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This planted a seed in his mind; he might be able to buy the grain
elevator on credit and get rid of the feeble old man and the
incompetent drunk whom he had been working for. John spent the rest of the 1930s buying the elevator and then trying to develop it into something bigger: a factory to convert corn into other things.
Francesca spent the same time trying to get pregnant. She had four miscarriages but kept trying anyway.

As of the beginning of 1942, when America entered the war,
John Cozzano, Mr. Domenici, Sam Meyer, and David Meyer were
partners in Corn Belt Agricultural Processors (CBAP), successful
corn syrup production facility in Tuscola, Illinois (photo). John and
Francesca were the parents of a brand-new baby boy, William A.
Cozzano (photo), who by that time was the fourth grandchild of
Guiseppe. He was, however, the first grandson. Everyone who laid eyes on the new baby predicted that he would one day be President
of the United States.

Thomas joined the army, was sent in the direction of North
Africa, but never got there; his transport ship was sunk by U-boats in the North Atlantic. Peter found gainful employment as a Marine
sniper in the Pacific. In 1943 he was taken prisoner by the Japanese
and spent the rest of the war starving in a camp. John was both too
old and, as a farmer, too strategically important to be sent off to war.
He stayed home and tried to keep the family enterprises afloat.

War required lots of parachutes. Parachutes took a hell of a lot of
nylon. One of the feedstocks required to manufacture nylon was
cellulose. One excellent source of cellulose happened to be corn
cobs. And John Cozzano's factory had been throwing away
corncobs by the hundreds of tons ever since it had gone into
production. The heap of corncobs that rose from the prairie outside
of Tuscola had now become the highest point in several counties and could be seen from twenty miles away, especially whenever pranksters set fire to it (photo).

Sam Meyer contacted everyone he knew. A lot of these were
recent immigrants from Central Europe and were only too happy
to invest in a parachute factory, knowing that it could have only one conceivable practical use. John got the nylon production unit up and running just in time to throw out a very low bid on a very
large government contract. The next year, Allied shock troops poured into Normandy borne on billowing canopies of Cozzano
nylon (photo).

Peter came back from war with bad kidneys and a bad leg. While
he was not well equipped for doing physical labor, he performed a
useful role as a troubleshooter, figurehead, and conversationalist of CBAP until he died of kidney failure in 1955. His father, Giuseppe,
died two months later. During the interval between the war and
these deaths, things had gone smoothly for the Cozzano family,
except for the annihilation of the ancestral farmhouse in 1953 by a
tornado (photo).

Two times in two months, the entire Meyer clan, led by Samuel
and David, came down from Chicago to attend funeral services.
Hotel rooms were scarce in Tuscola and kosher kitchens
nonexistent, so John and Francesca put the Meyers up in their big
stucco house and did what they could to provide them with
acceptable cooking facilities. Francesca learned to keep a blowtorch
handy so that Sam Meyer's son-in-law, a rabbi, could perform a
ritual cleansing of her oven (photo).

During these visits, William Cozzano, now thirteen, shared his bedroom with a number of younger Meyers, including David's son Mel, who was the same age. They became friends and spent most
of the time down the street at Tuscola City Parky playing baseball,
Jews versus Italians (autographed baseball in glass box).

A year later Samuel Meyer died in Chicago. The Cozzanos all
came north. Some of them stayed with the Domenicis, but the
Meyers returned the favor by giving other Cozzanos a place to stay.
Mel and William shared a mattress on the floor (photo).

After that, Mel and William stayed in constant touch. They liked
each other. But they also knew they were the eldest sons of families
that had accumulated much and that if they screwed up and lost it,
it would be no one's fault but their own.

The remaining space in the office was filled with William A.
Cozzano's personal memorabilia:

A black-and-white photo of his parents, the Olan Mills logo
slanted across the bottom, shot in a makeshift traveling studio in a Best Western motel on the outskirts of Champaign-Urbana in 1948.

An assortment of six-inch-high capital letter T's, made from
cloth, mounted under glass, along with a corny photo of the seventeen-year-old Cozzano, pigskin tucked under one arm, other arm held out like a jouster's lance to straight-arm an imaginary linebacker from Arcola or Rantoul.

Diploma from Tuscola High.

A photo of William with Christina, his high-school sweetheart,
on the campus of the University of Illinois, where they had both
attended college in the early sixties.

A wedding picture, the couple flanked by eight roughed and
false-eyelashed sorority belles on one side and seven tuxed and
pomaded University of Illinois football players, plus a single Nigerian graduate student, on the other.

Diploma (summa cum laude) with major in business and minor
in Romantic languages.

A battered and abraded football covered with thick stout
signatures, marked ROSE BOWL.

Two photos of Cozzano in the Marines, mounted side by side in
the same frame: one, picture-perfect William in full-dress uniform,
staring into the distance as though he can see a tunnel of light in the
sky at one o'clock high, JFK in glory at the end of the tunnel,
asking William what he can do for his country. The second picture,
two years later: William Cozzano in a village in the Central
Highlands, unshaven, eyes staring out alarmingly white and clean
from a smoky face, a slack-jawed, inadvertent grin, a Browning
automatic rifle dangling from one hand, a cherubic Vietnamese girl
sitting in the crook of the other arm with her left leg wrapped in fresh white gauze, staring up at him with her tiny mouth open in
astonishment; Cozzano was smiling through a crazy weariness that
threatened to bring him to his knees at the next moment but the
girl sensed that she was safe there.

Another glass mount, but instead of cloth letters this one had
forged medallions hanging on colorful satin ribbons: a purple heart and a bronze star from Cozzano's first tour and another purple heart
and a silver star from his second, surrounded by a flock of lesser
decorations.

Baby pictures of Mary Catherine and James.
An illuminated parchment from Pope John XXIII superfluously
blessing their marriage.

A picture of his father on a fishing trip in Alaska, shortly before
his fatal heart attack.

A photo of Cozzano in his Chicago Bears uniform, sitting on his
helmet to keep up and out of a sideline morass, black grease on
his cheekbones, blood hardening on his knuckles, grass stains
on his shoulder pads.

Pro Bowl rings from a couple of different years in the Nixon and
Ford administrations.

The last formal portrait of Christina, shot just before she had
been transfigured by radiation and chemotherapy; this one also said
"olan mills" and had been shot in a slightly nicer motel room in
Champaign-Urbana by the same photographer who had done
Cozzano's parents in 1948.

A photo of William giving a victory speech on the front lawn of
the family house in Tuscola, flanked by Mary Catherine and James.
Autographed photo of William with George Bush at The Peking
Gourmet Restaurant in Arlington, Virginia, a harshly flash-lit
amateur snapshot, Cozzano and Bush eating Peking duck in
shirtsleeves and yukking it up.

Cozzano jogging around Camp David with Bill and Hilary
Clinton.

An invitation to a White House dinner from the current
President.

The dome of the Illinois State capitol was built on foundations of
solid stone seventeen feet thick. Cozzano needed to keep all of this
stuff in his line of sight while he worked, because these pictures and
souvenirs were his foundations.

Cozzano was reading a letter that he was supposed to sign. He knew that he should simply do it, but his father had told him that
he should always read things before he signed them. Since a large
part of Cozzano's job involved signing things, this meant that he often worked late. He was holding his big pen in his left fist,
nervously popping its cap on and off with the ball of his thumb.

The intercom made a gentle popping noise as Marsha, his secretary, turned on her microphone in the next room. Cozzano
startled a little. Marsha had a talent for finding things to do, and
when Cozzano stayed late she often hung around for a few hours
and did them. Her voice came out of the speaker: "The State of the
Union speech is about to begin, Governor."

"Thank you," Cozzano said, and shut off the intercom. "I
guess," he added, to himself.

Cozzano reached for the remote control and turned it on to
C-SPAN - he could not abide the network anchors - just in time
to see the cameras pan over the ritualistic standing ovation given
every president, no matter how incompetent. Continuing to
thumb buttons on the remote, he caused a little window to open
up in the corner of the screen, running the Comedy Channels' live
coverage.

The egregious hypocrisy of the scene disgusted him. How could
those assholes cheer the person who was leading -
wrong, failing
to
lead - the country into disaster?

Eventually the applause died down, and the Speaker of the
House reintroduced the president. There was a second obligatory standing ovation. Cozzano scoffed, shook his head, rubbed his
temples with the palms of both hands. He couldn't take it. The
cameras swept the section where the president's wife and family sat,
smiling bravely. The president pathetically waved his arms to quiet
the ovation, and then began his speech.

A year from tonight, I hope to stand on the West Front of this
great building and begin my second term as your President.

(cheers and applause, mostly from one side of the hall)

He proceeded to do some ritual complaining about the usual
topics: the budget deficit and the national debt. Just as predictably,
he blamed it on the usual suspects: gridlock in Congress, the
growth of entitlements, the insurmountable power of PACs, and,
of course, the need to pay interest on the national debt, which had
grown to something like ten trillion dollars. The only mildly
interesting news coming out of the speech so far was that he
intended to adopt a Rose Garden strategy during the coming
election year, staying at the White House and doing battle with the
two-headed monster of the deficit and the debt. This was the only
responsible thing he could have done; but Congress applauded him
deliriously.

It was all so completely predictable, so politics-as-usual, that
Cozzano was lulled into a near coma, trapped between boredom
and disgust. Which made it all the more shocking when the
bombshell hit.

We must either cut entitlements - the payments made to our
senior citizens on Social Security, and sick people on
Medicare and Medicaid - or we must cut the interest that is
paid to the national debt. Now, granted, we borrowed that
money. We must pay it back if we can. And we most certainly will make our best effort to pay it back. But not at the expense
of the sick and the old.

(applause and cheers)

Our debt is the result of our own sinful irresponsibility in fiscal
matters, and we must accept the consequences of those sins.

But I am reminded of the words of the great Russian religious figure Rasputin, who once said, in a similar time of economic
troubles, "Great sins demand great forgiveness."

(applause)

Let us not forget that we owe this money to ourselves. Surely
we can find it in our hearts to repent from our economic
foolishness and to forgive ourselves for the mistakes that were
made by ourselves and by our predecessors.