Editor's Note: This is part of a series that tells immigrants' dramatic stories.

By the age of 14, Tony de Lucia already had come up against some formidable challenges, but nothing compared with the day in 1960 when he lost his third father.

Now it was down to him and his mother living in a house in La Mirada with monthly payments of just over $100 that they couldn't afford. His 36-year-old mother got $20,000 from life insurance but hadn't worked since coming to the United States and now had trouble finding a good job.

Yet though they had been here only a couple of years, they both loved California and didn't talk about returning to her family home in Nola, Italy.

They sold the house and moved into an apartment. His mother began selling Avon products and he went to work.

"The first job I ever had was cleaning the bathrooms in an insurance office," de Lucia said in a phone interview.

"To be honest with you, it was really degrading for me, because I was raised with maids, and now I'm cleaning toilets. But I did it, and I didn't fret. And then I got a job on weekends working at a car wash. And I went to La Mirada High School and got good grades."

Star-crossed lovers

De Lucia's father, Carlo, and his mother, Ulrica, came from families that hated each other as much as the Montagues and Capulets in "Romeo and Juliet" because of a heated disagreement among the grandparents.

So when the two young lovers got

De Lucia was raised by his grandparents and used their last name of Granito while his mother went to work in Naples. His mother's sister, Zia, had met and married an American merchant seaman and moved to New York. The family agreed that it would be best if young Tony was adopted by his aunt and uncle, so they approached a Catholic adoption agency.

"Part of what they had to do to qualify is my uncle, who was Jewish, had to convert to Catholicism. But he was really happy to do it, not so much for the change of faith, but he really wanted to help me out."

He flew by himself to New York on July 1, 1959, and soon joined the family of his second father. But he wouldn't be with his new family for long.

While the adoption was proceeding, his mother met an American serviceman, a chief petty officer stationed in Naples, and as they began dating and getting serious, they ran into an Italian Catch-22.

There was no divorce in Italy at the time, so even though de Lucia's parents were separated and fighting each other in court, she couldn't marry Wayne Keller and go to America with him. And to emigrate, she would have had to get in line and wait perhaps 10 years.

The couple figured out a convoluted strategy. Ulrica would get a tourist visa and come to New York, where she would divorce Carlo de Lucia and marry Keller.

She arrived in November and lived with de Lucia and his new family while she filed for divorce, which was soon granted, and she married Keller the next May.

Before that, there was an appointment at the Catholic adoption agency where someone was treated to the full story and the request that, since the one-year trial period wasn't over, de Lucia be permitted to stay with his mother and his third father.

Finally a family

The request was approved and for the first time Tony de Lucia was living together in a normal family unit with his mother.

"I was very excited about living with my mom," de Lucia said, "because I had a lot of difficulty growing up when she'd come down and visit me a day or two and then leave. My grandfather was in his 80 s, and my grandmother was in her 70 s, and they were very affectionate to me, and they had maids, so I always got a lot of attention. But I had a hard time when Mom would leave."

The new family moved to California, where Keller got a job with Rockwell in Anaheim, but the normal times ended two years later, when he was killed in a traffic accident on his way to work.

De Lucia and his mother struggled financially through his high school years, but he got good grades, and after graduating, they took the first of two memorable trips to Italy, trips that could have turned them back into Italians. This time there was talk of him going to the University of Naples and studying medicine.

"But only one problem came up," said de Lucia. "It was a beautiful place, and there was family and everything, but it wasn't Southern California. Life here was just so wonderful."

So the mother and son returned to California and moved to a place at Anaheim Street and Bennett Avenue in Long Beach while he began commuting to Cal State Long Beach.

One of the best things that happened on the trip to Italy is that he finally met his birth father, who wanted to make amends for the past and who began helping with college costs.

"I worked at Lucky's on Fourth as a bagger,' said de Lucia, "and then I made it to checker, which was really good, because I brought home a decent amount of money, and we even had medical benefits." During his last year of college, another checker introduced him to her daughter, Star, who was a sophomore at Loma Linda University. They began dating.

During this period his grandfather died, and his grandmother came to Calfornia to live with his aunt, whose family was now also in Long Beach. When he got his degree in political science and public administration from CSULB, it was time for another trip to Italy.

"My grandmother was ready to go back, and I said, 'great, I'll escort her and my mother to Italy for the summer,"' de Lucia said. "By this time, my mother was seriously thinking about staying there. She had been raising me and never got married again, and she was still young, in her early 40 s." His girlfriend, Star, decided to go along, too.

Back to Italy

The summer stretched into 3 years because his uncle suggested he go down to the NATO base in Naples to see if there were any good jobs.

De Lucia got a good job working for the American Navy as a civilian, and Star got a job working at the Navy credit union. "It was really nice because we had American all day long, and when we wanted Italian, we had Italian." After a year, they got married.

Another year and a half, and Star got pregnant. Just two months before she gave birth to their son, Carlo, de Lucia's mother suddenly died. An autopsy showed the cause to be a brain tumor.

"So now it was just me and my wife and our son," said de Lucia. (His daughter, Ulrica, was born later in America.) "By the time the holidays came and went, we had decided we would be going back to America, for no other reason than California is California and the United States is the United States."

The decision was made easier by Star's father, who offered him a job at Long Beach Seafood, the family business founded by Star's grandfather in 1921. His job: sell fish to restaurants.

"I was more like an office person, if you knew me back then," de Lucia said. "It was really tough for me to walk in the back door of a restaurant and strike up a conversation with a potential buyer and try to find something in common.

"But my father-in-law wasn't going to fire me because I couldn't sell fish, so I did it. I figured he was looking at the numbers. He never expected me to work a certain day or time frame. It was just the bottom line."

De Lucia learned his sales technique on the job: "It was just the stubbornness of cold calling. I was not going to give up. I remember thinking, 'You physically are going to have to grab me and kick me out of the restaurant.' And I never had that. But it worked. It was just persistence. With the experience I have now, I see it's the same in all sales. You just have to be dogged about it."

He learned, and "one thing led to another and I started being really successful in sales." His success was rewarded with a promotion to sales manager when one of his brothers-in-law left the business, and he was part of the team that helped his other brother-in-law expand Long Beach Seafood to another level, selling to large national restaurant chains, and through Costco and Trader Joe's and the Brinker Corp., even internationally, to Mexico and Guam."

When his other brother-in-law retired a few years ago, he became president, and today he presides over a scaled-down business that is back to selling mostly to Southern California restaurants.

"With China coming on board with its cheap labor, a lot of the processed items that we used to do are being done over there," he said. "They work on a nickel a day, and all our butchers are union."

But when it comes to fresh versus frozen fish, "we do have an advantage over China, because we still do a nice, legitimate nothing-added natural product and have accounts that will pay a little more money for that." Locally, clients include everything from BJ's Pizza to L'Opera, Alegria, the Queen Mary, Gladstone's and Nino's. His right-hand woman is his sales manager, and his wife, Star.

De Lucia's personal experiences have given him some strong opinions on immigration to the United States, and one of them is a negative view of bilingual education.

"When I was 12 years old and didn't know any English, I started school in Brooklyn in September with only what I learned playing with the kids that summer. The teachers were good, the kids were good, and by the time the year was over, I was getting A's on my spelling test.

"My aunt spoke Italian to me when I got home because she knew very little English, but when I was at play or at school, it was just English. I think when you're young, it's a perfect time to learn foreign languages, and when you're thrown in a situation like that, you absorb it rapidly. They would have done me a great injustice if they had attempted to do something after school with a translator or interpreter.

"I feel very strongly about that. I think it's wrong that we don't try more to support our American culture while maintaining the pride that we have from our birthplace. I'm proud that I was born in Italy, but I'm just as proud, if not more so, that I'm a part of this country and that I had the experiences I had in this country.

"If similar circumstances had occurred in Italy, my mom and I would never have been able to have the success that we had together and eventually I had on my own. Granted we had family there, but leaving that out, I never would have had these opportunities."

Proud to be American

He and his wife had a good experience living in Italy, "but it didn't make up for what we were giving up by not living in the United States. Because it wasn't just about us, it was about the living environment for so many people. Over there, unless you have money and know somebody, it's just a constant struggle.

"I live in a neighborhood now where we're all doing well, and we feel good. But if I had the best house in the neighborhood and everybody else was poor, I'd feel miserable. It was that kind of environment over there.

"Over here, you don't need to know the president of the telephone company in order to get a serviceman to come to your house and fix your phone or add another line. And you do in Italy. My uncle did know the president of the telephone company, and we did get our phone in three days instead of three years. But so what. Everybody else waits.

"If I had had some opportunities there, it would have been strictly because of my family background. If it was going to happen, I'm so grateful that it happened here."

If you know any immigrants in our area with dramatic stories to tell, contact Al Rudis at alrudis@ yahoo.com or 562-499-1255.