Introduction
We are in May 2023. I am in my Twilight years. I have passed my 85th birthday. Memories are becoming more and more important. My life was enriched by the writings of my forebears. I am a happily married man, a happy father and grandfather. I think my descendants may be interested in my life experiences, just as I was appreciative of what I was given through my father's and grandfather's writings.
Looking back, I believe that I have been reasonably successful in my professional life. I worked in technology, both in research and development (R&D), and in the execution of the results of R&D. My inventions are well recorded in 47 issued US patents. I was invited as a guest speaker in Budapest by the US ambassador to Hungary, to be honored as a Hungarian-American inventor at the signing of a US-Hungarian IP (intellectual property) agreement in 2013. I wrote and presented many technical papers, built factories, managed engineering organizations globally, and my team's work at one point resulted in a product with multi-billion dollar sales that enjoyed such high demand that we had to put our customers on allocation because we could not meet all the demand.
Nevertheless, my proudest achievement in life is the American Gorog family. Judith and I have created a family that now enjoys three children, five grandchildren, and two children-in-laws.
For my descendants, the undoubtedly unique aspect of my life is my migration, of which the key elements were: where I came from, how I came to the US, and my assimilation into American life. These notes are part of that story. Without my migration my family would not have come into being.
About 5 years ago, in the summer of 2018, I prepared a brief set of notes titled “Our family, where I came from”. Gary, my son-in-law, prepared a small booklet from those notes, to which he added photographs of me in my younger years and of our apartment building where I grew up in Budapest. About 10 years ago, in January 2013, I prepared a set of notes titled “1956 and Emmigration”, in which I described the roughly 9 months period of my life during which I was reborn: first from a class enemy in communist Hungary to a revolutionary against Hungarian communism, then from a revolutionary against Hungarian communism to a refugee migrants student in America at the University of California Berkeley. Therein I summarized the reasons and the circumstances of my departure from Hungary.
In the notes that follow here, I describe some aspects of my early life in California. The writing of these was triggered by a recently found letter I wrote In the summer of 1958, about a year and a half after my arrival to the USA. This letter brought back old memories that I wanted to capture. Also, writing these notes gives me an opportunity to recognize some of the people who made my entry into the university in Berkeley possible and also some who helped me to integrate into American society and to assimilate some of the social customs in America that were distinctly different from those in Hungary.
A glimpse into the past (via a long-ago letter to Erzsi)
After my sister Erzsébet's death, a part of her paper collection went to my sister Ágnes. In this collection was an old letter that I sent to Erzsi many years ago. I wrote this letter in the summer of 1958 and reading it now in May 2023, I unexpectedly got a glimpse into my life and my financial circumstances at that time.
That summer, I worked near the Nevada border in the White Mountains of California at a US federal government-run facility, managed by the University of California. Private industry was also welcomed to carry out research there at the High Altitude Research Station. I first spent several weeks around 3,800 meters and then a week at a level of more than 4,300 meters in a summit laboratory located in a small stone hut on the top of the mountain, completely alone. I had a radio connection from the summit to make my requests to the base station; they regularly brought up to me the needed food and, if necessary, other other items as well. On the way to the summit, even in August, the ice that covered the path had to be blown up with dynamite, and only the off-road vehicle could take me up to the summit laboratory then.
I worked there as a technician. A San Francisco company (Wesix Electric Heaters) sent me there, together with the laboratory equipment necessary for my work. My task there was to measure the ion content of the clean high-mountain air for a few weeks. (The company was interested in this because they manufactured electric heaters for homes and they thought that maybe, if the ion content had an adequate effect on the improvement of urban air, then they would manufacture some kind of air ionization equipment that could be placed in homes together with the space heaters they were selling.)
At that time, I was still a relatively new American, I arrived in the USA on January 16, 1957, and then I started university in Berkeley, California at the beginning of February 1957. (I verified the exact date of my arrival in the USA on the Internet; I was transferred from Bremerhaven to New York on the Marine Carp US naval ship, and this ship only brought Hungarian refugees to the USA once and arrived in New York on January 16th. It took 11 days across the ocean.)
For me, this long ago sent and recently found letter brought back some of my old memories and made me re-experience my emotions in a unique way.
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Below: The old letter, now in a translated and typed form; the original was handwritten in Hungarian, and also it is now hard to read.
White Mountain Research Station
Mt. Bancroft 8 - 14 - 58
Dear Elizabeth! Dear family!
(Originally I wanted to write to the whole family, but your letter arrived in the meantime, I had a lot of fun with it. I liked it so much that I decided to write to you.)
But others can read it too.
It's a pleasant, calm evening (by the way, it's quiet all day up here on the top of the mountain). I was outside for a bit of air earlier, the clouds are creeping up from the valley, you can't see much in the light of the floodlights illuminating the area, you can only see the lazily wandering grayness, the experimental chickens and a reddish building that is especially owned by rats, guinea pigs and dogs. - After airing myself, I drank a hot tea (I can't say that it was good because the water here starts to boil very quickly, so the tea turned out to be quite pale). I don't know if I already wrote to you how tea is made here: a bunch of tea leafs enough for a cup of tea is wrapped in a small paper bag that hangs from a thread, at the end of the thread there is a little piece of paper tag that you can hold on to - well, you can also put some advertising on it. One pours the hot water into the cup, hangs the bag in the water, and when it is brown enough, then we pull the bag from the tea, holding on to the thread and/or to the advertising tag - after that we'll throw the bag with its thread and tag away. (We would put it on the saucer, in a cultured place.) - After drinking tea, I wrote a couple of greeting lines to a graduate student. A graduate student is a student who has already graduated from university and received his diploma, but is still doing further studies for a higher academic title. Usually, it is possible to obtain the "Master Degree" in 1-2 years and approx. in another two years, or in four years from graduation, you get your PhD ("Doctor of Philosophy"). He was here last semester and he went home to Helsinki a few weeks ago to get married. (He also lived in the International House, apart from that we had a common circle of friends.)
It was very kind of Tobias's wife to offer to recommend me to his relatives; it's okay if people are known from several sides. As you may not know, I know both Tobias professors well. However, neither one of them teaches in the College of Engineering. The biophysicist Cornelius T. (he gave us the polio vaccines that I sent you) is a very smart but overly scientific man. - Charles T. is a physical chemist (I have never seen a more skilled and refined person than him). Both helped me a lot. (I got my job in San Francisco last summer through Cornelius T. and Charles T. helped me to get a $200 scholarship for the last school year from an elderly lady's club.)
It's slowly approaching 11:00 p.m., and I'm starting to get sleepy. I had a rather tiring day today: this morning when I went down to check my instruments, I saw that last night one of the amplifiers broke down. (It's a beautiful, expensive device, it costs more than 1000 dollars a piece.) I tried to fix it all day, but without much success, I'll try again tomorrow. (In the worst case, if I can't manage to get it into working order, I'll continue the work with three amplifiers instead of four.) - Well, good night (it's true that it's already mid-morning for you, I'll correct myself: good morning to you, and good night for myself)!
August 15, 3:30 p.m. - there is a real winter landscape out here. There was a big hailstorm, the whole area is white, besides, there is such a dense fog that you can hardly see even a few steps. - Today we have a lot of visitors, four biologists came to visit, plus a journalist. (I spent an hour explaining to him what we were doing. I encouraged him to go to San Francisco as well. I hope he writes a good article that can be useful to me as well. His paper is one of the biggest in the San Francisco area. True that may not mean much, it's full of stories of murders and actresses.) – Anyway, I'm having a good day: I managed to get the device that I worked on all day yesterday into working order. It took a day and a half of thinking, but now it's finally done. – Your letter arrived today in which you report on the results (and lack of results) of the admission to the physical education college. So, you have two brothers, one of whom is studying at an engineering university. Hum, this is also something…!
Mama inquired about next year, whether there is a scholarship for me, etc... The details of the situation are as follows. Based on my academic results, I received $300 from the University, which I can withdraw in four installments. This will be good for quick help as may be needed during the year. The money I lent to my friends plus what I save in the summer adds up to approx. $5 to $600. Annually my tuition fee of approx. $560 is covered by this. As I predict it, during the fall semester I will be able to work 5 hours each on two afternoons a week, (I can't fit more because of my schedule), which is 10 hours a week, and at the current hourly wage of $2.30, it amounts to $23 per week. Deducting tax plus travel to work expenses, I can earn approx. $75-80 a month. If I don't live in the International House (which is about $95), I can make do with it. I will not go to the Opera for the time being, and I will only ride a horse once a month. - There is one thing I still don't know how to do; I want to buy a vehicle, probably a scooter or a motorcycle. Without a vehicle, a person here is like a lame person. (Even in a small university town like Berkeley.) - Well, I think it's smartest if I finish writing now, because either tonight or tomorrow morning the visitors will be going back to the city, so this letter will be in the mail soon .
Kisses from your brother,
Istvan
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Postscript and additional explanatory notes to the letter
The government-assisted arrival of Hungarian refugees to the USA was perhaps America's most successful emigration program. The re-elected incumbent President Eisenhower already started supporting Hungarian refugees in October 1957 (that is, before his re-election in November) and in December 1957 established the “President's Committee for Hungarian Relief”, with the aim that this committee coordinates the relationship between governmental and voluntary private organizations that offered various assistance programs to us. As a result, partly with the help of the media, a very popular assistance program was developed, in which many individuals and organizations participated in some way. The central US government transported the 1956-Hungarian refugees from Europe to America, partly on airplanes and partly on military transport ships ("Liberty Ships") left over from the Second World War. Thus, more than 30,000 Hungarian refugees arrived in America in late 1956 and early 1957. Everyone first arrived at Camp Kilmer, a World War II military camp opened by the government and then closed. There, everyone first spent a few days in a closed camp, where security investigations were conducted. For these investigations the Hungarian identity cards that most of us had were very important; whenever someone didn't show an identity card, it was assumed that his/her identity card was hidden because it might contain information that the individual does not wish to share with the American authorities. After the closed camp, everyone went to an attached open part of the camp, and those who had relatives who were willing to sponsor them could continue out of the camp right away. Those of us who did not have such contact opportunities, we stayed in the open camp where various external opportunities could be sought. Thus, our arrival in the USA was arranged by the central government, and the further steps took place with the help of various organizations and individuals. I found out about the opportunity to go to Berkeley in the open part of Camp Kilmer, I accepted it there, and from there, after sleeping one night in New York, together with another Hungarian student from the camp (later my friend Gyuri Egry), I flew straight to San Francisco, where four students were waiting for us at the airport and who took us from there by car to Berkeley.
I can thank the Tóbiás brothers, mentioned above, and Edward Teller, mostly known as the "father of the hydrogen bomb", for my Berkeley entrance. They convinced the necessary authorities to admit us to the world-famous University of California (owned and operated by the State of California) without any study certificates in our possession, with the only condition that, if we successfully complete the first semester for which we chose the level and subjects, then we can continue our studies there. Financial support for the first semester was provided by getting accommodation in the International House and working at a job in the dish-washing line serving the dining room there. After the first semester, we had to provide for ourselves. In those years, this option to go to school while earning a living through part time work existed in California.
I studied English for several years, in fact probably close to 8 years prior to my leaving Hungary. I first started English in 4th or 5th grade, but by the time of my 6th grade, in all Hungarian schools English was replaced by Russian. After that I continued privately. As I recall it now, I had at least four different instructors. Back then learning English in Hungary was mostly book studies, none of our instructors were native English speakers and there were no opportunities to hear spoken English. I may have had some periods without studying English, but by and large I continued it and by the time I turned 17 one of my instructors advised me to start reading English books. Very wisely he told me not to worry too much about looking words up in the dictionary. “Keep reading and do a look-up only when you finish a page and you have no idea what you read”. Thereby, by the time I left Hungary I was reasonably fluent in reading, but not much accustomed to speaking. In any case, my English was good enough that I could start Berkeley in the spring semester of 1957. Fortunately, I was allowed to explore which classes to take and for a very important introductory physics course on Newtonian mechanics there were several parallel sessions taught by different professors. I selected the one whose English I understood best. Luckily enough, this session was taught by Professor Owen Chamberlain who in 1959, two years after that semester received a Nobel Prize. When I started Berkeley I only understood people who directly spoke to me, or delivered a lecture to the class. I remember it well that after a couple of months, as I was walking in the corridor of a lecture hall (Dwinelle Hall), passing a group of students who were engaged in an animated conversation, to my great surprise I understood what they were telling each other. That was a Eureka moment, an Epiphany that I never forgot.
Not long after my arrival there, I also helped the professors in their efforts to bring more Hungarian refugee students to Berkeley. As part of this effort, accompanying Professor Charles Tobias, I visited several organizations. Everywhere our request was that we are not looking for money, but for part-time jobs for refugee students. Furthermore, I was also invited to a university assembly in the spring of 1957, where my task was to second the big thank-you speech given by Edward Teller with a few minutes of my authentic personal thanks. This happened in front of more than 10,000 students and thousands of professors. In the fall of 1958, more than 40 of us 1956-Hungarian refugee students were studying in Berkeley. When I arrived there were four of us; so the professors' efforts worked out well, they were successful. Many thanks to them forever!
A note on social integration, and a thank you to Joe and Betty Connors
During my heroic early years In Berkeley my closest friends and support community were the other Hungarian refugees who were studying in Berkeley. Another group of people with whom I regularly socialized were foreign students, mostly from Scandinavia and Germany. I had practically no social contact with American students during that early period. I owe a large part of my integration and assimilation into American society to Joe and Betty Connors. They contacted me after they had contacted Charles Tobias, whom they asked how they could help some Hungarian refugee students? Professor Tobias put them in contact with me.
Joe Connors was an Oakie. Oakies were poor Americans who migrated from the middle of the country, frequently from Oklahoma, to California during the Great Depression. Joe's family settled in Sacramento. He studied chemistry in Berkeley and became a water chemist working for the municipal organization that supplied water to the East Bay communities of the San Francisco Bay Area. Betty Connors was born and raised in Montana. She came to Berkeley to study music and eventually became the head of the Arts and Lectures organization on the Berkeley campus. Her organization was responsible for bringing visiting lecturers and especially artists to the campus; she became quite well known and brought the Global top performers to present concerts on the University campus. Joe and Betty had no children, possibly because they were concerned about overpopulation. In any case, they showed great interest in putting their arms around me and teaching me some of the details of American life. They were not rich and made it clear to me when we first met that they are not offering to fund my education or my life, but they will be happy to invite me to their home and teach me some of the customs and social details that were not part of the University curriculum. Betty would provide me with concert tickets and on many occasions they invited me to fine restaurants in San Francisco. It is through these events that I was able to enjoy the San Francisco Symphony free of charge and I learned about American Cuisine. Eventually we became quite close friends and many years later, after Joe died, Betty became a virtual grandmother to our Christopher. Betty invited Christopher to join her on several trips, including one to England. To this date Chris remembers very fondly the great times they had together. After Betty died, to our great surprise we found out that she named all of us Gorogs, Judith, me, and our three children as heirs to her estate. While her estate was not very large, it was still a nice gift, we all received meaningful sums of money, and I think the five of us inherited close to half of her estate.
Life in America in the 1950s was very different from what it is today in the 21st century. There are three examples that come to my mind that illustrate this difference. Public safety was unbelievable, unfortunately that is no longer so, but back then people could leave their wallets sitting on their car seats in unlocked cars without worrying about theft. Other examples from my memory were strangely restrictive. JC Beckett, my chief engineer at Wesix Electric Heater, where I worked full time in the Summers and part-time during the school year, was very fond of me and was my strong supporter. Nevertheless, when I was thinking of buying a motorcycle and mentioned that to him, he told me that I better make a choice: do I want to keep my job or do I want to ride a motorbike? The two are incompatible, he told me. Obviously I did not have much of a choice. I kept the job and never owned a motorbike. Another example comes from a conversation with Joe Connors. This was early in the first year, when I did not understand the devastating effect that the violently anti-communist senator McCarthy had on American society. Having just recently escaped from communism, in a conversation I praised McCarthy to Joe, even though I knew that Joe was definitely a left of center Democrat. Joe's response to my comment was “if you were an American, I would kick you out of my house and would not allow you ever to enter again”; he did not kick me out, but I learned my lesson.
One more item that has significantly changed in the past half a century and one that had a significant impact on the evolution of my later life has to do with the continuously geographically evolving USA. Specifically, in the 1950s and also pretty much through the 1960s, the center of the USA was on the East.Coast. A few weeks after I arrived in the USA I headed out West and had the good fortune of getting my education at one of the best universities in the world, at UC Berkeley. When I was about to receive my PhD in 1964 and was looking for an appropriate job, I was only interested in the East. In my prior life I got to know Hungary and Slovakia, where I went on a bicycle trip at the end of the summer of 1956. After coming West, I never crossed the Sierras. I got to know California and also some of Mexico, but I felt that I was a country bumpkin and I wanted to get to know the real USA: Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Washington DC. Therefore I looked at jobs only at the three major R&D centers of the time, at Bell Labs, at GE Labs, and RCA Labs; they were all on the East. Silicon Valley, as it is known today, did not yet exist. Through some connection, partly because of the subject of my PhD dissertation, I was offered a job at Watkins and Johnson, an early pre Silicon Valley high-tech outfit on the Peninsula where later on Silicon Valley evolved, at a salary slightly higher than what I accepted at RCA Labs. Had I stayed in the San Francisco Bay Area, probably I would have ended up financially much ahead of what I had actually achieved. Most likely I would have participated in the creation of the soon rapidly evolving Silicon Valley technology world and also would have benefited from the real estate boom that took place in the San Francisco area shortly after my moving to the East. I am not complaining, I followed my interest, but it is also interesting to recognize some possibilities that we did not utilize because they did not match our interest. Today the entire American Gorog Family lives in California. Because I pursued my interests, Judith and I, even though we met in Berkeley, got married in New York. We then lived for many years in Princeton, New Jersey and all three of our kids were born in New York and pretty much grew up in Princeton. Our youngest, Chris, finished high school in Lancaster, Pennsylvania to where we moved when he was finishing middle school. (In Berkeley I briefly met the Andy Grove of later Intel fame. He too was a Hungarian refugee in 1956, was 2 years older than I was. He got his bachelor's degree in New York and subsequently in 1963 his PhD at UC Berkeley in Chemical Engineering, where Charles Tobias was his thesis advisor. He clearly already had an East Coast experience prior to his coming to California. From Berkeley he moved directly into the emerging electronics industry on the Peninsula that then became Silicon Valley and he was a key player in the evolution of what became the world-wonder Silicon Valley.)
Some concluding remarks that I added after I thought I had completed these notes.
Specifically, I felt that I needed to add here to these notes how much my university education and immigration were commingled. I come from a family where on my Y-chromosome line (father of father of father of father line), I am the fourth generation with a “Dr” (an entitlement based on having earned a doctorate at an institute of higher learning) in front of my name. Even though for four generations we all had to restart our lives due to a combination of causes: war (Napoleonic), personal conflict (poor young wife leaving much older well off husband), death (father dying before son finishes high school), and communism (reverse discrimination according to the pre-communism social class of parent), each one of us first succeeded before disasters hit.
In my case, there was a strong external factor in selecting my profession. I had diverse interests, but I only saw science and technology as worthy to pursue. I was a teenager growing up in a Stalinist Communist dictatorship; I learned not to trust the government, and I saw well educated lawyers and social scientists persecuted and not allowed to continue their professions. In the world around me I saw that only high achievers in science and technology were able to cross the boundaries of nations and social systems, and I was committed to secure for myself that path. Then later on, after I entered Berkeley I felt compelled to pursue studies as far as I was able to. I did not plan to enter academic life, I was always interested in industry, but I also felt that as long as there was still something ahead of me that the University offered, I wanted to take it. That is why I pursued engineering education till the end of my opportunities, through bachelors, masters, and doctorate degrees. And in fact, a few years after I entered industry, I realized that there was still a postgraduate study available that I did not pursue earlier and I applied and received a one year postdoctoral National Academy of Sciences and National Science Foundation Fellowship. This one year I spent in 1968 at a European research laboratory (ESRIN) in Frascati, Italy. That also allowed me to travel around and get to know much of Western Europe. Thereby I, the earlier country bumpkin, got to know, and feel at home in, not only the USA but also Europe. Thus for me immigration and assimilation are almost synonymous with securing my education, a process that I feel I successfully completed by January 1969, 12 years after I entered the USA. After that, for approximately 40 years until my retirement, I lived in the USA, voted in every election (I became a US citizen in 1962), worked in industry, and served in academia only as advisor and industrial donor. And of course, along the way, together with Judith we raised our family that I consider the proudest achievement of my life. Also, I was fortunate enough to be the first father in five generations, spanning over more than two centuries of Y-chromosome line, whose ability to execute his commitment to raising his family was not interrupted and negated by disastrous external events.
