nottingham gate before that got fancy. i remember my father saying i'm glad we're down here, but if a bomb should hit this building, it's got hot water pipes and gas pipes and we would be dead anyway. we moved briefly back to czechoslovakia but what happened was then my father did not want to work for the communists when the coup happened in february '48 and so he took the job and we came to the united states and my father defected and asked for political asylum. i was 11 at the time that we came. so i learned most of this from him. and he is the one, and i will never forget him saying this, even as a teenager, he would say americans don't know how fragile democracy is and how resilient it is. and so i really did get enamored of understanding what democracy was about. i was very proud to represent a