at once smitten.
Turns out that his friend was a mutual friend with Beatriz, and she noticed that her males friend, Bernie Kule, had an eye for her friend.
Well, what ensued were several "chance" encounters at the flower shop, for whenever Beatriz was to visit the florist again a phone call would come in to the attache's office for Bernie Kule, and he would beg absence for a short while to visit the florist which was not that far away from his post that he couldn't walk to it.
Chance meetings led to formal rendezvous, always chaparoned by their mutual female friend, which eventually led to meeting the disapproving family - after all, Bernie Kule was just an American, not one of their kind and evidently and apparently not from the same moneyed class that considered friends.
Long story short here...guy meets and gets the girl, convinces her of his love for her, girl goes to the yarn and marries the "gringo" over the not-so-veiled protests of her parents who had admonished her with, "Marry the gringo and you do not get the money!"
We didn't grow up rich, although perhaps my treasure is that I have inherited dual citizenship by being the only child of the eventual eight they had, who was born in Bogota, Colombia! Thus, I am that rarity: a Polish-Colombian. (You see, with Latins they say it's in our blood...and I DO feel an attachment to my first country, Colombia, despite almost all of my over 60 years living and working in America.
I thank you for the read. |
http://salestrainerkule.wordpress.com
Beatriz with an unknown friend...before Dad.
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