CryptoDad. J. Christopher Giancarlo

insurers. In time, he rose to be executive vice president. Although somewhat unmindful of his medical practice, Berthold Schwarz turned out to be a brilliant financial investor and portfolio manager. His family became one of New Jersey's most prominent, with a box at New York's Metropolitan Opera House and a sprawling home in tony Upper Montclair that my mother would sometimes visit and admire. It was a far distance up Bloomfield Avenue.

      While different in means, the Schwarz brothers were alike in patriotism. After Pearl Harbor, Berthold's two sons left medical school to enlist in the US military. Not long after deployment near Bastogne, Belgium, Berthold's younger son died fighting in the Battle of the Bulge.

      My grandfather Henry, just turned 40, enlisted in the US Army Air Corps. He had been a teenager during the First World War and recalled his father treating American doughboys in quarantine for the Spanish Influenza before shipping out of Jersey City. Now, as a new World War began, Henry was an experienced physician, familiar with the infectious diseases that plagued city residents. He was eventually commissioned a captain and appointed medical commandant at a series of North American training bases, overseeing health conditions. He served a year at Daniel Field near Augusta, Georgia, and was then assigned to Fort Thomas, across the Ohio River from Cincinnati. He brought with him his wife and children and installed them in great-grandma Ella's spacious house in the suburb of Hyde Park, where he visited on weekends. As the war ended, Henry returned to New Jersey with his family, having retired from the Corps with the rank of Major, an honor he held with pride the rest of his life.

My mother and father were introduced by high school friends a few years after the war. Hector was young and brash, heading to Manhattan College and thinking about medical school. Ella was determined and set on nursing. She would go on to Columbia Teacher's College to receive her bachelor's degree in nursing. The couple dated throughout college.

      Hector took advantage of his language fluency and the post-war strength of the US dollar to enroll in Italy's fine but inexpensive medical school at the University of Padua, one of the world's oldest. In December 1954, while returning home for Christmas, his flight from Rome descended into New York's Idlewild Airport, rammed into a pier, burst into flames, and hurtled into the waters of Jamaica Bay. Twenty-six passengers died. Miraculously, my father escaped the submerging aircraft and swam to shore, one of only six survivors, His carefree days were at an end.

      Soon my parents were married, taking up residence in Italy. During school breaks they skied in Cortina, saw the follies in Paris, stood in the stalls at La Scala, and visited my father's cousins in Terracina, on the Mediterranean. They acquired a series of European sports cars and survived my father's participation in the famous Italian auto rally, the Mille Miglia.

      In 1957, their first child was born, Charles Henry, named after our two grandfathers. Hector graduated from medical school the following spring and returned to New Jersey. There, in 1959, I was born.

      My father's medical career thrived. He did his residency in general surgery and otolaryngology at the renowned New York Eye and Ear Infirmary. He was inquisitive about everyone and everything, ideal for the halcyon days of the early 1960s in New York, when the city was a global center for medical innovation. He created operating room procedures that had never been done before. He experimented with new medical technologies. He introduced ultrasound, which he had encountered in Italy, into American surgical practice. He was fearless, engrossed, energetic, and brilliant. He relished being a doctor.

On the west side of the Hudson, Hector first joined and then took over Uncle Berthold's Jersey City medical practice. Like his father and father-in-law, he was self-employed and entrepreneurial. His surgical innovations attracted attention, his practice boomed, and, in the late 1960s, he and my mother launched a successful skilled nursing facility in northern New Jersey in a new building constructed by my grandfather, Charlie.

      My parents then moved up the metaphorical road—though not literally, west on Bloomfield Avenue this time. That would have taken them too far from the buzz of Manhattan. Instead, they headed north along the Hudson river to a town a lot like Upper Montclair, the East Hill neighborhood of Englewood.

      While my father was building his medical practice and with my brother and me as preschoolers, my mother returned to Columbia University to earn a master's degree. After bearing two more sons, Michael and Timothy, she ran the burgeoning private nursing home facility. Still, she always seemed to have time for her four boys. On Monday through Friday, she was up early in pumps and pearls. Yet on Saturdays she'd teach us to punt a football, bodysurf a wave, or even drop a water ski and slalom.

      Together, my parents were a force. They were each determined, strong, and stubborn. It was as if their unshakable will, by itself, could make things happen. And it did. In all kinds of ways. They were a force in the minds of their sons. We were expected to lead lives of achievement, self-reliance, and dignity. But each of my parents' willfulness also caused turmoil in their marriage, which began to rupture. First gradually, and then precipitously.

Groovin'

For me, the 1960s began as soon as I could stand on two feet and take a good look around. I liked what I saw. My world seemed colorful, melodic, and good. After school, we played football, stickball, and basketball in the backyards and driveways of our leafy, 10-block neighborhood until my mother's loud whistle called us home for dinner. Most everything we touched or ate was made well and produced domestically, indeed locally. Many of our clothes were sewn in New York's garment district, televisions made in Trenton, furniture crafted in Connecticut, vegetables grown on New Jersey farms, meat butchered in town. My grandfathers, Charlie and Henry, drove cars made in Detroit: Cadillacs and Buicks, respectively. They were solidly built, and just as finely made as the Mercedes that my European-styled father drove. In fact, my dad's Mercedes looked rather pedestrian compared to their cars. Theirs were aspirational. The tail fins on Grandpa Charlie's 1962 Sedan DeVille made it appear as if it could take off and fly. The tiny tail bumps on Dad's Mercedes made you wonder how it ever got across the Atlantic.

      I respected the cultivation and the language facility of my European aunts, uncles, and cousins—whom we visited some summers—and the many French, Italian, and Hungarian doctors who attended my parents' dinner parties. Yet, I preferred American things—especially football, rock ‘n’ roll, the Jersey Shore, the New York World's Fair, the Apollo space program, and muscle cars—all of which seemed to express the future's limitless possibility.

      We went to a cheerful Catholic elementary school. We were fortunate to attend junior and senior high at the nondenominational Dwight-Englewood School, a fine private college “prep” school that assiduously set out a broad framework for how to think rather than imposing a narrow worldview of what to think. I respected and somewhat envied my older brother, Charlie, who seemed to win every academic award Dwight-Englewood bestowed. Unlike me, he was kind, easygoing, athletic, and wickedly smart. Like my dad, he loved gadgets, spending days at a time constructing electronic devices, even TVs and early computers. Unlike him, I played electric guitar, wore my hair long, and got into some trouble. A few times, Charlie got me out. I was probably less helpful than he was to our good-natured younger brothers, Mike and Tim.

      I attended Skidmore College in picturesque Saratoga Springs, New York. There, under the guidance of some exceptional professors, I experienced a time of personal satisfaction and accomplishment. During my junior year, almost 21, I took an academic leave of absence, got a basement flat in London, and worked as a researcher for Sir Ronald Bell, a member of the House of Commons. It was during Margaret Thatcher's first term as prime minister. I was drawn to her unabashed advocacy for entrepreneurship, civil society, individual initiative, and anti-Communism. I admired her unapologetic rejection of the British welfare state, high taxes, industrial policy, and detente with the Soviet Union.

One evening, I was invited to meet Mrs. Thatcher with a dozen or so other young Americans working in Westminster. We gathered in the magnificent, crystal-chandeliered Pugin Room in the Palace of Westminster overlooking the Thames. As twilight warmed the windows, Mrs. Thatcher engaged us with her quick wit and enthusiasm. She described human liberty and free market capitalism as the essential foundation for achievement of humankind's greatest