Imre Salgó and his wife, Marion
This is my younger brother, Imi, and his wife, Marion. In 1939, around december Imi went to America with the last boat. After that the ocean was too dangerous because of the submarines. But he just made it out.
He was brought together with a girl who was here from America, to take a husband back to America with her. My brother got his traveling permit a half a year later,, they got married there.
My brother was at the mercy of this woman’s every whim, though he knew English, but the English that was brilliant in Hungary, was probably quite paltry over there, as I figure it. And this woman nearly locked my brother into the apartment. She didn’t let him go out! My brother could stand it for a half a year, then he escaped from her, with ten dollars in his pocket. He met some negros in an underpass, and they gave him a tip. He called a few acquaintences from Budapest, one had a department store chain and bellhop service. Fine, come on over. He went there, this was in New York. He left his wife, escaped from her. They hired him as a troger [sic – laborer].
That’s life! It’s interesting, he worked with negros, moved furniture, and the like. A negro asked him: ‘Don’t you have a profession? How can that be? Why don’t you go here or there? Have you got an employment agent?’ So he went to an employment agency. The employment agency placed him in a factory. They asked him what’s his profession. He told them he was an engineer. He went to the factory, they said OK! They gave him some task. Do you know what a dodekahedron is? It’s a kind of shape that has a million sides [It has twelve sides].
If he can design one, I’ll give you a week, come back and you’re hired! My brother didn’t have a lot of money, he worked all night, came back the next day, and they hired him. I don’t know if it was weapons factory or a military factory. But after a year, he had a hundred engineers working for him. In the meantime, he’d graduated from Columbia University, which is in New York. All I know about his life is that he lived in New York for ten years, met a woman, but couldn’t divorce his wife. They moved out to Reno, which is in the state of Nevada, and there he got his divorce, and married Marion, with whom he lived together for fifty years. I don’t know why they didn’t have children. His wife was a British-born American woman, who didn’t know Hungarian. But she understood some. Imi found a position, if I know well, in what we’d call the local board or city council, as an engineer. He lived for a long time there, from 1947 to 2001. He just died three years ago, we’re writing this in 2004, so he died in 2001, at the age of 90. It said ‘vice-president’ on his business card, so he didn’t have any business, he just worked as an engineer the whole time. He had to oversee all the new technical innovations. So the job came with a lot of responsibility. Imre became a member of one of the Freemason lodges.
