came from the artifacts I was exposed to early on and from having some Native ancestry through the grandparents who had that farm where my father collected artifacts and my brothers showed me fossils and a petrified tree trunk.
The anthropology interest came very early, too, because of exposure to different cultures and languages. My mother's parents had been German immigrants as very young children. The house that we lived in when I was young was in an Erie neighborhood that my mother's immigrant family had lived in. (My parents bought their first house from an old family friend.) Besides German immigrants, there were also older Italian, Czeck, and Polish immigrant families there. My German born great aunt lived with us. She was fluent in English, but switched to German when her older friends visited her. Our neighbors often spoke Italian with each other.
My father's siblings all (except one "white sheep" in the family) had Native physical traits and coloring, although they were not enrolled tribal members and were mixed, Native and British. They self-identified as White, but had pride in their Native ancestry.
My father was a supervisor in a manufacturing plant that employed several African Americans who had moved North after WWII. Several of the White employees were from poor Appalacian backgrounds who had also moved to northern cities for jobs. So I met these people and their families at company picnics and Christmas parties.
Some of them had businesses on the side, e.g. trash collecting and doing handyman repairs. So they were the ones that my father hired when he needed help or trash hauled away. He often invited them in for a beer when they worked on these home jobs. He told me that most of them had very little formal education and some were not literate at all due to school segregation and sharecropping in the South. He taught some of them the basics of reading and how to sign their names, register to vote, and apply for home loans.
So, I was always shifting from one culture to another as a kid, before we moved into the suburbs. Kids do that naturally, to "fit in" without consciously thinking about it. It seemed so natural to me to be around various cultures that anthropology became a natural interest as I got older.
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