Note to readers: This exploration of my family history is primarily for my kids and kinfolk. I’m posting it in my blog because I’m too cheap to set up a separate website. If you are not among my relatives you probably won’t be interested in this stuff, and that’s fine with me.
In the 1890s the newest immigrants to arrive in Chicago – Hungarians, Italians, Ukrainians and Poles — settled on the Southeast Side because that’s where the factories were. Thousands were employed at the Illinois Central Railroad repair shops, the Pullman Car Works and others. The neighborhood where they lived was called Burnside because a nearby railroad station was named for a Civil War general.
l-r: Uncle Frank Nemeth, Elmer Novak and my grandmother
They made good money and worked up an appetite, those factory guys, and some of their groceries came from my grandfather. Joseph (Jozsef) Hajdu Gasperik trained in Hungary as a butcher and sausage maker, and arrived in Chicago around the turn of the century.
His shop was at 9349-51 S. Cottage Grove Avenue. He arrived in the U.S. in 1903 and married my grandmother, Julia Nemeth, in 1904. The family lived over the store. My mother, Vilma, youngest of three children, was born in 1916.
The Gasperiks in 1910 with sons Frank and Joe
The family prospered: My grandfather owned rental property and an automobile. They spoke Hungarian at home, and my mother did not learn English until she started school. Although most Hungarians were Catholic, the Gasperiks attended a Hungarian Reformed church. (My mother told me she was christened Wilhelmina because the minister did not believe Vilma was a proper Hungarian name.)
The Hungarian community in Chicago stayed fairly small: not for lack of immigrants, but because Hungarians assimilated quickly and were more inclined to intermarry with other ethnic groups than did the Italians, Poles and Lithuanians. So the Hungarian community in Burnside that thrived in my mother’s childhood is largely a memory today.
And they had a car around 1910.
My mother’s oldest brother, Joe, was 13 years older. She was closest to her brother Frank, who was seven years older but died when he was 18. There were relatives nearby, Gasperik and Nemeth cousins whose families had migrated to Chicago.
And there was drama: My grandparents divorced at some point and my grandmother remarried in 1935. Her second husband, John Kristof, died three years later. The store on Cottage Grove Avenue was a casualty of the Depression, and brother Joe married and moved to California. My mother graduated from Fenger High School.
Why classified information is a big deal
It’s been amusing to watch the news coverage of Hillary Clinton’s email woes and apparent lack of understanding of government rules for handling classified information. Especially when politicians and media pundits say it’s not a big deal.
Classified information was a big deal when I was in the Navy, especially when I was assigned to a joint-forces nuclear weapons headquarters in Albuquerque at the height of the Cold War. I needed to show a special pass to get into the building where I worked even though all the guards knew me. Everyone, including the janitor, had a top-secret security clearance.
Everybody was security-conscious because there were consequences. Every night the security force checked the safes and signup sheets, and periodic surprise inspections combed the offices for violations. A serious violation (such as leaving documents out or jotting down a safe combination on a desk calendar) meant losing your security clearance at a minimum, and a quick transfer to, say, the supply depot in Guam.
We knew what to safeguard because we had clear guidance on what information was classified. That’s why Hillary Clinton’s claim that that a document was classified only if it bore specific markings misses the point. Even as a green junior officer I had the tools needed to perform security reviews as part of my job. With enough confidence to walk into my boss’ office once and tell him: “We can’t say this, colonel, it’s classified.” Apparently nobody at the State Department said that to the Secretary of State.
Even with a security clearance, access to information was further limited by a need to know. I did not know specifically what my friends in other departments were doing, and we were careful not to talk shop when we were out on the town. When people asked us what the Navy was doing in Albuquerque we couldn’t tell them, so we made up stories about a subterranean channel under the Rio Grande and a secret submarine base.
Classified information was equally serious aboard ship. Radio codebooks were kept in a safe in weighted bags – to be thrown overboard if the ship faced imminent capture. When one of my roommates needed to read one of the secret intelligence publications in my custody he had to sign for it. Ships’ schedules were technically classified even though the bar hostesses outside our base in Japan seemed to know more than we did.
Classified information is still a big deal for the federal government. Most of the time, anyway. Last year a Naval Reservist was sentenced to probation and a fine for putting classified information on a personal electronic device. And General David Petraeus was convicted for sharing classified notebooks with his biographer/mistress (even though she was a military officer with a security clearance).
So while Hillary Clinton’s disregard of security requirements is no big deal for Democrats, I suspect folks who have actually worked with classified information (unlike media folks and pundits) take the issue a little more seriously.
However, I don’t think a Clinton presidency will put state secrets at risk. Her painstaking effort to hide the Clinton Foundation’s influence on the State Department makes Richard Nixon look like a rank amateur. So Hillary Clinton has the potential to to be the most security-conscious president in history. And there’s a bonus: Her eventual presidential library will be really small – without a shred of evidence.