Here's Thomas Ross with the other half of the biological equation that made up my father: my grandmother, known before marriage as Louise Janitz. According to her Certificate of Citizenship, she became an American at the age of seven on March 18, 1914—along with her father, Josef Csanitz. (He hailed from Hungary—like so many surnames, his was Americanized in the printed word but still carried its foreign flavor in the speaker's mouth.) They were married in a Catholic church on November 14, 1925. 

They look pretty happy, don't they? There's nothing to suggest that this man would go on to (as rumors had it) get drunk and beat his eight children, or that this woman would be remembered for whacking those same children with broomsticks while they hid under beds.

Tom and Louise are only eighteen at this point, and life is going to get rougher. That suit he's wearing is pretty new, pretty hopeful. Take a good look at it before you click forward.