ambassador rudolf v. perina - Association for Diplomatic Studies and ...

Seattle with my mother.
Q: What do you recall of your time there, your schooling?
PERINA: By then I was fairly well Americanized. I went to junior high and the first year
and a half of high school in Cleveland. By that time I was a fairly regular American kid. I
do remember, however, a very large, active Czech community in Cleveland. My parents
became involved in it, and the family’s social life was primarily with other Czechs. It
taught me the remarkable strength and resilience of ethnic communities in the United
States.
Q: What was your father doing then?
PERINA: He became what was then called a time study engineer, which would now be a
type of efficiency expert for a production line. He worked for a company named Elwell
Parker in Cleveland. My mother became a secretary in a company called Gibson
Homans, which produced paints and varnishes. Eventually, my father learned to be a tax
auditor and got a job with the city of Cleveland. He remained in Cleveland for the rest of
his life and retired as the head of the tax collection department for the city of Cleveland.
My mother later retired as a procurement officer for the U.S. Air Force. In hindsight, I
respect very much how hard they worked in America and how well they did, considering
where they started. Certainly they had much more difficult lives than I can even imagine.
I reaped the benefits of their emigration from Europe to America.
I should mention one thing which proved to be important for my parents in later years,
although we had no idea of it at the time. At the time that my parents got their U.S.
citizenship in 1956, there was a lapse in the consular agreement between the United
States and Czechoslovakia. The old consular agreement had expired and there were
negotiations on a new agreement but, in the Cold War environment, they moved very
slowly. There was a period of a year or two when there was no bilateral consular
agreement. Many years later, after the Communist government in Czechoslovakia finally
did collapse, we learned that because of this my parents had never lost their Czech
citizenship under Czechoslovak law. Because of this, after the fall of the Communists,
my father was entitled to restitution of his property. Indeed, he eventually got his original
family house back because he was still considered a Czech citizen under Czech law. No
one imagined before 1989 that something like that would ever happen.
Q: Were you aware in those days of current events more or less? Were you following the
news and that sort of thing?
PERINA: I remember certain things being discussed in the family, such as the Hungarian
Uprising in 1956. I remember that it sparked this hope in the Czech community that the
Communist system was finally collapsing, as many still expected. Afterwards, of course,
there was criticism in the émigré community that the United States did not do more to
help the Hungarians.
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