In the early part of this century young Allie Wilson took a train ride.  When the train stopped briefly in Sparks, Georgia, she got off to stretch her legs.  Finding herself caught in a cloudburst, she took shelter in a nearby dry goods store and chatted with the proprietor.  Later, back at home, Allie began getting letters from the owner of the store.  The next time she saw Andrew Williams was on their wedding day.  He was a widower with three small children.  Together they had seven more.  Poverty and alcohol made their lives difficult and Allie’s husband died before the children were grown.  Even so, every one of those ten children turned out well.  Each became a tribute to the fortitude and determination of their mother.  Her future as well as the futures of those ten children and their children hinged on nothing more than the fact that it began to rain at a whistle-stop in Georgia one particular afternoon more than 80 years ago.  Allie Wilson was my grandmother and my mother was the oldest of her stepchildren.

At 12 years of age David L. Cavera came without his family from Sicily to America.  He slept on the dirty towels in a relative’s barbershop in New York.  He learned to be a barber and later made his way to Chicago and cut hair in a shop where Al Capone sometimes got a trim and a shave.  Somewhere in our family we still have a picture of that shop.  One afternoon a friend of David’s invited him to take a Sunday afternoon train ride to Michigan.  The purpose was to meet some girls, which they did.  David married one of those good Italian girls around the turn of the century and they settled in Grand Rapids.  That union produced three daughters and a son.  The son is Jim’s father.  If David had not joined his friend for a Sunday afternoon train ride almost a hundred years ago, the life we call our own would not exist.