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My Family's Co-cultures Essay

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To the outside world, I appear to belong to the Traditional White Nuclear Family culture, but my family included co-cultures and subcultures that were rare in the suburban south.
Both of my parents were raised in a tradition of noblesse oblige-inspired progressivism characterized by gallantry and service. Both were raised in families dominated by a co-culture of science that encouraged intellectual pursuits.

My family is strongly collectivist in nature.
My grandfather grew up as a poor orphan in New York City. He had a younger brother to care for and wanted to avoid the “orphan trains” of the day. As a child, he worked as a bicycle messenger and learned wood patternmaking as an apprentice. He eventually became a pioneering …show more content…

By the summer of 1940, Germany had conquered France, and in September that year The Selective Training and Service Act of 1940 – the first peacetime conscription in United States history – was enacted requiring all men between the ages of 21 and 35 to register for the draft. My father registered for the draft and as an engineering student was given a deferment from active duty until after graduation.
As an engineering student during the war, he traveled with other chemists, code breakers, and physicists, to Columbia University and the California Institute of Technology as part of the war effort to develop jet and rocket technologies. He was strongly influenced by Charlie Parker and the “hetcat” jazz culture of the early 1940s that he encountered while he was there.
My mother was raised by her French grandmother who in the tradition of the salonnières of Paris hosted gatherings in her fine home where creative people would meet to discuss art, literature, and politics throughout the 1920s and 1930s. My mother spent her high school years -- during WWII - in Newport, R.I., where her 20-year-old cousin was married to a high ranking naval officer. She was a gifted artist influenced by avant-garde artists who fled to the United States following the outbreak of World War II. A brilliant mathematician, after the war she conducted aerodynamic research on prototypes of helicopters, supersonic transports, reentry vehicles, adjustable wing aircraft,

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