A POE. I like that.
My father—who was born near the beach where, thirty-nine and a half years later, MacArthur returned as he said he would (Lingayen Gulf, meeting place of the provinces Pangasinan and La Union)—made it to the US early in his adult life. How he actually made the journey has always intrigued me since no one in the family ever talked about it.
After looking at a Google map, I figured that if the Gulf were big enough to accommodate battleships in wartime, it would’ve been big enough to harbor smaller vessels in peacetime, like tramp steamers. Tramp steamers were easy to sign on to then, and even as late as the 1970s you could hop on, do a lot of dirty heavy work, then hop off at the first stop and hop on the next steamer going further. The trick back then was knowing the comings and goings of such short-run vessels which, as this was in the old days before comprehensive shipping news, you pretty much had to do by going in person right to the docks to find out.
There were two directions my dad could’ve taken, east or west. West would’ve meant hopping from steamer to steamer, wending his way through the islands and peninsulas of Indochina. East meant making his way down the coast of Luzon facing the China Sea, into Manila Bay, where if he lucked out he could sign on to one of the much larger, international, Pacific-crossing tramp steamers, like the Queenmoor out of Newcastle, UK. I’m inclined to think that’s the route he chose. Because, thanks to the Thomasite teachers sent by our American conquerors, Dad had one invaluable asset: He could speak the English language.
In either case, it still might’ve taken him as long as 6-8 months to reach San Francisco, which my mother told me was his first place of residence. So it happened that my father, Cenon Merto “Sam” Ramos, started his American life in the most evocative city in America—the home of fog, hills, sourdough, hashish, Dashiell Hammett, Harry Bridges, Gracie Allen, Mission Dolores, earthquakes, Chinatown, Manilatown, the DiMaggio boys, and the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra (period recording of Alfred Hertz conducting the SFSO in Wagner’s Parsifal here).
It was 1927. Dad was 22.
"I'll Be Dead Before You Break My Heart" 