My "Forrest Gump" Life: Summer in Naples

I'd like to say my life “just happened,” but I don’t believe in luck or serendipity. Nevertheless, even when I didn’t know what I believed in, I unexpectedly found myself, like Forrest Gump, in extraordinary places or among OMG people.

In 1992 my next door neighbor, who was from Italy, recommended me to the publisher of an Italian-American newspaper looking for an English editor. The paper’s office occupied the dingy basement of an Italian retirement home run by Catholic nuns. One day a fax arrived from The White House inviting a reporter from our newspaper to join the White House Press Corps for President Bill Clinton’s July 1994 trip to the G7 Summit in Naples.

Two weeks later, I left the basement, the nuns, and the old folks behind, and headed to Europe on the private plane of journalists and photographers that accompanies Air Force One.

In Naples, I was in the front row for President Clinton as he addressed the Press Corps. First Lady Hillary Clinton passed right by me in Ravello, an outdoor amphitheater carved into a mountain that overlooks the Amalfi Coast. I sat on the bus next to Wolf Blitzer and listened to chatty gossip about the other reporters. At Pompeii, our guide was the Director himself who shared fascinating stories you’ll never read in a book and let us walk through one of the homes where tourists were not allowed. Carefully we tiptoed around plaster casts of victims caught in the agony of instant death; their petrified lunch still on the table.

We followed President Clinton to Warsaw, where my mother’s family had perished in the Holocaust. At the Umschlagplatz, the train stop outside the Warsaw Ghetto where deportees were sent to the Treblinka death camp, I lifted my camera to photograph a memorial wall and realized as I clicked that I was taking a picture of my uncle Zelman’s name.

In Berlin, I sat on a reserved platform as more than 100,000 people watched Bill Clinton become the first U.S. President to walk through the Brandenburg Gate since the toppling of the Berlin Wall. From there we headed to the airport; our return to D.C. followed a spectacular sunset the entire way.

The next morning I bought a newspaper in Baltimore that featured a front page photo of the President making the historic “Freedom Walk” through the Brandenburg Gate. I couldn’t wait to talk to my friends about what I was certain had been all over the Los Angeles newspapers while I was gone.

“Did you see the newspaper today? Have you been watching the news about my trip with the White House Press Corps?”

“Naw,” everybody said. “The only thing that’s been on TV or in the news while you were gone was O.J. Simpson and the murder of his wife.”

And so... it was back to my job in the basement of the old folks home, more like Cinderella this time than Forrest Gump.