Series 7: Veterans and wartime, 2007-2011, inclusive

Colonel Marc Garcia, of the United States Army Reserve and the United States Department of State, was born in 1962 in Brooklyn, New York to parents of Colombian and Haitian heritage. Garcia grew up in Queens, where he graduated from Holy Cross High School. Garcia attended the historically Black college Hampton Institute (now Hampton University) in Virginia, where he joined the Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC) and the Virginia Army National Guard. As a freshman in college, Garcia was promoted meritoriously to the position of sergeant, and as a sophomore in college was commissioned as a second lieutenant. Upon graduation from college, Garcia moved to Brooklyn, where he worked for Assemblyman Roger L. Green as a legislative aide, and became an elected county commissioner. Garcia spent time working at the United Nations before leaving to work in the United States Department of State as a foreign service specialist under Ambassador Vernon Walters, a retired three-star general. In 2009, Garcia was activated as a member of the Virginia Army National Guard and was sent to Iraq to serve as a Military Police Battalion Commander. When he returned in November of 2010, Garcia was promoted to Colonel for his performance in Iraq. At the time of the 2011 interview, Garcia looked forward to an official promotion to Colonel.

Ruth Gruber was an award-winning Jewish American journalist, photographer, and humanitarian. Born to immigrants in Brooklyn in 1911, she became the youngest person in the world to receive a PhD, at age twenty--with a dissertation on Virginia Woolf. In 1935, she became the first correspondent to travel to the Siberian Gulag and Soviet Arctic. She went on to author nineteen books and wrote several memoirs documenting her experiences. Photography was a component of her earliest reportage; her groundbreaking work as a photojournalist spanned more than five decades on four continents. Gruber was appointed by Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes in 1941 to report on conditions in the Alaska Territory. In 1947, Gruber's photographs documenting the harrowing voyage of the Exodus 1947 were sent internationally via wire services to thousands of newspapers and magazines, and transformed attitudes toward the plight of Jewish refugees and Holocaust survivors after the war. She lived in Manhattan, where the interview occurred in 2008. A mother to two, stepmother to three, a grandmother and great-grandmother to many, she died in 2016.

Sources:

Gruber, Ruth. Haven: The Dramatic Story of 1,000 World War II Refugees and How They Came to America (New York, NY: Open Road Media, 1983). "Ruth Gruber, Photojournalist." International Center of Photography.

Turner, Philip. "Virginia Woolf and Ruth Gruber, Driven to Create as Women." The Great Gray Bridge.

Lucy Anbrosino was born in 1919. Her childhood in the Coney Island neighborhood of Brooklyn was plagued by the loss of her father and the family's poverty. With her family unable to care for her, she was institutionalized during the Great Depression; within that time she was misdiagnosed as insane, although she likely suffered from a severe learning disability, and spent much of her teens doing chores on a farm in rural New York State. After release as an eighteen-year-old, Anbrosino returned to Coney Island and took on jobs including mangler work at a laundry, adding frills to dresses, and adding color to artificial flowers. Later factory work included the manufacture of sweaters and clothespins. In the last few years of World War II, Anbrosino joined her brothers in war-work; she was a spot-welder on battleship hulls in Port Newark, New Jersey, then measured bullets and anti-aircraft cannons at a Brooklyn factory, and also attached buttons to Navy pea coats at another factory in the city. Also in the 1940s, she met her husband while working at an apple coring facility in Manhattan. She took his name, Palo, and had children. Lucy Anbrosino Palo died in 2011.

Michael Palo was born to Italian American immigrants in Brooklyn, New York in 1948. (His mother, Lucy Anbrosino Palo, was also interviewed and is in the same series.) Upon graduating high school, he was drafted into the Vietnam War where he was deployed for a year. He moved back to Brooklyn after the war, worked in clinical systems for hospitals, and has been married three times. He has two children with his second wife; a son and a daughter. When the interview took place in 2008, he was living in Staten Island and was heavily involved with veterans organizations.