Monday morning, June 5, 1967 the Patrol Squadron Forty-four duty officer came running out to our Lockheed P-3 “Orion” on the ramp at Naval Air Station Patuxent River, Maryland, where my crew and I were finishing our checklists and getting ready to go fly. “Get out of the airplane,” he told me breathlessly over the intercom, “Suzy’s in labor in the ward, and you’ve got to go there.” A few long hours later (longer for Suzy than me), our daughter and first child was born.

We named her Christina Marie. You know her as Chrissy Houlahan, who has represented Pennsylvania’s 6th Congressional District in Washington since 2017. She’s running for reelection now.

We, her mother and I, are enormously proud of Chrissy, a graduate engineer, a corporate entrepreneur, an inner-city Philadelphia public school science teacher, and for the past four years your representative in Washington.

From the immigrant reception halls of New York City to the House of Representatives in a single generation is proof that well into its third century the United States is still the land of opportunity for its citizens. Still the fabled “City on the Hill,” the destination of choice for those suffering multitudes, like Ukrainians today, who seek safe and better lives for themselves, their loved ones, and their children by becoming Americans.

I was born in German-occupied Lwów, Poland in January 1942. The city, Lviv in Ukraine today and recently under criminal Russian attack, was the home of both sides of my family. Only three of my immediate family survived the war: my mother, grandmother, and I. My father, maternal grandmother, and both grandfathers … and all our other relatives died in the Holocaust.

We three survivors came on board the steamer S.S. Marine Perch to the U.S. as quota immigrants in mid-summer 1946, when I was four. I became an American citizen in 1953.

Sixteen years after we disembarked penniless in midtown New York City, in June 1962, I graduated from Columbia College, tuition and fees paid by a competitive N.Y. State Regents scholarship, and was commissioned an ensign in the U.S. Navy. I met my wife-to-be soon after completing flight training, in my first squadron. We’ve been married almost sixty years.

My Navy service would span the next 24 years, a graduate degree from Columbia University, foreign language training with the State Department, squadron and air station command tours, one year at the senior headquarters in South Vietnam in 1969-70, and duty on high-level staffs in Washington and Hawaii. Later I was a sales executive in the aerospace industry. In retirement I’ve been writing history books.

In exchange for our many blessings, we’ve paid our dues. Not just in taxes, the price we all pay for civilization, but in service to country. Both Chrissy and our son are veterans: she an Air Force engineer; he an Army medic and nurse.

From now into autumn Chrissy will be running for reelection to represent almost all of Chester and part of Berks Counties and the city of Reading — and to protect our democracy as an experienced member of the Armed Services and Foreign Affairs Committees — in the upcoming 118th Congress. I hope you’ll carefully consider her past and yours, and our collective future, and support and vote for Chrissy. Please contribute to her campaign now, and vote for her in November.

With best wishes,

Andrew C. A. Jampoler
(Chrissy’s dad)