My Changing World

by Norm Solomon

          Because my parents were older than most, our combined experience spans more than a century, and there have been many changes in that time.  The most dramatic changes have been in transportation and communication, changing the world into what Marshall McLuhan called “a global village.”

          For example, when my father emigrated from Syria, he traveled by boat and train across a continent and an ocean in three weeks.  By contrast, when I returned to Syria a little over a century later — by jet transport from Portland to San Francisco, Paris and Damascus — I did so in less than two days!

          My mother’s parents traveled by covered wagon from Logan, Utah, to their homestead in McCammon, Idaho, south of Pocatello.  A few years later, my mother had a distinct recollection of seeing her first automobile.

          History and economics are the foundation of my academic training; so, I have a feel for history in general and economic development in particular.  I was impressed to learn that when the Columbia River Highway was built in 1907, there were only 13 miles of paved roadway in Oregon outside of Portland.

          I had heard an old-timer speak of his family moving from Coos Bay to Salem during the Great Depression, with gravel road all the way to Eugene.  So, when Uncle Wilson told me of the family’s move from Idaho to Oregon in the 1920s, I chimed in that it was gravel road all the way to The Dalles.

          “No,” he corrected, “there was no gravel.  It was dirt road!”

          The biggest change in ground transportation in my lifetime was the construction of the National Defense Highway System, begun by President Eisenhower in 1954.  As a young Army major in the 1920s, Eisenhower had led a convoy of various military vehicles from Washington, DC, to San Francisco.  The point of this experiment was to see how rapidly troops and equipment could be deployed from coast to coast and to observe obstacles encountered.

The simplest problem to solve was inconsistent road numbering.  The convoy would get lost because road numbers would change when crossing a state border or sometimes even a county line.  The immediate remedy was to declare and number a U.S. highway whenever state roads crossed more than one state.  Thus, U.S. Highway 30, which used to have a dozen different numbers, runs from Atlantic City, New Jersey, to Astoria, Oregon.

President Eisenhower’s vision was to someday get massive troop movements from coast to coast in three days.  So, his dream was realized a quarter-century later in what has come to be known as the Interstate Highway System.  Two of my childhood memories are of vacations to Yellowstone Park and to California, with the first leg of each journey ending within Oregon.  Since then, I have driven from Bakersfield, California, in one day and frequently travel to Utah in one day.

Jet aircraft first made their appearance toward the end of World War II, about the time I was born.  As a teenager, I went with my Explorer Post to see one of the first civilian jet transports at Portland International Airport.  In 1963 I flew to Paris on a Church mission, and a few of the older missionaries coming home had come to Paris by propeller-driven plane.

When I was a child, long-distance calls always seemed to carry bad news.  They were so expensive that they were typically only resorted to in time of urgency.  With the advent of satellite transmission and direct-distance dialing in the 1960s, long-distance rates began to fall.  At about this time, a friend of mine called from Paris to Portland, with a cost of $135 for 25 minutes.  (When we account for inflation, that call would have cost more than $500 in today’s money!)  Another friend had an operator hang up on him when he tried to call Los Angeles from a small city in Belgium.  Today, such calls are commonplace, no longer involving the intervention of an operator, and incur only a fraction of the cost.

Medical science has made enormous strides in my lifetime, with polio, smallpox and tuberculosis largely wiped out in modern industrial countries.  I still recall the long lines to get the Salk vaccine against polio when it first became available, too late for three of my friends — Pam, Richard and Bob.  Today, medical researchers are grappling with newly emerging illnesses, most notably HIV/AIDS and mesothelioma.  Of course, traditional challenges remain:  Cancer, various strains of flu, and the common cold.

A change that emerged in my early childhood was suburbanization, made possible by the advent of the second family car.  When I was born, Portland had only three suburbs of any size — Vancouver, Hillsboro and Oregon City — and they pretty well functioned as their own cities.  In the earliest days of my childhood, I recall the time that Mom and I got stuck in the mud in Beaverton.  You cannot do that anymore, since Beaverton has been largely paved over!  My high school chemistry teacher had a farm out in Tigard; I don’t think you would find any of those anymore either.  Gresham, which had only about 1,000 inhabitants when I was born, has since become one of Oregon’s largest cities.

Our family was one of the last on our block to get a television set.  A couple years before, our family had gone down to the grand opening of Portland’s first television channel — KPTV, UHF channel 27.  Mom thought it would be a great idea if Jay and I put on a song and dance to get “discovered.”  But the crowds were big, and we were ignored.  After that, I would occasionally see television at a friend’s house, but acquisition was a low priority in the Solomon household at the time.

After hearing TeleKing ads on the radio, I finally called the company and told them our family wanted a television set.  The operator asked to speak to my mother.  Mom acquiesced to my initiative, and a salesman called with a bulky, heavy device that cost $400 and would get only one channel.  But when the TV was turned on, the show playing that Monday evening was “I Love Lucy,” featuring Mom’s favorite comedienne, and she was enthralled.

We had heard about KOIN Channel 6, Portland’s first VHF channel, but did not know how to get it on our set.  Finally, my tech-savvy sister LaVerne flipped a switch in back to VHF and turned the dial to 6 in front, and viola!   When I left for my mission to France, Portland had five television stations, and folks in Paris were all gaga over deuxième chaine, their second channel.  Today, both cities have hundreds of channels from which to choose.  And I found large satellite dishes adorning the humblest homes in my father’s village in Syria.

There have been a multitude of other changes introduced in my lifetime, but I am barely aware of them and take most for granted:  Automatic transmission, video recording, front-wheel drive, remote controls of all kinds, power steering, high-speed dental drills, cell phones, anti-lock brakes, microwave ovens, automatic dishwashers, convection ovens, Teflon coating, electric can-openers, hand-held calculators, automatic light switches and door openers, ad nauseum.

What have been the biggest changes in my life?  Prices, obviously.  While I was in graduate school studying economics during our greatest bound of peacetime inflation, one of my colleagues made the classic comment:  “I remember when only old folks remembered when prices were low!”  Real estate prices have been especially rampant.  My mother, who once bought a pair of homes for $800 each, never dreamed that her little boy would grow up to live in a quarter-million-dollar home!

Learning My Family Name

by Norm Solomon

          I belong to what must be the world’s smallest minority:  Arabs with a Jewish surname.  I am one of the first generation of Solomons to be so blessed.  How I attained that status and how I learned of its origin is my purpose in writing today.

          My father and his siblings emigrated from Syria to America early in the 20^th century, coming one or two at a time over the course of ten years.  (My father was 60 years old when I was born, which provides context for what I am telling you, but which is a story for another day.)

          Uncle George came first.  The first leg of the journey was by boat from one of the eastern Mediterranean ports to Marseilles.  From there he traveled by train to the port city of leHavre, on the coast of northern France.  As he boarded the ship at leHavre, those responsible for the ship manifest engaged him in a conversation that went something like the following:

          “What is your name?”

          “Jurjis.”

          “That’s Arabic for ‘George’; so, in America, your name will be George.  What is your last name?”

          That question made no sense within Uncle George’s culture, since there is no such thing among Arabs as a personal last name.  Had the question been one of family name, the result of the inquiry would have been different.  Instead, the rest of the conversation continued as follows:

          “I only have one name.”

          “Well, everyone in America has a first and last name.  So, what is your father’s name?”

          “Sleimaan.”

          ‘That’s Arabic for ‘Solomon’; so, from now on, your name will be George Solomon.”

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          When I retired a century after George and my father and the rest of the family arrived in America, my preoccupation became family history research.  My daughter and I, with the help of others, had traced my mother’s ancestry on most lines 10 generations or more back to England, Switzerland, France and Germany.

          My father’s genealogy, however, was quite another matter.  First of all, records available on this side of the Atlantic were quite sparse.  The only information we had was an oral history interview I had conducted with my father on a Sunday afternoon as a youth.  During the course of that interview, I learned my grandparents’ given names, and those of my great-grandfather and great-great-grandfather.

          My grandmother’s family name was Hweibi and her sister had married into the Atiyeh family of the Younes clan.  (Her sister’s grandson later became Oregon’s Governor Victor Atiyeh — 1979-1987).

          Armed with that little information, I prepared for a genealogical research excursion to my father’s village.  My preparation included courses in Arabic language and Middle East Studies at Portland State University.   And for the first time I became affiliated with Portland’s Syrian-Lebanese-American Club.

          While preparing an ethnography for my Middle East Anthropology class, I interviewed three immigrants from my father’s village.  They had visited my home several times when they first arrived in Portland; so, it was a renewal of a relationship only dimly remembered.  Khalil Azar and his brother Aziz assisted as interpreters for their mother, the focus of my interview.  She spoke very little English, and my second-year Arabic was not good enough for a meaningful interview.  So, I learned much about the culture of my father’s village from all three.

          The interesting thing about the Syrian-Lebanese-American Club is that the name is far more expansive than the reality.  The preponderance of club members, indeed of Portland’s Syrian-Lebanese community, have their roots in my father’s village, Amar el-Hosn.  The largest Syrian community in the United States is located in Allentown, Pennsylvania, and members there are less pretentious.  They named their club The Amarian Society.

          From our interview, Khalil Azar knew of my intention to visit Amar.  As we gathered for a club meeting several months later, he approached me to ask where I intended to stay while in the village.  I told him that I supposed I would stay in a hotel and asked him whether there was one close by.

He assured me that there was but was surprised to learn that I had not planned to stay with relatives. 

          “You do have relatives in the village, don’t you?”

          “I probably do, but I have no idea who they are,” I replied.

          “Well, let me put you in touch with Selma Barchini.”[1]

          Shortly thereafter, Selma, who was thrilled to learn that she had extended family in the Portland area, invited my wife and me to dinner.  By way of introduction, I took a picture of my father.  As soon as she saw it, she exclaimed, “He looks just like my jiddu!” (Grandfather)

          I got a similar reaction when I arrived in Syria the following spring and was hosted by Selma’s Uncle Saloum.  When I showed him the picture, his response was a similar exclamation, “He looks just like my father!”

          Khalil Azar’s assertion that I should make contact with Selma Barchini was my first clue to my family name.  As an immigrant child visiting our home, I assume that his parents spoke of visiting Khalil Barchini, my father.  The reactions of Selma and Saloum to my father’s picture confirmed my assumption.  More recently, I received additional confirmation from my long-lost cousin Virginia, who told me that as a child she had been told that the family name was Barchini.

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          The origin of that family name is equally intriguing.  The name means “the people from Barsheen.”  My grandmother was from the village of Barsheen, an apple-growing center north of Amar el-Hosn.  My grandfather’s earliest known ancestors, Christian Arabs named Hadeed, originally came from Ramallah in present-day Palestine.  A branch of the family traveled north to Barsheen to avoid the marriage of their sister to a Moslem man.  Generations later, one of the Hadeed men moved to Amar and married a woman in that village.  To distinguish him from the other Hadeeds already living in Amar, he was called Barchini, the man from Barsheen.

          Of the five dimensions of family history research — name, event, date, place and relationship — none is more important than name.  One’s name is both paramount and precious, and I have found my own.

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[1] The name ‘Barchini’ reflects the French transliteration from the Arabic script, probably owing to the League of Nations Mandate over Syria following World War I.  The English transliteration would be ‘Barsheeni.’