Lee A. Iacooca · Mob Talk Social Club

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Lee A. Iacooca

In 1921, a young Italian man sailed past the Statue of Liberty with his elderly mother and his new bride. Sixty-one years later, the president asked his son to save her.

The young man was Nicola Iacocca, from San Marco dei Cavoti, in southern Italy. His bride was Antonietta. They came through Ellis Island and settled in Allentown, Pennsylvania.

Their son was born there on October 15, 1924. The world would know him as Lee.

His father opened a hot dog restaurant, the Orpheum Wiener House. When the Depression came, it hit the family hard. They kept going. “When times are tough, be in the food business,” his father told him.

His mother made sure nobody went hungry. “Thanks to her a nickel soupbone went a long way in our house, and we always had enough to eat,” he remembered.

Lee went to work for Ford. He rose fast. In 1964, he and the Mustang were on the covers of Time and Newsweek.

But his years at Ford were not all triumphs. The Ford Pinto, a car whose fuel tank could explode, became one of the most notorious failures of his era there. It is part of his story too.

In 1978, Henry Ford II fired him, in a year Ford made record profits. Asked why, Ford said: “Well, sometimes you just don’t like somebody.”

Lee went to Chrysler, which was close to collapse. He went to Washington and fought for federally guaranteed loans. He cut his own salary to $1 a year. Chrysler paid the loans back seven years early.

Then, in 1982, President Reagan called. He asked Lee Iacocca to lead the campaign to restore the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island.

The son of two immigrants took the job. The goal was about $150 million. The campaign raised more than $350 million.

“If Miss Liberty was a symbol of hope, Ellis Island was a symbol of reality,” he said.

In 1990, the island where his parents first touched America reopened as a museum.

But in those same years, he was losing the person closest to him. His wife, Mary, had lived with type 1 diabetes since she was 23. In 1983, at 57, it took her life.

He did not let that be the end of it. In 1984, he started a foundation in her memory to fight diabetes. He gave it the money from his autobiography. Today, it has funded more than $40 million in research.

Every Italian American family has a Nicola and an Antonietta. They came with almost nothing. They got through the hard years on soupbones and stubbornness. And somehow their kids ended up running things they could never have imagined.

Lee Iacocca died on July 2, 2019, at his home in California. He was 94. Today would have been his 102nd birthday.

His daughter, Kathryn, now leads the foundation he built for her mother. And every year, visitors walk through the halls of Ellis Island, the same halls his parents walked in 1921.

Lee Iacocca was the son of a hot dog seller from Allentown. He helped restore the island where his parents became Americans. Then he spent the rest of his life fighting the disease that took his wife.

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Lee A. Iacooca