CANAL RAT ON THE DELAWARE

Delaware City is a little town that could have, but never did. But it's where I grew up. And I still love it.

It was originally settled as Newbold's Landing, surrounded by peach orchards, a small port on the Delaware River serving farmers in southern New Castle County. In 1829, it suddenly grew to prominence — and was renamed Delaware City — when it became the eastern terminus of the newly constructed Chesapeake and Delaware Canal, linking the Chesapeake Bay to the Delaware River, and Baltimore to Philadelphia.

Delaware City's at the east end of the canal; Chesapeake City, at the west end. As a kid, I remember being shown an old map on the wall of our town hall that projected Delaware City to grow bigger than Philadelphia was at the time. But that was not to be.

By the turn of the century, many larger ships could no longer squeeze through the locks at Delaware City. So, on January 31, 1927, the locks on the old canal shut down and a new, wider, and straighter canal opened. It was rerouted to enter the Delaware River at sea level at Reedy Point, a mile to the south of Delaware City. Grand plans for the next Philadelphia collapsed. And Delaware City remained a small town with a big name.

Today, Delaware City's much the same as it was back then: a quaint, sleepy, forgotten, little one-traffic-light town on the banks of the Delaware River, nine miles south of historic New Castle. The running joke among locals is that Delaware City's population is 1,200. At low tide, that is. Only 900 at high tide.

It was in Delaware City that I spent the first eighteen years of my life. And — for a young white boy, at least — it was a magical place to grow up: an Ozzie and Harriet kind of town, where everybody knew everybody else, where neighbors and family looked out for one other, where nobody had much money but it didn't really matter, and where life centered around work, church, and school. I only realized later that not all of Delaware City's residents had it so good.

I might as well admit this, too: For those first eighteen years, I was not known as Bill Press, either. I was stuck with the family nickname: Chippy, or simply Chip. My family called me that, I was told, because I had the same legal name — William Henry Press — as my father and grandfather before me. (My full name, in fact, which I never use, is William Henry Press III.) So they needed some way to tell us apart. And, besides, I was just a "chip off the old block."

I suffered that nickname gladly until the first day of my eighth grade class at Salesianum High School, when Oblate Scholastic Mr. Robert Lawler called the roll. After declaiming, "William Press," he asked, "What do they call you, son? Bill?"

At that point, I'd never been called Bill in my life, but I was too scared to contradict him. "Yes," I nervously stammered. And, from that day on, I've been Bill Press — everywhere, that is, but in Delaware City.

The Press family, part of the Cook Cousins clan, made up a big part of Delaware City, even at high tide. The family patriarch, my grandfather, William H. "Pop" Press Sr., was born on December 2, 1888, in Salem, New Jersey. He joined the army in World War I and was assigned to Fort DuPont in Delaware City, directly across the Delaware River from Salem. There, like many of my uncles and family friends, all fellow Fort DuPont alumni, he met and married a local girl, and never left.

For us grandkids, the big question, then and now, was: Where did the Press family come from? It's a question we often asked Pop-Pop Press, without ever getting a straight answer. He insisted he was a direct descendant of the Cherokee. As proof, he'd unbutton his shirt, show us his bare smooth chest, and ask, "You never saw an American Indian with hair on his chest, did you?" Not exactly a DNA test, but some of our family still believe that tall tale. Even as a kid, I always thought it was bullshit. And I am now more than ever convinced it was.

My first sign came while working at my first job in politics, as administrative assistant to San Francisco supervisor Roger Boas. One day, I accompanied Roger to a luncheon at one of the city's big synagogues. Roger, a prominent member of San Francisco's Jewish community, sat at the head table, alongside the president of the congregation, whose name was, curiously enough — Sam Press. Meanwhile, I was seated at a table in the back of the room, where everyone was speaking Yiddish. At one point, the woman next to me turned and whispered, "You do understand what we're talking about, don't you?" When I admitted I didn't have a clue, she was stunned. "What? A name like Press and you don't speak Yiddish?"

More evidence poured in, years later, once I popped up on television, first on KABC-TV in Los Angeles, and later on CNN and MSNBC. I've heard from dozens of people from all over the country with the same last name, none of them directly related to our Press family. Yet every one with the same story: their ancestors were Russian Jews who emigrated to the United States from Latvia.

I was especially struck one night, attending a black-tie event at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in downtown Los Angeles, when a friend asked if I knew Jim Press, then head of Toyota Motors for California (later head of Toyota for the entire country). When I said I'd never met him, my friend disappeared across the ballroom, only to reappear with the more famous Mr. Press in tow. Jim walked up, stuck out his hand, and gave me a big smile. The first two words out of his mouth were "Russian Jew!"

How could it be otherwise? I have since, hit or miss, traced Pop-Pop's family back to the 1830s, all in the Salem or Pennsville, New Jersey, area. In immigration records, I've also discovered several Presses arriving in the Philadelphia area from Latvia in the early nineteenth century, long before Ellis Island. So I'm convinced there's a connection, even though not yet firmly established. Interestingly, even in Latvia in the 1800s, the name was already Press — although, much earlier, it must have been shortened from a longer family name.

So I have long considered myself the Catholic descendant of a Russian Jew — a prospect that did not go down well with Grandmom Press, a loyal Catholic of German descent, who made sure all of her grandchildren were baptized and raised Catholic and went to Mass every Sunday. On one visit from California, I told her I'd heard from a lot of people around the country named Press and, after doing a little research on my own, concluded that Pop-Pop's family were originally Russian Jews. "No!" she snapped. "Pop-Pop weren't no Jew!" I thought afterward that maybe Grandmom Press's attitude toward Jewish people said a lot about why Pop-Pop hid his lineage. At any rate, I never met a (self-admitted) Jew...