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up in Hungary, and while he was teenager the Nazis and Russians were fighting over Budapest. There was rape and murder and all manner of bloodshed. Families lost everything. As my dad and his sister, my aunt Eva, were fond of saying, “You don’t want to remember these things. You went through them and they happened and you try your best to forget them.” As I got older and he told me a few stories, I realized there are American problems and there are old-world problems, and the two are very different.
    He has plenty of stories from this time, and my family is working with him on a book about his experiences, so I’ll leave those to him.
    He came to America, where Aunt Eva put him up and took care of him. She died in 2014, but she led a remarkable life—hung out with Salvador Dali and fought with Zsa Zsa Gabor, because you can’t have two beautiful Hungarian women in a room together. Lest you think I’m prone to exaggeration, here is her obituary:
    A brilliant, witty, international beauty, born in Budapest, Hungary. She was married for 20 years to US Airforce Officer and diplomat Karel Pusta. Later, she enjoyed 20 happy years with Paul Kovi, owner of the famed Four Seasons restaurants. She has lived in Paris, Washington D.C., New York, California and Budapest.
    She worked as a Hungarian broadcaster for Radio Free Europe, a prominent event planner for Hilton Hotels, and Fashion Editor at East/West Network, a publisher of Travel Magazines. She was active in the American Hungarian Foundation and in 2007 won the Officer’s Cross Order of Merit of the Republic of Hungary for her diplomatic efforts to improve Hungarian/American relations. Her friendships included luminaries such as Salvador Dali, Pablo Picasso, Oleg Cassini, and David Niven to name a few.
    Aunt Eva was a part of this glamorous, jet-set kind of crowd, and among the people she knew was András Simonyi, the Hungarian ambassador. She had him come to a Blues Traveler show in 2005, and he invited me to the ambassador’s house in Washington, where I sampled various delicacies. He also plays guitar, so I brought him on stage with us at the 9:30 Club for a couple of tunes. “Who the hell is he?” the band asked. I told them it was the Hungarian ambassador, but they were skeptical. To this day he’s one of our most oddly accredited sit-ins.
    Aunt Eva helped my dad acclimate to his new country, and soon he enrolled at George Washington University. That’s where he met my mom. While they were dating he went off to Fort Lewis in Washington State. He joined the Army to get his citizenship as quickly as possible. He wanted to marry her but didn’t want her to wonder whether he was marrying her for citizenship, so he decided to become a citizen before he proposed. He worked his butt off for that.
    He finally became an American citizen, they were married, and he started working toward that American dream. He was a computer systems designer when I came along in 1967. He worked at a bank, U.S. Trust, then an ad agency, J. Walter Thompson, and eventually at Squibb.
    His version of the American dream was to have seven kids. He was a Catholic, and that was a very Catholic thing to do. My mom’s a Presbyterian, so I guess she just went along with it. Her father was a Navy admiral, and his father a Navy admiral before him, who, I am told, helped design the Panama Canal.
    My mom had seven kids in rapid succession. She basically spent thirteen years of her life having children. She was a baby machine. Then when I was around eight or nine, she went to Fordham Law School in New York City. As soon as she became a lawyer she turned into a different person. She lost weight, the color returned to her cheeks, and she started getting excited about stuff again. It was exactly the right prescription.
    It also allowed the three younger ones to be on our own without as much supervision. I remember the four older kids weren’t allowed to