A handsome, twenty-something, white man with red hair and green eyes moves into a highly active Mormon neighborhood in Sandy Utah with four dark haired, dark eyed beautiful ladies. One of them is noticeably pregnant. The year is 1969. It is a time of tumultuous change.
I heard this story many times growing up. My dad would say, “Yeah, those neighbors didn’t know what was happening when we moved in. Here I was, a young white guy, moving in with four women that all looked the same age. They didn’t know which one I was married to, or if I was married to all of them”
My dad had married my mom as soon as possible, after the baby (me) was known about. My mom, nearly 10 years his senior had conceived before a divorce with her first husband was finalized.
The picture above was taken in the new house, after they had moved in. My mom’s three oldest daughters (back row L to R: Julie 13, Sal 16, Lanie 15) had decided to live with my mom and her new husband, rather than relocating to San Diego to live with their father, Walter Wolfgramm.
There were many issues that became apparent during these times. Not only was the world in an upheaval over civil rights, the Vietnam War, and free love. There were big issues on this home front, issues that became impossible to surmount.
Being from both a racial minority through my mom, who was of Tongan decent and of the racial elite through my dad, I always felt like I was an anomaly. My sisters were immigrants and suffered the consequences of being such during their first years in America.
Lanie would tell a story of when they first went to school. “How do you say your name?” “Pisileni (BEEsuhLenEE)…” “Peesawhat…? No, you’ll just go by Lanie.” That is how it was. They were given new names, easily pronounceable by their teachers and American classmates.
It wasn’t easy being part of a mixed-race, mixed culture, blended family with parents almost a decade apart in age. My mom was a strong woman, that’s what it took in those days. She was not going to stand for any slide remarks or actions taken against her family. In fact, she always threatened us that if we ever came home from school and had been in a fight with someone, then we would ‘get the belt’ as she would say. Not only that, there were many stories told about how my mom would take my older siblings back to school or to a neighbor’s house and force them to fight the person that had bullied them at school. My mom made her children survive.
My sisters paved the way for more ethnic minorities and helped bring the Polynesian culture to the forefront of their communities in the years to come.
Now, it is hard to even imagine what the stakes were for my family back then. Being part of a religious culture that consistently taught against interracial marriages for the better part of its existence, it only stands to reason, that at this time, there would be harsh judgements against them on all fronts.