Paul Dans

So they were kind of these hard hat outer borough New Yorkers who moved from slum tenements to public housing and then ultimately to a little piece of the rock up in the Bronx.

So that's my dad's side of the family.

And, you know, my mom's side is even more, you know, maybe not more patriotic, but the same sort of crew that came from working class stock.

They were French Canadian immigrants.

My grandfather was one of 22.

That's kind of, I guess, runs in our blood.

But my mom was the youngest of eight in a town called Woonsocket.

They worked in the textile.

Woonsocket, Rhode Island.

Woonsocket, Rhode Island.

um textile mill workers right and these guys were the mechanical geniuses um five of her brothers went off fought world war ii their first language was was french yeah so they actually went behind enemy lines they cut the supply lines they landed on d-day and these were the simple guys who kind of came back to the machine machine shops and stuff uh here to only see the factory town move abroad yeah in um in the 1990s the story of all new england yeah the french you know the

Yeah, it's the story of all over this country, you know.

And we had moved around, like I said, my dad was in the military.

I know Lindsey's team likes to tag me as a New Englander, but I lived in Boston for all two months when I was a baby.

But my dad was on orders from the military.

So, you know, it's kind of like he's a Vietnam vet and we're a military family moving around.

We moved to Colorado in the early 70s.

And this was post-hippie Colorado.

And dad wasn't quite a social justice warrior, but it was a little closer to kind of Archie Bunker dynamic where they were kind of questioning the Vietnam War.

Dad had done his service, but there wasn't something sitting right about it.