Kolesar Alison - America Is Immigrants

ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATOR

A LISON K OLESAR grew up in Edinburgh, Scotland, and earned a history degree and a masters in art history before emigrating to the United States at the age of twenty-five. She has illustrated over a hundred books, drawing everything from people and plants to maps and machines.

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Instagram: @alisonkolesar

DESI ARNAZ

Migrated from Cuba circa 1933

One of Americas most beloved television couples almost wasnt.

When executives approached starlet Lucille Ball about adapting her popular radio show for TV, she insisted her real-life husband, Desi Arnaz, be her co-lead. CBS was opposed to a Latino man playing the husband of an all-American redhead, but the couple wouldnt budge. When executives relented, the television classic I Love Lucy was born.

By some accounts, Ball and Arnaz were TVs first interracial couple; undoubtedly they were the first bicultural one. Arnazs character, Ricky Ricardo, was designed to upend stereotypes: He was a successful businessman, and the rational one of the pair. Arnazs heritage was a focus of the show, but not as fodder for cheap jokes; only Lucy was allowed to mimic his accent.

Arnaz was also an innovative producer. He and his crew developed the multicamera setup that allowed for recording on adjacent sets in front of a live audience, a system that would become widely used in television production. Arnaz negotiated to retain the rights to the shows content so that he and Ball could advocate for, control, and profit from syndication. Because of this, Arnaz is considered the inventor of the rerun, and he and Ball became the first-ever TV-actor millionaires.

The rest is historyxenophobic concerns about Americans ability to connect with a Cuban lead were all for naught. On January 19, 1953, the episode Lucy Goes to the Hospital drew more viewers than the inauguration of President Eisenhower the next day. Over half a century later, the shows reruns continue to delight television audiences.

Arnaz, who had arrived in the States as a teenage refugee, today has two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

KATHLEEN KAY MCNULTY

Migrated from Ireland in 1924

Before she programmed computers, she was a computer. One of about a hundred women employed by the army as human computers during World War II, Kay McNulty calculated missile trajectories. The work was painstaking; each weapon had its own firing table, each table had about 1,800 trajectories, and every trajectory took about thirty to forty hours of hand calculations.

The slow pace of progress on a single table meant turnover was high, but McNulty had always had a knack for numbers and didnt find the job tedious. Shed arrived in the States as a young girl when her father, imprisoned for his affiliation with the Irish Republican Army, moved the family to Philadelphia upon his release. At the time McNulty knew only Gaelic but went on to excel in school and become one of three women in Chestnut Hill Colleges class of 1942 to graduate with a degree in mathematics.

In an effort to speed up computation processes, engineers developed the ENIAC, one of the earliest computers. The media dubbed the eight-by-eighty-foot behemoth the Giant Brain, but few understood its power. McNulty was one of six women chosen to program the ENIAC.

With no set programming language, the women invented and wrote programs out on cards, then physically input them into the ENIACs panels by hand via cables and switches. At the time, none of them knew they were performing calculations toward the development of the hydrogen bomb.

As with many womens roles during World War II, the contributions of McNulty and her colleagues were forgotten to such an extent that recent historians who came across a photo of women beside the ENIAC believed they had been placed there as models. The lack of acknowledgment, though, didnt bother McNulty, whose interests in recognition lay closer to home. If I am remembered at all, I would like to be remembered as my family storyteller, she said.