I have a lot of pride in my family'* story, so I like taking every chance I can to tell it. This is a story of what its like to come from somewhere else and not be born into luxury.

I've been thinking a lot lately, especially after my grandfather'* recent death, that there'* a story that deserves to be told. Its long, but trust me, its worth it.

My father'* story, and how I got to where I am now. Grab some popcorn.

My father, Florian Pop, was born in Romania in 1958 as the youngest of 6 children, the rest being girls. He grew up with my grandfather in a small farming town in the middle of nowhere called Alunis. Even to this day, some people don't have running water, let alone electricity. My grandfather, Anthony Pop, was a tailor by profession. Unlike anything we've ever been through, all he knew was work, and he rubbed it off on my father as much as he possibly could. When other kids were out playing soccer in the dirt fields, my grandfather forced my dad to sit inside and learn to sew. Yet he was a Christian and the mayor of that town, and instilled Christian values in my father. My grandfather was a Christian even in his name, which was pronounced "Pope" in Romanian, and had some Christian significance.

Fast forward a bit, my dad eventually grew up and went to high school. During high school and into college, he played soccer as a Goalie. From what I remember, he was one of the best, as he reached a division that was superseded only by the national team. He went on to graduate one of the top 5 out of 3,000 with a Physical Education degree. When most of us think of Physical Education in school, we remember a gym class that was sometimes even disregarded in GPA calculations. This simply wasn't the case. Even to this day, you can go back to Romania and every single teenage boy will kick your *** in a range of sports. It was a different culture. As a Physical Education teacher, he was respected in his town to the level where elderly men would stand up in the bus and offer him their seats. My dad married my mom, Lidia Luminita Pop, who was 18 when they got married. She had me at the age of 19. By the late 1980'*, they had a house fully paid off, a well paying job, and in a word, security. But Romania was a communist country, and being devout christian meant endless persecution and segregation. You couldn't hold certain jobs as a Chrsitian. You couldn't go certain places. It was communism at its finest.

4 years later in 1989, my sister was born, and a week afterward my mother was released from the hospital, and everything changed.

My father believed that there wouldn't be a future for us in Romania, so 2 days after my sister Flavia was born, he carried out a plan that he had been putting together for 3 years, to escape. Now, escape wasn't a walk in the park, as every Romanian wanted to escape. He spent hours upon hours planning and practicing. At one point, he tried to escape and ended up losing the equivalent of a current $60,000 as some of the people helping him turned out to be insiders for the government. In any case, his plan was to run away. The problem was, that running away from Romanian during those times was not like crossing from Mexico into the US. That would be simply heavenly. If you were caught crossing the border, you weren't escorted back in an air conditioned bus. You were either shot on sight, shot in the back facing a wall, or sent to prison for 5 years. This wasn't a criminal prison, it was a political prison. It was where they tried to make your life as miserable as possible for 5 years to make sure you would never try to leave again. Its that kind of communist fear that ruled people. My dad had balls.

His plan was to visit a relative in a small town on the border between Romania and Hungary for a baptism. His cousin Utu Pop had agreed to help him this time, with the condition that my father would take 4 of Utu'* relatives along with him and help them escape as well. Driving toward the border, he wasn't questioned by any policemen as would normally happen in those times. Now, in order to cross the border, you had to cross a river. However, the river was moving so fast that you wouldn't dare cross in the narrow sections. Instead, they had to cross where the waters were calm, and the only calm waters were a lake deposit that the river went through, which was 3km wide at the point which they would cross. My dad had an inflatable boat that they would use to cross the river. Afterward, they would meet up with Utu, who would pick them up on a road nearby at 4:00 AM. If they couldn't make it the first night, he would come back the second night, and if they didn't make it the second night, Utu would assume that they were eight caught, killed, or that they simply didn't make it and went back home. My dad had taken a 5 day sick leave from his job as a teacher.

At around midnight, they left the house and creeped across the street without being seen, and camped behind a large hill. They sneaked out to the water to survey the area, and there were large Police patrol boats constantly moving. In this particular area, there were two piers on each side of the water, with lights that lit up the entire lake. It was bright enough to see the fish jumping in the water. On another end of the lake, there was a restaurant on a bridge with loud people. After seeing that they were in broad visibility, they were instantly terrified and didn't know what to do, but eventually agreed to try to wait for a good time to go down, hoping that perhaps the pier lights would shut down after a certain hour. They waited till around 2:00 AM, and my dad went back with one of the guys (David), to check out the water, only to find that the lights were still on at that time.

They went back, and decided to wait a while longer. After another hour, they went back to the water at 3:00 AM, and saw that it was still clear across the waters, the two police boats now anchored down. They decided to go back, and talk to the rest of the guys. Discouraged, they began to feel as though they wouldn't make it, and that they should turn back, but my dad said hold on guys, lets wait a bit and go back one more time. They waited an hour, and went back, and as they got back to the water, a fog began to rise. They quickly took turns inflating the boat as quickly as possible, getting dizzy from the hyperventilating to inflate the boat. Keep in mind this boat was meant for 3 people and there were 5 of them, crossing a 3km stretch of water.

By the time they had it inflated, the fog had risen so thick that you couldn't see through it, at a height of about 4 feet above the water. My dad was the first to enter, and the rest got in after him. Being the athletic one, he began rowing across the water. His buddy would stand up from time to time as the others held his feet to look over the fog and guide my dad to row. Halfway there, as they were passing the two large police boats, a German Shepherd dog started barking. The policeman on the boat, who had awaken in a drunken fashion, opened a rusty door and came out and started to beat and kick the dog, then went back inside and fell asleep again. Meanwhile, their hearts were beating like subwoofers. My dad described it as a fear that can't be described, the kind of fear that he wouldn't wish on anyone. The kind of fear that leaves a scar. He rowed, and rowed on for an hour and a half, all the while full of this fear. As they neared the other shore, another police boat'* old loud motor could be heard. My dad started rowing as fast as he could, and just BARELY missed the path of the boat'* spotlight. The boats waves rocked that little inflatable boat to the point where they almost fell out, and everyone was soaked. My dad was the only one on that boat who could swim. All of a sudden, everything turned pitch black, and they banged into the shoreline, which turned out to be a 90 degree steep cliff 10 feet high. My dad jumped out, and fell into the water up to his chest level. The rest followed him, to patch of land that was above the water. My dad bent his knees and leaned against the wall and made a ladder out of himself, telling them to step on his lap, then in his hands which were cupped together at his stomach, then on his shoulder, then on his head, to reach the top of the cliff. They all got up quickly, and my dad then jumped so they could catch him.

It was not about 6:30, and Utu was long gone after his first trip. The plan was for them to create 3 V'* in a <<< fashion on the road out of chalk, so they drew them on the ground quickly, and ran up the hill to hide under a bush. As they looked back, the fog was completely gone, and they could see the other end of the lake clearly, and the fish jumping in the water. They hid under that tree that night without any sleep, and my dad sat in silence and awe of that miracle. Fog doesn't wait till 4:00 AM, rise to 4 feet in complete thickness, then go away 2.5 hours later only to give them enough time to cross.

They waited under that tree that whole day, hiding under that large bush. Dogs would bark in the ships down at the water, knowing where they were hiding, but the police didn't know anything. They were too afraid to sleep, too afraid to move, too afraid to even breathe heavily seeing others who had attempted to escape handcuffed, being "escorted" by policemen to the station. They took short, quick breaths and waited in fear the entire day, and into the night. That day, it had rained, and the chalk had washed away on the road. My dad took his shoelaces and some branches, and tied the laces around the branches and made another <<< formation on the road as quickly as possible, then came back. At some point in the night, they heard a car coming by and the screeching of brakes, followed by the car backing up in reverse. Not knowing if it was a suspicious policeman, my father crawled on his stomach and elbows as quiet as a cat all the way to where his cousin Utu was, as he was calling out for them. He tapped him on the shoe and freaked the hell out of him. They all came down and got in the car, and drove away. They hadn't eaten all day or slept for two nights. As they reached a gas station to get some gas, they all went into the gas station shop. The shop owner said who are you guys? Utu responded that they had just escaped from Romania. The shop owner exclaimed "Wow! Take anything you want, its all free!" Everyone there knew what an incredible risk it was to leave the country. Unfortunately for the 5 of them, the only things they knew about in that shop was Coca-Cola and bubble gum, which is all they took. They drove to a nearby town, and Utu paid a cab driver to drive them across to the border of Hungary and Austria. If he had been caught, there would have been consequences, but if the cab driver had been caught, he could just say that he was only transporting people. The cab driver drove and drove the entire day in a distance similar to Los Angeles to Sacramento. By that time, they had been sleeping, and the cab driver pulled up and stopped in the middle of a bridge. He woke them all up and said "this is where you get off." They all got out, and he drove away.

As the cab driver left, they couldn't see a thing. It was night time with complete fog. My father said he hadn't ever seen anything like it in his life. The November fog was so thick that he could barely see his hands. They all decided to hold hands together and walk somewhere off the road. The first step they took, they fell off the steep bridge and rolled down the hill into a trench several feet down. They got up and started walking down what appeared to be a path, walking blatantly into trees, bushes, and tripping over things. The found a spot to wait, and waited until around 11:00 AM when the fog cleared. They walked across a bridge where commuters usually walk across for work, and found another path that followed the river. They were right at the border between Austria and Hungary. All they knew was that Austria was a mountain country. There were signs in different languages with flags on them, but they didn't know which flag referred to which part of the land. Was it the land facing the flag or the land on the other side? Knowing that Austria was mountainous, they decided to walk upstream on that path, till they reached a farmer'* land not far away. They crawled on their bellies for half a mile until someone started calling out to them. Not sure if it was a police, they stayed quiet and hid, until Utu showed up and said that he had been searching for them all day. Happily, they got into the car again, and drove through Austria.

By the time they reached Germany, they were experts at crossing the border. They crawled through damp, cold weeds for a mile as Utu crossed the border and showed his passport, and pick them up on the other side. They then reached a town where my dad'* Sister Tamara lived. They searched everywhere for a phone to call her, as all they knew was her number. They finally found a phone, and called her number, and she picked up. Utu was the one talking to her. He told them that he was with my dad, and she said "you're kidding, stop joking like that." He said seriously, I'm not joking, he'* here with me, in Germany." She said, "Really now, that'* a bit too much joking, stop it." He replied "I'm not joking, there'* "!@#$@ Street over there, and "%@#$@#" street over there. Across the street, someone started yelling from an apartment window, who turned out to be my Aunt Tamara! Amazingly, they had reached her place without even knowing it. She hurried down, drove 100 yards or so out to pick them up, and brought them inside, and called her friends over. My father said she and her German friends were some of the nicest people ever. They gave them everything they needed; food, clothes everything! They stayed there for 3 nights, and by the time they were done, they each had a suitcase with enough to last them for 3 months. They had clothes, razor blades, perfume, underwear, everything they would need. My aunt then called another one of my Aunts Maria in Romania to tell her that my dad had made it out safe. Maria then called my mom at midnight to tell her that my dad had arrived in Germany safely. At 7:00 AM the following morning, the Principal from the school my dad taught in called my mom to ask where my dad was, having been interrogated by the Police, who had been tapping all of the phone lines in the country. My mom replied that she didn't know, and that was the end of it. While it normally wouldn't have ended there, Romania was in unrest. Revolution was in the air, and the police had enough to worry about. Everyone was ready to explode.

They then drove off into Italy, and into France, where my father knew a Romanian Christian guy who had his own radio station. After questioning them to make sure they weren't secret service agents, he tried to find somewhere for them to live. He called all of the nearby churches and finally found one in a suburb of Paris. The church had agreed to give them shelter for a week, after which they would find somewhere else to stay. My dad went out and bought a postcard with a guy'* naked *** on the back of it, and mailed it out to his Principal saying "thanks for helping me escape," in an "LOL!!!" fashion. Turns out that even though it was slightly insulting, that same Principal later used that card after the Romanian revolution of 1989 to gain favor with the supporters of the revolution.

The church they stayed at was in a rich suburb. While they stayed there, many people came by and brought them everything they needed. Food, cosmetics, even a 6-pack of some of the finest wine in Paris. They stayed in Italy instead of France because Italy had a turnaround time of only 6-12 months for paperwork to immigrate to America, vs the 1-2 years in France at the time. During their week staying there, they were all bored, so my dad said "Why don't we find something to do," so they went out to a shed in the back, found some tools, and started doing gardening work. The walls around the church had overgrown with weeds and bushes, and the whole landscape was a mess. They started trimming everything, uprooting the weeds, even to the point of stretching strings across the walls to trim the plants exactly on a line of perfection. When the pastor of the church came back, he could barely recognize the church! He asked them "Who told you to do this?" My dad replied "no one, we just wanted to." The pastor then had a meeting with the church'* committee, and they offered my dad and the rest of them to stay there as long as they wanted in the Sunday school room so long as they cleaned it up for the Sunday school class on Sunday, and kept the church clean. My dad got a job working at a factory there, and my mom came to visit him once. 2 months after my dad had left Romania, the revolution took place. They say he was "on the last train" out of Romania, as it had become a Republic (supposedly) after the revolution.

One day, a letter came in the mail for him, with a plane ticket and paperwork to enter the country. Utu drove him to the airport, and 11 hours later he was in LA.

<Continued at next post due to length restrictions>

Once got to LA, he got together with our only family who was in the US at the time; my aunt Mia. Her husband was a plumbing contractor, so all of the guys worked for him. My dad told me that he used them, and underpaid them. They earned $5 an hour the first year, $6 the second year, and $7 the third year. By the third year, my dad had his own truck, tools, and my uncle would just call him up every night to tell him his appointments the next day. My dad would buy all of the materials ahead of time and do all of the work himself.

At some point inbetween that, my dad made enough money to fly my mom, my sister and I into the USA. We lived in hollywood off of Gouger and Franklin ave. By my dad'* third year working for my uncle, he and my mom decided it was enough and that there was no future working for him, so they moved out and moved to an apartment building which they would manage together off of 3rd street and Western in a bad neighborhood. They managed a 68-unit apartment building there and both worked long hours every day repainting apartments, doing general maintenance, and so forth. The place was called Harvard Caltempo Apartments. They were barely bringing in $1500 a month and could barely afford to pay the bills. As a kid, I had to vacuum all 3 stories of that apartment building because my parents simply didn't have time. One time, we had a bullet go through our window and into a ceiling, and it took 3 hours for the police to arrive. Hard times, but we stuck it through.

One day, when I was transferred to a community school, I was dropped off at a different bus stop, and my mom had forgotten to pick me up as she was at home cooking. I waited there for an hour, and got bored so I figured since I didn't know where the hell I was, I would go to my aunt'* place. 3 of my aunts by that time had moved into the Hollywood apartment complex where we used to live, and all I knew was that we were on Gouger off of Franklin under the hollywood sign. So at under 10 years of age, I walked my scrawny little *** all the way across the bad parts of Hollywood with a little blue backpack as my mom had the police searching across the town for me. I arrived at my aunt'* house, who were all worried sick, and knocked on their door as if there was nothing wrong. The only thing I remembered after that is them putting a huge blanket around me and giving me cereal, Fruity Pebbles.

As we lived there, my dad worked as the maintenance guy and dragged me along everywhere he went. As a kid, I learned how to fix my own sink leaks, unclog toilets, and install tiles in bathrooms. My dad had an old beaten down toyota pickup with a different color on every part of the door and no power steering. We'd drive around to lakes fishing with my sister on my mom'* lap and me in the center seat with the stick shifter between my legs. We didn't have everything, but looking back, we had each other and we were happy. Just this past weekend I watched videos of us at that old apartment in those old times, and I miss those days like you couldn't imagine. We were a family, and we stuck together no matter how hard it was.

After a while of living in that apartment building, my parents got sick of it, and my mom tried applying to other places to work. Every door closed at every interview. "We like you and we think you're great, but..." "You're a great fit for this position, but..." After countless discouraging interviews, she went to an interview as an apartment manager for Alondra Park Apartments, in Torrance, California. The company was DMC Investment LLC, owned by a couple of Jewish guys. The owners weren't there, but the secretary was, who seemed to do everything to discourage my mom from coming back. Nonetheless, she came back a second time and had the interview, and got the job.

From 1994 until last year, my mom worked as the apartment manager there. My dad worked part time as a maintenance guy, but his passion was physical education, so he worked at the California Academy of Math and Science in Carson, California as a part time PE teacher, taking part time classes at CSUDH to get his degree in teaching again. Not very computer literate, I would sit long hours every night typing his papers since he couldn't type very well, just writing down every word he spoke. In a sense, I now know the ins and outs of education law, writing lecture plans, and developing student skills. I guess you could say I did as much as I could. Come time to go to high school, my dad accompanied me to an interview at CAMS, where he worked, and naturally I was accepted to the best rated public high school in the area. At the age of 16 I bought the 95 regal you see in my signature. I worked at that apartment building at $8 an hour every summer of middle school and high school to make the money for that car, unclogging toilets, painting fences and railings, installing ceiling fans and blinds, everything my dad taught me when I was a kid dragging me on his plumbing jobs. $4200 bought me a 62,000 mile 95 regal that was being sold by the son of a recently deceased mother. When my parents had my little brother Timmy, the owner of the building (who had always been very kind to us), told us to cut a door into the next adjacent single unit so that we would have an extra room for us. DMC Investment LLC later broke apart and sold the Apartment building, after which my mom got a job as the Apartment manager of Seaport Homes Luxury Condos, where we live now. My father works as a PE teacher at Colin L. Powell Academy for Success, a school designed to reach out to low-income families in bad neighborhoods. 95% of his class are black or mexican, and he has 1 or 2 white kids. Its not uncommon for a kid to come to class telling him that his brother got shot in a gang fight the other day, or have a kid'* grandparents come in for trouble that the kid was causing. Broken families and disrespectful kids, yet my dad does it because the rich have enough. Its the poor that need help. In 2006, my dad completed his Masters in Physical education, to come close to what he was in Romania.

After graduating high school, I moved out to Illinois where I attended the Illinois Institute of Technology, during which I met my fiance. I came back to visit in January and will be driving back out in November or December of this year to prepare for our wedding, which is in February 27th.

This, all because my dad had the balls to row a 3-person boat with 5 people past police patrol boats over a 3km lake, sweat bullets of fear, and risk his life doing it 2 months before the Romanian Revolution of 1989. He gave up everything he had and left behind everything he'd worked for his entire life, and started over from scratch, just so that I could have a future. In a sense, he gave away 10 years of his life so that I can be where I am today, and gave us everything he had all over again, but all the while, he never looked back, never regretted a moment of it, and never lost his faith and trust in God.

My dad after he got married:
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My mom right before she got married:
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My dad a few months ago:
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My sister:


My father and I at my wedding, with my mom in the background:
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And my wife and I at our wedding:
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this was cool the first time i read it....

lol robert

great every time andrei

Yeah, in a completely different location.

don't get me wrong, it was totally worth the time to read, the lack of an edit button makes me sound like an ***.

Its ok, we still love you.

Great story. made my day

The lack of an edit button brings out the often cruel and somewhat cold edgy grisly truth. When you speak, you don't have the edit button. It'* you. Live. For real.

As well after you go through a couple of episodes of edit button wishing, it makes you think twice and re read your posting. Argue-ably an edit button makes the Forum for better posting. But without it, it makes for a better you. ;-P .

Nice read and Re-Introduction. Our country has alot of families with roots similar to yours and they have added so much to our culture and success.

Sure beats my story..... I was abandoned at a Chevron gas station in the Midwest at the age of 9 and picked up by a group of hippies traveling west in a Volkswagen Van. They took me in, named me "Stoney" and we traveled through 23 States, gypsy style until I came of age. I often have fond memories of that smoke filled van, the antics of these loose knit loonies, and the road littered with McDonald wrappers all along the way. Don't ask me about the sheep ranch we visited for my 14th birthday.....

i am an ***... Lizzie can confirm this. but i usually find more accurate ways of describing how i feel about something afterwards. having a stroke out in the middle of the desert tends to do that...

but i did thoroughly enjoy reading this the first time i saw it, on the w-body forum, even though my first impression was "wall of text tl;dr".... it was worth the time spent reading it though.