William Penn Life, 1980 (15. évfolyam, 1-4. szám)
1980-07-01 / 3. szám
The White House Excerpts from remarks of the President to Leaders of Ethnic and Fraternal Organizations. The President Speaks: Your coming here, representing fraternal organizations, is extremely helpful to me, because it is a reminder of what our nation has gone through in the past. Either you personally, or your families, including my family, when they came here, felt a sense of alienation or loneliness, of doubt about the future; close ties to the home country, mostly in Europe, many in Asia and other places in our world, but with a sense of adventure, confidence in the future, and a need for help. No matter how powerful or rich or influential a family may have been in a mother country, a new arrival in our nation needed to understand the new home: how to live; how to vote; how to speak the language; how to get along with different kinds of neighbors when quite often in the country from which they came there had been a homogenous group, people almost all alike. That transition from the new immigrant to a strong, confident, productive, cooperative American citizen, was quite often made with the help of the fraternal organizations, because they were comprised of people who had been through the same experience. The next step is within the family. I would say that within our ethnic communities, which have been pretty coherent and kept as they have been for a long time, there is a special characteristic of the love and appreciation of the value of family. That is important. It brings about cooperation. It brings about a willingness to sacrifice. It brings about unselfishness. It brings about a respect for authority. It brings about a sense of discipline, even within the bounds of personal freedom. It brings about the love of a grandmother or grandfather. So I am deeply grateful to you for what you have represented in the past, what you represent now, and I think even more for what you will represent in the future. And the same uncertainty and the same shock or rapid change that took place when those immigrants, including some of you, first came to our country, still take place on a daily basis in a strong, dynamic, changing, unified, free nation. And that is why I am not afraid of the future for our country, because when America has been unified, when our people are bound together in a common purpose, we have never faced a question that we could not answer, and we have never faced a problem that we could not solve, and we have never faced an obstacle that we could not overcome. National Ethnic Republican Man Of The Year LÁSZLÓ PÁSZTOR A member of the William Penn Association, László Pásztor, who as a refugee with his family, after the 1956 uprising in Hungary, was sponsored by our Association and had his first job at our headquarters in 1959, received the National Ethnic Republican Man of the Year Award from the National Republican Heritage Group (Nationalities) Council on May 17, 1980 in Cleveland, Ohio. The award was presented to him by Ambassador George Bush, now a vice presidential candidate. Pásztor, founder, past chairman and now honorary chairman for Life of the NRHG(N)C is a Research Scientist with the New Technology and Planning Department of Dravo Corporation in Pittsburgh. He is a member of the National Research Council of the R.N.C., National Co-Chairman of the Coalition for Peace through Strength, Chairman of the Executive Board of the American Hungarian Federation and Elder of the First Hungarian Reformed Church of Pittsburgh. The fraternal and ethnic leaders from the whole United States were invited to attend an all day conference and briefing in the White House. Representing the William Penn Association as well as the Pennsylvania Fraternal Congress was Elmer Charles, National President of the William Penn Association. 2
