Thank You Uncle Sam: Calabrian Families in America

Publisher Marketing: Since 2008, Niall Allsop and his wife Kay have lived in a small Calabrian hilltop town, Santa Severina. In the town's square one summer he bumped into a man from New Jersey who was enjoying a vacation back in the town of his birth. Gino Sculco told him how his father had emigrated in 1920, returned to Calabria and emigrated again in 1960, the second time accompanied by one of his sons. In 1967 Gino and his wife Sina followed in their footsteps. Niall Allsop was so intrigued by the Sculco family's story that he decided to travel to America to find out more about what motivated them and other Calabrian families who emigrated and to what extent their American Dream had become a reality. Niall visited families in New Mexico, New York, New Jersey, Illinois and Wisconsin and met and heard about people whose resolve and enterprise was as breathtaking as their stories were touching and unique. From the man who always thanked Uncle Sam when his monthly pension check arrived to the woman who emigrated alone, and from the man with three families to the man who emigrated three times, Thank you Uncle Sam is packed with real-life characters to make you laugh, cry and wonder at their capacity for survival. Some families went to America early in the twentieth century; others as recently as the 1960s. Some stories are intriguing and complex; others straightforward and predictable. Some of the people Niall met were in their, sixties, seventies or eighties; others mere youngsters in comparison. Sometimes he spent just a few hours with them; sometimes he stayed overnight or longer. Sometimes he knew quite a lot about the family before he met them; usually almost nothing. Some he had already met; most were total strangers. The stories and experiences of all are both unique and commonplace-they are no more than people's subjective memories, stories and occasional skeletons, shared with a stranger. Niall Allsop travelled to America early in November 2012-just after Hurricane Sandy devasted parts of New York and New Jersey and just before the Presidential election; he also spent Thanksgiving with a Calabrian-American family in Wisconsin. Not surprisingly therefore Thank you Uncle Sam is also a travelogue, the story of other people, places and cars that he encountered along the way. Contributor Bio:  Allsop, Niall Niall Allsop was born and educated in Belfast, Northern Ireland, but began his working life as a primary school teacher in London and in 1971 took up his first headship. He left teaching in 1981 to pursue a career as a freelance photo-journalist specialising in the UK's inland waterways and wrote extensively in this field both as a contributor to several national magazines and later as author of a number of related titles, one of which, in a fourth edition, remains in print. By the early '90s he was a graphic designer and the in-house designer for a photographic publishing house in Manchester before becoming a freelance graphic designer based in the south-west of England. In September 2008 - the point at which 'Scratching the toe of Italy' begins - he and his wife, Kay, moved to Calabria, the toe of Italy, where they enjoy a sort of retirement and where they continue to struggle daily with the language in a small hilltop town where they are the only English-speaking people. Niall Allsop is also the author of 'Stumbling through Italy: Tales of Tuscany, Sicily, Sardinia, Apulia, Calabria and places in-between' and 'Keeping up with the Lawrences: Sicily, Sea and Sardinia revisited'