My father was the president of the Rockford, Illinois Labor Council when I was a kid. He was a machinist at a time when Rockford and Cincinnati were the centers of the nation's machine tool industry. I remember that many of those working as machinists in Rockford back then were Hungarian refugees; skilled machinists who had fled after Soviet tanks had put down their attempt to topple their Communist government in 1956.
These men had been trained in Europe, served apprenticeships there and once they got to this country helped make this country a manufacturing behemoth. Over the years I became convinced that we owed more than we could ever repay to these refugees from the Communists and Nazis who came with skills we never really instilled in workers here. We didn't have to; Europe sent us theirs.
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