I am Albert J Mora.
CELEBRATION OF BIRTH
On July 25, 1937, Matilde “Tillie” Santillan gave birth to her second child and first daughter Lupe in Saint Catherine Hospital in East Chicago, Indiana, a mile from Inland Steel on the Lake Michigan shoreline and four miles from Chicago’s South Side.
On July 21, 1958, Tillie walked Lupe, carrying me in her tummy, into Saint Catherine. Grandma had become a beloved personality in the community for her political activism and weekly advice column in the Gary Tribune, Tillie’s Corner.
She had announced my imminent arrival in Tillie’s Corner, and no doubt had already delivered my successful birth announcement for the Tribune to release on her notice.
Grandma had called ahead, so the hospital staff were already on DEFCON 5 alert. As soon as they walked into the maternity award, Grandma as always made herself emcee. She directed staff to give Mom the treatment, announced our arrival on the hospital intercom, then had the staff call Inland Steel.
Being a message from Tillie, the mill operator forwarded the call to the superintendent of the 76-inch Hot Strip department, where Dad was running a gantry crane dropping 100-ton loads of steel onto train cars. The foreman ran up and shouted, “It’s a boy! Get outta here!” With mill horns and whistles blasting away, Dad parked the crane, jumped onto the boarding platform, slid down the three-story stair rail like a fireman, and sprinted to the exit.
Dad jogged into the ward, now bustling with staff and arriving guests, in steel mill blues, with his ‘Jimmy’ patch on his shirt, and got the celebrity treatment. He handed Mom flowers, kissed her, waved at me through the glass, and headed home to fill the tub with ice and beer and spend the night celebrating with the gang.
As I sit here 67-years later feeling great, the evidence is that my delivery was a 100%-successful operation.
This was my propitious start. Or so I was told. I wouldn’t remember.
My earliest memory is of Mom’s beautiful green eyes smiling down as she washed me in a hot water tub, wrapped me in a towel, placed me on her enormous bed, dried me off, and tickled my tummy while singing, “Jeepers creepers, where’d you get those peepers, jeepers creepers, where’d you get those eyes.” Mom and I were a loving whole.
If you have ever felt this miraculous connection you can appreciate its profound, lifelong imprint. If you haven’t, let your imagination loose. Love yourself more than you have loved anyone or anything.
GROWING UP
I was followed by two sisters, each a year apart. My toddler memories are of Mom and Dad as an elegant couple who radiated the glamour and beauty of Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball of I Love Lucy fame. Wherever we went, people complimented them and fawned over their three beautifully dressed, beautifully behaved children.
The highlights of my childhood were summer trips to Dad’s hometown, Sahuayo, Michoacán, Mexico, and playing baseball. Sahuayo’s colonial plaza, mountainous backdrop, delicious food, and our loving family, who thrived, made for magical adventures. My baseball heroes were Don Kessinger of the Chicago Cubs and Luis Aparicio of the White Sox. I practiced endlessly by bouncing rubber balls off walls and made Little League All-Star shortstop. My childhood dream was to marry a beautiful girl from Sahuayo, bring her to Chicagoland, and play shortstop for the Sox or Cubs.
Then came the dark ages. Junior high was a communal nightmare. East Chicago drew steelworkers from every corner of the globe, and the resulting ethnic soup—stirred by 1960s social upheaval, teen hormones, and the terror of growing up—turned us into smelly monsters. Even I, whom Mom had nicknamed “Opie” for being a good boy, sometimes needled teachers. My favorite stunt was announcing on day one that I planned to earn an A in every class by scoring a perfect 90 percent and no more. Not that I rattled anyone; they had far better, or rather worse, to deal with. I confess I pulled off lots of close-As, but not by design.
THE MORAS
Sahuayo, Michoacan, Mexico is a small city tucked high in the Sierra Madre mountains 90-minutes from Guadalajara in Southwestern Mexico. The Mora family had come to Sahuayo from Spain in the 1800s and by the 1930s had long thrived as merchants and socialites. Their businesses—a machine shop, leather goods shop, furniture store, and clothing store—produced custom wares and took up half of one side of Sahuayo’s plaza. The Mora hacienda took up the other half—the best real estate in town. During the early-1950s Mexico’s economy modernized, tastes changed, and the Mora enterprise collapsed.
Grandpa Juan sold the family businesses and properties, hired a caravan of trucks packed with a century of possessions, and headed with his wife and ten children for Mexico City, where he was determined to get a fresh start. The move turned out a spectacular disaster. Juan had accepted partial upfront payments for the family assets, bit he never saw another peso. The moving caravan—loaded with French furniture, clothing, art, pianos, and the rest—disappeared on the way to Mexico City. The Moras arrived in the Capital financially and spiritually devastated. This was plight.
The Mora diaspora followed, but Dad stayed.
Dad had made a close friend whose family worked in one of Mexico City’s famous film studios, Tepeyac. Their constellation of stars included Pedro Infante and Maria Felix, Mexico’s version of America’s Frank Sinatra and Katherine Hepburn. Dad started hanging out, running errands and learning the magic that happened behind the camera. Having grown up working hard, Dad made himself useful at every sort of job until the studio was happy to hire him. Dad was duly star-struck and fell in love with every gorgeous actress. Much more, interacting with Mexico’s film royalty was a formative experience for a 15-year-old from a provincial town.
After two years helping craft masterpieces of the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema, Dad came to feel Tepeyac was home. Naturally, the job he really wanted was in front of the camera. He auditioned for many teen parts, but despite his athleticism and good looks, he was never cast. Dad faced two hurdles for growing into a major star. First, Sahuayo had given him a sticky commodity, its irritating accent. Think West Virginy. Dad tried to mask his accent, but you can’t get a Cajun to sound like Humphrey Bogart. That wasn’t the worst of it. The studio’s leading males were all film and radio singing stars. Dad was atonal. To prove the point, he thought he had a great voice!
In his eighteenth year, feeling impatient waiting for his big break, Dad made a bold decision. He had grown up knowing of countless people who had gone to the U.S and thrived, so he decided to check out El Norte for himself. He got a visa, wangled a break from the studio, and climbed a bus heading to the border. If El Norte didn’t suit him, he’d come back with a better chance at landing adult roles.
With instructions in a letter from his Uncle Alejandro in hand, Dad made his way to the bus station in Hammond, Indiana, next door to East Chicago. Alejandro, of whom Dad was fond, picked him up at the station and installed him on a couch. Dad arrived not yet 18, the minimum hiring age at the mills. He took full advantage of his life’s first break from work, lingering around town, discovering dance halls and theaters, admiring local beauties shopping along Main Street.
Best of all was going to White Sox games at Comiskey Park, 30 minutes away. Dad and Alejandro were both huge baseball fans. They watched Mickey Mantle and Yogi Berra battle Nellie Fox and Luis Aparacio, eternal icons of the sport.
The day came. Dad turned 18 and Alejandro took him to the Inland employment office on Watling Street. Alejandro introduced Dad to his friends at the desk. Dad filled out his application, signed, and handed it in. Next day, Dad was handed his green card, arranged by the mill. The day after, Dad walked through the mill gate for the first time to join the labor gang, where he would spend two years cleaning train tracks through arctic blizzards and laying concrete during tropical summers.
How far did Dad’s heart and soul travel from living with his family and working in a movie studio in Mexico City’s Mediterranean climate to lying on a couch in the windy, stark, flat Midwest? How hard was it to learn to speak, read, and write in a new language? How tall did Chicago’s skyscrapers look to him? How did the largest, loudest, meanest steel plant on Earth feel to him?
I thank God and this universe for my intrepid father. He is another human who lifted us from nomadism and cave dwelling to building websites with an AI assistant to spawn change in global political policy.
THE SANTILLANS
Grandma Tillie Santillan was a force of nature. She married young to a man who died. And another. Her third attempt at widowhood failed, as her third husband survived her. She bore her three husbands ten children. Her parents owned a boarding house that rented rooms to steelworkers. Tillie was spoiled, beautiful, and precocious. She spoke perfect Midwest English and perfect Spanish. She played guitar and sang at festivals. She was drawn to politics. She organized events and endorsed candidates who supported unions. She enjoyed life.
Mom was Tillie’s second child and eldest daughter. Being the oldest female, it fell on Mom to help grandma raise the younger children with the help of her grandmother who owned and lived in the same building. How else could Tillie have had time to become East Chicago’s leading social butterfly? This is when Mom gained her Supermom skills.
Always smartly dressed and energetic, Mom was a tornado. She shopped, cooked, cleaned, laundered, organized, ironed, baked, and sundry, and found time to read two or three books a week. Her favorite hobby was predicting endings to hard-to-crack murder mysteries.
Mom also adored books about the history of ancient cultures. She joked her whole life that she was a reincarnated 18th Century Royal who rode in carriages and wore new original design clothing every day that she threw out of the carriage window at passersby. Or maybe she wasn’t joking? My back of envelope analysis estimates that Mom was as productive as three normal humans.
Grandma was the family benefactor. Mom was Queen. Her older brother Alfred, a retired entrepreneur, says to this day that Mom was “the most beautiful, intelligent, dignified woman in the world. As close to a saint as any person.” I can vouch she wasn’t a saint. She was better, gloriously human.
Though Mom never complained, we who knew her best understood that her regality was part self-protective detachment. Hamlet’s slings and narrow spare none. Such is the plight of the gifted.
LUPE AND JAIME
[Recount their meeting, courtship, and marriage.]
GROWING UP
[My story from toddler to end of junior high.]
I had a great freshman baseball season. I was a scampering shortstop with a strong, accurate arm, batted first, stole bases, and scored runs. After our last game, our coach told us no one on the team should imagine they could become a professional baseball player. Except me.
I started playing guitar in high school sophomore year. I loved history, math, and science. I got good grades, did well on SATs, received a four-year full-ride scholarship from Purdue University and entered the engineering school in 1976. By my fifth semester I had become disenchanted with the prospect of becoming an engineer because a) though I loved them I found engineers spectacularly boring and out of touch with so much going on in all things non-engineering, b) I was spending lots of time practicing guitar, improving by the day, and c) all that practice ate into my homework time and hurt my grades. I was on the brink of being expelled.
I left Purdue with the plan of starting a rock band and becoming the greatest rock guitarist in history, influenced by my three heroes, Eric Clapton, Carlos Santana, and Jimmy Hendrix.
I worked at Inland Steel for two years during which I formed several basement bands that were instrumentally strong but none of us was a strong vocalist. By 1980 I had befriended Mario Moreno, ex lead guitarist of the Free Verse band who had broken up in 1976. When they re-formed in late 1979, Mario gave them my number and recommended me. The three continuing members auditioned me and let me in.
After working on the road with Free Verse for two straight years, in 1972 we got off the road and from then on worked clubs in Chicagoland. In 1976 I admitted to Purdue’s satellite school in Northwest Indiana and took day courses while playing clubs at night. In 1990 I finished a bachelors in business administration.
—
On the day I received my masters degree from the University of Chicago in 1993, I felt – as the great Lou Gehrig said and so many have felt – that I was the luckiest person on the face of the Earth.
—
[Music marriage, career, retirement.]
—
I’m 67 as I write, and more grateful than ever. I’ve survived two heart attacks. I enjoyed two parallel careers – business and music – while celebrating the joys of family.
