Emil Cicogna

The book A Sign of the Times which appears in the Amazon.com book catalogue is the result of my personal search to relate to my own family roots, and connect them with my present-day occupations. My father was a carpenter and his father was a blacksmith - same as the character in A Sign of the Times. My dad had a number of toolboxes in a closet during all the years I was a child, but one of them, a small hand-made wooden toolbox contained tools I was not familiar with, and I did not know what they were used for.

When I became an adult, married with my wife and two sons, we took a family vacation one summer to Busch Gardens in Virginia, and included in our vacation was a tour of the Budweiser Brewery in Williamsburg. At the end of the brewery tour were the stables that house the magnificent Clydesdales, and in that building is also a small museum that displays many of the tools used for making saddles and bridles and for shoeing horses, and there in the display case were the tools that were in my father's small wooden tool box at home. They belonged to his father, the blacksmith, and I decided right there to tell a story about the blacksmiths, and how most of their jobs became obsolete in the wake of the industrial revolution of the 1800's, which included the onset of the automobile.

Today I teach college classes, and one of them includes the History of Education in the United States. I have tried to tell some of the story of America through the people who were part of the history which has shaped this country, one family at at time.