One immigrant's journey to Des Moines

On Sunday, I enjoyed my first Father’s Day with my wife and two children in our new home in Iowa. Last year, I had started at The Des Moines Register in my new role, but my family hadn’t yet moved.

This Father’s Day was special for more than just having the family in the place where we were all born. Theresa and the children had just returned on Saturday from a trip to New York City. The trip was quickly scheduled to meet one of Theresa’s good friends and her oldest daughter for a trip to the city.

The group did many of the things tourists do when visiting NYC: playing in Central Park, watching the Rockettes, shopping and people watching in Times Square, taking the ferry to the Statue of Liberty, and touring Ellis Island. I was jealous that I couldn’t attend, but my wife and children gave me one of the most touching gifts that I have ever received on Sunday.

They brought me prints of my grandfather’s arrival and entry through Ellis Island as well as a photo of the ship that brought him from Italy to New York. According to the records, Arturo Beltrame traveled to this country with a steerage ticket, the cheapest fare possible, on a ship named the Chicago.

Like many immigrants who passed through Ellis Island, he would always remember seeing the Statue of Liberty, which would celebrate the 27th anniversary of its dedication.

My children either taught me, or reminded me of, the next bit of trivia after their own trip to the island.

The Statue of Liberty’s dedication would have been even older if it had been erected after it arrived. Instead, the statue was parked in crates on Bedloe’s Island, where it sat for more than a year because there was no pedestal to anchor the statue.

Joseph Pulitzer (yes, the same guy who bequeathed the money to Columbia University for The Pulitzer Prizes — of which The Des Moines Register has won 16), who owned The World newspaper in New York and was an immigrant, developed a plan to raise the money while shaming wealthy New Yorkers for not supporting the project. The statue, in Pulitzer’s words, was “not a gift from the millionaires of France to the millionaire of America, but a gift of the whole people of France to the whole people of America.”

For six months, Pulitzer printed an editorial on the front page of The World promoting a campaign that resulted in more than 120,000 Americans donating $100,000 to complete the project. The World also agreed to publish the names of all donors regardless of how much money they sent.

After leaving Ellis Island, my grandfather would spend his American life as Arthur Beltrame. Arthur, his mother, and his siblings met his father. They found their way to Iowa and settled in Des Moines on the south side along with other Italians from the Friuli region of Italy.

Art, as his friends and family called him, would spend most of his adult life at the same address, at the intersection of N.E. 14th Street and (interestingly enough) Arthur Avenue, married to my grandmother Mildred (Millie) Beltrame. Millie would die in the house in 1995 at 84 years of age after a day of working in the garden.

After losing Millie, my grandfather opened up to me as a teenager and young adult in a way that I could have never imagined. He had taught me many things as a boy, but he had never been very chatty. When he taught me how to mow his lawn, so I could earn my own spending money, I don’t remember more than a few words exchanged. Art would wait for me in the morning on his front steps as I delivered his Des Moines Register, and usually I’d get an appreciative nod.

The once-stoic grandfather, who would sit silently with me in his kitchen listening to Chicago Cubs games on the radio while occasionally cursing under his breath, began sharing his joys and regret, his advice and his worries. He told me fragments of his youth in Italy and challenges he faced as a young man. He’d tell me tales of boxing and uphill motorcycle racing. About enlisting in World War II and how the young soldiers would call him, “Pops.” And, he’d share stories of his long career after World War II as a postal carrier.

I recorded some of our conversations, but so many more were just moments between us in his living room as the afternoon light faded. He shared with me his unique American life, and I am so deeply appreciative for that. In 2004, Art would leave the house for the last time to go to the hospital, where he would later die at 98, just about a month shy of his 99th birthday.

My grandparents’ house no longer stands, but the statue and Ellis Island are still there reminding us that this is a country built by immigrants, from our founding fathers to my grandfather.

Given some of the election cycle rhetoric this year, I hope that we can remember a few words immortalizing the immigrants who have come and will continue to come to our shores: "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free …"

These words appeared inside the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty when my grandfather arrived in his new home, and now they hang in the museum at the base of the statue.

DAVID CHIVERS is president of The Des Moines Register. Contact: dchivers@registermedia.com

This article originally appeared on Des Moines Register: One immigrant's journey to Des Moines