Today, I get a chance to say goodbye to my father. I am 48, he would have been 84 had he made it to New Year’s. My Dad was my age when he gave me the chance to live in the United States. He uprooted his family and started over in a far away foreign land. He was not tired. He was not poor. And he wasn’t huddled. My father was a proud and accomplished man when he decided to leave it all behind. He was a scientist of international renown. He provided for his family. We lived in a small but pleasant condo in downtown Warsaw. We had a vacation home outside of the city that my grandfather had built. We had a grey 1963 VW Beetle my dad bought with the money he saved from a work he did in London before I was born. We took trips for vacation, had a large family, we went to the theater and the movies. Poland was under communist rule then, so there was little political freedom – although political satire thrived poking fun at the communists while evading the censors. But my Dad was not a political man. He didn’t like or support the communists. No one I knew did. But he rarely talked politics and certainly was no dissident. My father loved good music, good comedy, and the company of his friends and family. He loved to tell stories and command the attention of everyone within earshot. He didn’t care much about money – except he enjoyed spending it on music, on friends, on travel. He was a generous man. He was not irresponsible with money – but getting rich would have never made his to do list. He was no banker like his father had been. My Dad had much of what he wanted in life, yet he traded it in for 4 plane tickets and a new start with 600 bucks in his pocket and a family to feed. To be sure, ours was a smoother transition than many. My Dad had many connections in the science world and one of these yielded an invitation to become a visiting scientist at the Food and Drug Administration. So he had a job. The colleague who invited him also found an apartment for us, and even signed us up for school. Our transcontinental vessel was a PanAm Boeing 707 with flight attendants willing to provide this 13-year old boy with unlimited refills of Coke. We had a good start in the New World. But it was a start nonetheless, a start at the age of 48 for my Dad. My Dad was 9 years old when Nazi dive-bombers began to set Warsaw aflame. The bank closed, gasoline ran out, and survival was now the goal, every day. My Dad made it through, relatively unscathed. His father was arrested, but was not shipped to a camp. He was released after a bribe was paid to an entrepreneurial Nazi. He was a lucky man that day, to have a chance to give up his savings for a chance to live on. One of my Dad’s uncles was killed in a retaliatory shooting. A regular event in Warsaw that followed every successful anti-Nazi action carried out by the underground army. Uncle Joseph was on the wrong block of a random street – the street picked that day to round up pedestrians and mow them down in retribution. Another uncle, Peter, was taken to Siberia – where he survived the war and returned. All in all, it could have been much worse. My Dad was 15 when the war was finally over. His schooling had been clandestine during the war, as the Nazis prohibited education beyond the 4th grade. He landed on his feet in high school. He was every bit the defiant teenager to his parents. Once, he and his father didn’t speak for months, until Christmas time brought peace at the insistence of his mother. He finished high school, college, and graduate school with a Ph. D. in chemistry. He met his bride to be when he was 26. She was beautiful and sought after. He had one shot to sweep her off her feet. Charm was one of his greatest strengths. The other guys were out before they even knew it. In 1974, my Dad was invited to spend 3 months in the United States. He visited labs all across the country. He gave lectures and spent days or weeks here and there. He learned laboratory techniques and taught them; he exchanged ideas. He studied how human DNA is repaired after being damaged by radiation. He came home with a big box of Legos, with hundreds of slides from all over the country – and with about 20 slides of a television screen. Each slide was an image of a sad, defiant, humbled, and broken man giving a speech. President Nixon was resigning and my Dad snapped pictures as Nixon gave his final Presidential speech. My Dad also came back with an idea that his family, his kids, could have a better life in America. It took another four years to make that possible. He was 48. My Dad turned a one-year visiting scientist appointment into a 35-year career serving the American people as a civil servant. That was his second career. He had worked 28 years in Poland before we moved. He got to work two lifetimes – and traded that for no retirement. He wouldn’t have it any other way. He had always been passionate about his work. His last publication appeared in print 4 months before he died. The paper is entitled “UV responses in Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders, and Asians residing in Hawai'i and in Maryland.” Who would have imagined that when he was born in Warsaw on April 18, 1930.