CryptoDad

Chapter 2 Starting Grid

I think this is the greatest and best country in all the world, with its great sunlit spaces and its long long roads, and best of all the roads that are not made yet, and the stories that no one has told because they are too busy living them.

—Nellie McClung (author and social activist), In Times Like These

Moving on Up

So exactly how did I find myself in November 2014 tangling with the White House for permission to speak at a New York business conference? Well, it came about because five months before in June 2014 I had become the newest of five commissioners of the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The faraway journey that brought me there is a unique story in its own right.

There is a road in New Jersey that embodies the American experience and my own. Bloomfield Avenue stretches northwesterly away from Newark's gritty asphalt to the lush Watchung Mountains. Laid out in the early 1800s, Bloomfield Avenue was New Jersey's first county road. It arcs across Essex County, linking a series of towns metamorphosing from urban streets peopled by newly arrived immigrants to manicured lawns gracing mansions housing descendants of the Pilgrims.

Bloomfield Avenue also arcs across my family's history. In the first decade of the twentieth century, my father's maternal grandparents, Loretto Onorio Greco and his wife, Maria Louisa, left the Valle di Comino in the central Italian region of Lazio. They traveled first to Paris and then across the Atlantic ...