Historical perspectives.

Abstract

I was born in Beaumont, Texas, on April 23, 1943. Like me, many children born and raised in the South are named after their father. While my father’s name was really Dominico (Dominic), he went by Dick, which most people, himself included, lengthened to Richard. Children in the South who are named after their dad are often nicknamed Junior and then later “Jr.” My mother sought to get ahead of the curve by naming me R.H. when I was still in the cradle. Or, perhaps, when she called out my name to come home for supper, she only wanted me and not the other five kids on my block named Jr. to come running. In any case, the R. stands for Richard; more about the H. later in the section on scorpions and the Venezuelan jungle. Both my mother and father were first generation Sicilianor Italian-Americans from the Bronx. All their parents came through Riker’s Island as immigrants from Sicily (paternal grandparents) or southern Italy (maternal grandparents). The Bronx neighborhoods my parents grew up in were right out of the Robert De Niro years of The Godfather. My parents married shortly after my father graduated with a civil engineering degree from Cooper Union College in Manhattan, several years before the U.S entered World War II. My father’s first wartime engineering job was building a road from the oil fields in Venezuela to the airplane gas refineries near Caracas. It was a great job opportunity but not available to an engineer whose name was Dominico DeFrancesco. At that time, Italy was one of the Axis powers (along with Japan and Germany), and worries about sabotage ran high. My father, newly reinvented as Dick Defran, sailed from New York City to Venezuela three days after marrying my mother. Shortly after arriving at his tent in the Venezuelan jungle, his tent mate cautioned him to shake his boots out in case a scorpion had sought shelter there for the night. My dad, who had only seen the jungle in library books, thought his tent mate was kidding but shook his boots out anyway. Out popped a little scorpion, prompting my dad to say “Harvey, I will name my first son after you.” Thus, the “H.” after the “R.” in my first name. After the work in Venezuela was completed and the U.S. had fully joined the war, my mother, father, and older sister moved to Beaumont, Texas, where my father built refineries that made high-octane airplane gas from all that Texas crude; this is also where I was born. After the war, American chemical companies found there was a great market for more refineries and the petrochemical byproducts they had previously burned off. New plants needed to be rebuilt, and old refineries had to be modified to exploit new products such as plastics. America had begun to build a “better life through chemistry.” About the time I began the third grade, we began to move about once a year or more all over the South, the Northeast, and the Midwest. By the