My parents were FDR Democrats. My parents raised me to be a FDR Democrat

[Martin Eden]

12. He passed in 1985, same year as my mother

They were both big lefties back in the day, before I was born.

But my Aunt Kate, who lived with us during most of my childhood, was semi-famous. She was one of three elderly ladies featured in the Acadamy Award nominated 1976 documentary Union Maids, about women involved in the labor movement. Kate started getting involved in the mid-1920's when she was a teenager laboring in a Chicago factory.

Kate was born overseas (all my grandparents came over on the boat before WW1) and she was jailed for ten months during the McCarthy era for her political activities. They tried to deport her to Yugoslavia, but there was no record of her birth in the small Croatian village (ancestral home of my mother's family) -- so they finally had to let ger go.

Sadly, my Aunt Kate was never allowed to become a citizen of the country she loved so dearly.