The great Midwest snowstorm has come to an end now where I live, but in the quiet of its aftermath I’m still in a reflective mood. Hockey is among the most expensive sports for a kid to play. So much is this so, that I am the first of my family to be able to play this great game in any organized way. My father told me about him playing around on a pond once in a while. Maybe some kids had gloves and others had some shin pads, just to try to make it more real. Yet my grandparents did not have the means to allow my father to play organized hockey. Even if they did have the means, western New York in their day did not have the infrastructure or the rinks to support an organized hockey culture. The Sabres were wildly popular due to their rapid rise out of expansion. Yet it would take a couple of decades from that NHL expansion for the youth hockey to gain a hold in the area. This finally culminated in Patrick Kane being drafted 1st overall in the 2007 NHL draft.

With it costing some $2500 for beginner hockey and maybe up to $7000 for intermediate hockey according to THIS LINK HERE, I am grateful to my ancestors who came before me; grateful for their hard work across generations that gave me the privilege to play this game. This is their story and my story. It is ultimately the story of privilege. But it is the story of privilege earned; not of privilege granted.

I’ve already written about the origin of my name and joked about my own ethnicity. The truth is that I, like most of my generation of Americans, what Barack Obama referred to as “100% American mutt”. This is the story of my family through my paternal grandmother from whom I get whatever Greek ethnicity that I can rightfully claim.  Her family came from a couple of small towns near Agrigento Sicily, where there are the ruins of several nearby Greek Temples.







One of our family names is actually related to the famous ancient Greek general Pyrrhus, who lives on as the poster child for fighting battles that, even if they are won, are so costly as to ruin the victor. I’ve learned from this possible ancient ancestor to disengage from battles from which there is little for either side to gain. This mentality even extends to the kind of disciplined hockey that I am trying to play. I’m still working on cutting down the turnovers. There is another family name that appears in our ancestry through marriage, Giangreco, that apparently means or references, “John the Greek”. This however, is the extent to which I can claim a true Greek heritage.

With the distance from Tunis, Tunisia to Argigento, Scicly being only 188 miles, the purity of my heritage is certainly in question. The island of Sicily has been colonized or conquered by the Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Carthaginains, the Byzantine Empire, the Arabs, Normans, Spanish, French and finally modern Italy, I believe in that order. We are certainly a multiethnic people. Be that as it may, the ancestors of Sisyphus toiled in the sulfur mines and salt mines near Racalmuto and Serradifalco, Sicily. Most of them had roughly sixth grade educations and lived a harsh life overall. Affording hockey lessons and hockey training for their children was far in their future. In and around 1912, they decided to board ships heading for America to try to improve their lot in life.







After they arrived in America, it was their lot in life to work in the coal mines of eastern Pennsylvania. It was their story that meshed with the movie October Sky when I had the chance to see it. Homer Hickam’s personal journey in the movie was my family’s journey across several generations. After these men had established themselves, they sent for their wives and children and their extended families. Once they had gotten their quota of coal dust in their lungs, they heard that there were jobs available in the industrial cities up north. Some moved to Detroit, and others to Buffalo. My great-great grandfather, Cataldo, got a job working in a steel plant. I have a photo of this man, a good-looking guy with a neatly trimmed mustache. He was said to be a very kind and supporting man to his entire extended family. He continued working at that steel plant until he fell into a large vat, killing him instantly at the age of 72. That was his privilege; to work up until the very moment that he died.

Cataldo’s son married my great grandmother. I don’t remember what my grandfather did for a living, but he was a very troubled man with an alcohol problem who had difficulty adjusting to life in America. He beat my grandmother and sometimes my mother as a child. My great grandmother, even in that day, had enough of the abuse and told my grandfather that she was leaving him. Some days later, my great uncle found his father dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. That was their privilege.







My great grandmother was strong, hard working, generous and a fantastic cook, raising her two children as a single mother the rest of the way. My great uncle and my grandmother had the privilege of pushing their education a bit farther than their parents had, by making it through high school. To this day, my father speaks of my uncle Al as a second father to him. Now in his early 80s, he’s just the type of common sense man that you look to as a mentor growing up and then continue to seek advice from well into adulthood.

My grandmother, around the time that she was graduating from high school, met a guy through relatives who was going through a hard time. His parents both died young, leaving him to take care of himself, his older sister, and younger brother. My grandfather had to drop out of high school to work and take care of his siblings. That was his privilege.

In time, things settled down, and my grandparents were married. My grandfather, of German and English ancestry, eventually got a job with the postal service. It was a decent paying government job with decent benefits, but there is a reason why the expression “going postal” exists. The management sucked and he hated it. He eventually quit that job and moved his family around the country from one scheme to another where he was going to be self-employed. We cannot not blame him for this. He did not have a family support system around him to advise him about how to come up with a good plan for his life, nor the discipline to execute such a plan. He never really grew up to lose his rash, undisciplined mentality. Despite this, he always loved his children and did his best for them.

Ultimately, my grandmother had enough of the instability and so did my father. They left from California together on a Greyhound bus back to western New York.  My grandmother had few skills and raised my father through his high school years on barely more than minimum wage. Yet, my father had friends, family and familiarity upon getting back home. Getting back home gave my father some level of stability. He still had somewhat of a troubled time as a teen, but nothing too serious or at least nothing lasting came of it. He graduated from high school with a rank of 257 out of 305, he told me. My father explained to me that some of the drag on his performance was the anxiety caused by the turbulence of his early teen years and likely due to the lack of a strong male guide as an early teen. My father’s life was beginning to turn out just as his father’s life had before him. Yet the damage turned out to be temporary this time. Either that, or my father finally had either the strength or the tenacity to fight through poverty to the other side.

My father took the summer and one semester off after high school to get his head together and then found a job working in a grocery store distribution center. He worked third shift in the grocery warehouse, and occasional weekends in the meat warehouse. The meat warehouse was the part he hated. “You haven’t really lived until you have had the privilege of trying to pull a large pallet of chicken thighs and drumsticks off the top of a rack thirty feet in the air”, he tells me. “Maybe the boxes on that pallet are slightly damaged or warped. Maybe that forklift is a bit more sensitive than you expect as a newbie and with a jerk, the whole stack comes crashing down on the cage of the forklift, splattering you with a gush of slushy reddish half-frozen fluid”. “Your co-workers, a bit jealous of the ‘college kid’, have paused to watch this and are just standing there and clapping at your performance”. “If this was during the summer, you would walk out of the warehouse at the end of the shift, taking off the jacket that you needed to work in a giant refrigerator for 8 hours. It was an eerie sight to see all the tired, shambling men walking to their cars with steam coming off of them as they rapidly warmed in the late summer afternoon air”.








My father entered college during the second semester on the strength of his SAT scores, working 11 PM to 7AM and then driving to school for my morning and early afternoon classes. After about two years of managing this fairly well, he finally had a hiccup trying to manage school, work and a social life this way and, to make a long story slightly shorter, flunked out of college. That was a portion of his privilege.

He took about 9 months to work and to try to find himself again. Then he heard from his father, who he had reconciled with.  His father told him that the Raleigh / Durham area was booming. Like his ancestors before him, my father decided to make a fresh start. He tells me that he decided to wake up each morning going forward with a plan for that day. The general rule was that he would work first always and play only after he had achieved his goals for that day. He tells me that he had a lonely first 18 months or so, but that he was older and better equipped to handle a period of relative isolation. That isolation gave my father the focus that he needed to build a foundation for his life. That foundation included the spiritual as well as the practical, and he eventually found most of his lasting friendships in North Carolina though a Catholic young adults group.

He decided that he was finally ready to go back to school while working a series of jobs including working for a moving company. He finally worked his way through, finding employment as a technician and then getting his engineering degree, graduating with honors and becoming an EMC engineer. While his education had been delayed, he tells me that he did have a stroke of good fortune in being at the right place at the right time when various information technology and telecommunications industries were rapidly growing. He was able to work as a technician and go to school either part time or with a barely full time course load, while having his employer reimburse his tuition costs. He tells me that he believes that it’s a travesty today that so many young people are relegated to virtual indentured servitude by student loans. His education took a bit longer, but he admits that he ended up better off financially at the end of it than most people coming out of college today.







Through the Catholic young adults group, my father met a nice woman who happened to also have roots in the Great Lakes region and who happened to be a physician’s assistant with a masters degree from Duke University. They dated and enjoyed spending time together.  More importantly my father tells me, they found that they wanted the same things out of life and could work together. They eventually married. Now they have three and a half children.  The youngest “half child” being myself, Sisyphus Embros of the St. Louis Scarecrows.







Looking back on my family history, I see a theme. Luck is where preparation and hard work meet opportunity. My privilege and that of my family has been to work our asses off; never to give up. It has been a privilege for each generation to do what they could to make the lives of the generation that came after them a bit better than theirs had been. They had their share of pitfalls along with some good fortune along the way. Greater chances for an education were certainly a key for each successive generation. The privilege to dust yourself off after repeated failure and keep trying is the one theme that I find to be the archetypal story of all American immigrants, even those who endured the horror of being brought to these shores against their will. I don’t deny that the march toward perfect equality has not yet reached an end. Yet, I hope that this privilege to work for what one desires, this pursuit of happiness, will soon be granted to all Americans, regardless of who they are or what their ancestry may be.