Pope John Paul II (1920 – 2005) - 31 January 1997

Every weekend for many, many summers, coming to the end of the 100-mile drive eastward from New York City to our house at the end of Long Island, I ducked down a road that had, used to have, a small railroad station and hence was known as Depot, or rather Dee-po, Lane.

It had only one or two small farms on it but a large cumbersome brick-faced church with a female statue in front. And a sign. "The church", it said, "of Our Lady of Ostrobrama". Although I'd been for most of my life a reporter and, therefore, supposed to be what old editors, with no humour whatsoever, called a trained observer, in the matter of Our Lady of Ostrobrama, I'm afraid I was as guilty as Sherlock Holmes pronounced Dr Watson to be. Remember? "Watson! You observe but you do not see!"

It never occurred to me to wonder what, or who, or where was Our Lady of Ostrobrama. Of course, I knew it was a Catholic church, our end of the Island was heavily settled by Poles and the Poles knew in their blood, or from letters of countrymen who'd gone before, they knew exactly where to settle to make a living, like many another immigrant family.

For instance, I remember a place called Tarpon Springs in Florida, where, in my day, a small and colourful town was inhabited, it seemed, wholly by Greeks mysteriously sailing far out to sea in ships named Achilleus and Agamemnon. I've just looked up the town in an old federal guide. It says population 3,414, the sponge capital of America. With the perfection of deep-sea diving equipment in 1905, a colony of Greek sponge fishermen abandoned the method of hooking sponges with long poles in shallow water and came here to fish far out to sea. When the fleet of 70 or more boats departs, a bearded priest of the Greek Orthodox Church blesses each boat.

What has this to do with the Poles of Long Island? Only to stress the curious fact that immigrants, especially non-city folks, usually look for and find a familiar landscape. An old college friend of mine, who'd served in the diplomatic service in Eastern Europe, told me when he came to stay with us one summer that the north fork at the end of Long Island looks exactly like central Poland. The same flat stretches of potato fields, the same cumbrous brick churches with thick, odd-shaped steeples.

Well, the Poles, in coming to New York early this century, somebody said, could smell sandy soil. Good potato country, which was what they had at home. They certainly made their mark. They were thrifty and industrious and, in time, came to buy out the old Yankee families who owned the potato and cauliflower farms and also something Long Island was, 50 years ago, famous for all over the world: duck farms. Of course, they put up their own churches. So there came a day when I was at last curious about Our Lady of Ostrobrama.

A new Pope was elected and the astonishing word got around our village that the local priest from Our Lady of Ostrobrama was invited to attend the installation. He was, they said, the only parish priest in the United States so chosen. Finally, the reluctant penny dropped. The new Pope was the first Polish Pope and Ostrobrama, I discovered, was a sacred town in Poland where a miracle was said to have taken place.

It was a great day for the worshippers at Our Lady of Ostrobrama and the, by now, two or three generations with Polish roots. I met the proud priest a little later. His name, by the way, was Michael O'Flynn. I thought of this when we went into the other week the origins of the half-million or more immigrants who poured into New York City, the city alone, in the past five years.

The leading arrivals, remember, being from the Dominican Republic, then from the former Soviet Union, from offshore China, Guyana and so on. What I failed to notice or see, Holmes, was that if you added together the numbers from Central or South American countries including the Dominicans, you would have a total about five times as large as the total from any other single country.

I haven't seen the census figures for the whole country but I'm pretty sure they would confirm, for once, the conventional wisdom that the largest, the most inundating flood of immigrants into the United States in the past 20 years has been Spanish-speaking peoples from Central and South America. What we call Hispanics or Latinos. And you don't need to see them on the streets or in stores anywhere to appreciate that they are the new-found Americans who, more than any other blood or culture strain, are strikingly affecting American ways of life.

Most conspicuously, in performing a revolution in American food. I don't mean by introducing a dish here, a favourite vegetable there, as in their day Hungarians made every American familiar with goulash, the Germans with liverwurst, borscht from Russia, lasagne from Italy. I mean a revolution in this country's own standard fare, as if Britain's bacon and eggs, suddenly everywhere was replaced by enchiladas and salsa.

The other evening there was a rather touching episode on the news, the last ride of a famous train that once had a daily run along a stretch of mountains and valleys in the far north-west. It simply showed the engineer, the driver climbing aboard and about to pull the whistle cord. He'd just had breakfast. If anybody had told me this scenario so far and asked, "What did he have for breakfast?" I should have said, "Some pancakes, syrup, sausage, hash brown potatoes". No! All the man said was, "Had me some cornbread and a couple of tamales" and "So long, brother!"

Well, if that railroad man and his, to me extremely improbable, breakfast was a surprise, imagine the amplified shock of a story I picked up a day or two later from Minneapolis. A team of 20 food chemists, labouring away in what the paper correctly called Minneapolis's frigid, wind-chilled canyons. (The canyon walls, I ought to say quickly, are skyscrapers.)

And to help you appreciate the incongruity, the sheer dottiness of what's happening there, I ought to say first that Minneapolis is in the heart of the state of Minnesota, that Minnesota is about halfway across the country, bordered on the west by the Dakotas, on the north by Canada. At this time of the year, the weather is normally Arctic. I see that whereas yesterday New York City's high temperature was a mild 31, that's just 1° below freezing, the daytime high in Minneapolis was 7, 25° below freezing and at night 4 below zero. The Minneapolis airport claims the record for staying open even through periods of ice storms and mountainous snows.

And what sort of people would dream of settling this inhospitable prairie? In the late 19th Century, they came in in swarms. Nothing but Scandinavians, hotfooting it home. Look through the list of Senators and Congressmen from the different States and you'll be bound to find, representing Minnesota and the neighbouring Wisconsin, people named Andersen, Andresen, Olson, Stassen, Dirksen and the like.

So now what are these 20 burrowing scientists doing in one skyscraper, in Minneapolis, in the headquarters of one of America's oldest, most productive food merchants? They are working day and night to Americanise salsa, to adapt the humble tortilla, taco and refried beans, in order to, I quote, "adapt them to the mainstream American palate".

In the, oh I suppose the late '70s, the Mexican food business, the simplest staples of Mexican food, began to spread like an oncoming flood up from the Texas border and, the food tycoons discovered, into the north. So they bought up the little guys who'd been pushing refried beans and the tangy tomato-diced Mexican sauce, salsa, for decades, but mainly and only in the south-west. Now it's sweeping the whole country and the merchandising giant whose headquarters have long been in Minneapolis is, of course, busy seeing to it that it does sweep not only this country but they're hoping soon to fan out into Europe. And who composed this dedicated team of food chemists? Not a Mexican among the lot. The three leaders are Shirish Mehta, Christopher Policinskis and Dr Piacek-Llanes – an Indian, a Pole and a Czech. All Americans, of course. Talk about a research project proper to a multi-cultural country.

This overriding fashion of replacing old familiar foods with exotics has its tragic side, I must say. About five, six years ago, my favourite soup vanished from the shelves, Scotch Broth. I've had it in Scotland and in England and here, in various towns, in the old days. But this firm's product was the only canned, tinned soup I knew as good as the original. Suddenly, I couldn't get it anywhere in New York.

It's been dropped, said the managers of several mini and supermarkets I trudged through. I wrote to the president of the company. He was polite and regretful. He sent me, as a consolation prize, a coupon entitling me to 50 cents off the next can of soup I bought. But why, I'd asked, had Scotch Broth been dropped? There's no call, he wrote. It's been replaced by Won Ton soup. Ah, so!

It is still, thank the saints, being manufactured in Canada and I hope and pray that Canada, settled by people called Stewart and Campbell and Ferguson, are not going to be bullied into taking Won Ton, with or without a 50-cent coupon.

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