When visitors to the Statue of Liberty climb to the crown’s observation deck and peer out onto the harbor where 12 million immigrants crossed to come to America, they look through windows built by Lara Massie’s father.
Lara, a 31-year-old neurosurgery resident in Detroit, had never involved herself much with politics before this election. But like so many others, she’s found herself eager to participate. She attended the Women’s March on Washington — her first protest — and has been calling Congress to put her concerns on record.
So she was among the throngs of Americans disturbed last weekend by President Donald Trump’s announcement that people from seven countries couldn’t come to the United States. She vacillates, she said, between “wallowing in terror and feeling empowered.”
But then she flipped through her photo album on her phone and saw the old photos she’d saved of her father toiling inside Lady Liberty’s crown, and found herself not only feeling inspired, but also hopeful.
Just over 30 years ago, George Massie worked at a Pittsburgh manufacturing company hired to construct new lookout windows for the crown’s observation deck as part of a massive restoration ahead of the statue’s 100-year anniversary in 1986. He would later tell his daughter stories of those 10 months charged with rehabbing this great American symbol. Her favorite is when he was invited to the black-tie gala opening for the restored statue and had to climb to the top in his tux to unscrew a window so first lady Nancy Reagan could stick her hand out and wave, she said.
But he also told her how, while up there, he’d think of his great-grandmother, who’d arrived at that spot from Austria at just 16 years old in search of a better life.
Lara reflected on that, this common history most Americans share of being from immigrant ancestry, and felt her father’s deep pride and patriotism in leaving his mark on a monument that welcomed foreigners to America’s shores with the literary equivalent of open arms: “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”
So in an uplifting message on Facebook, she shared her small slice of family history to, she said later, “remind everyone of our collective history. We have a lot to fight for and a lot at stake and a lot that defines us.”
“There is one thing that is keeping me calm in all of this insanity. Throughout my life, there’s never been anything my dad couldn’t fix. Cars, appliances — I’ve seen them taken apart to their pieces before coming together to make something greater than their individual parts.
“Growing up in Pittsburgh, I learned to be proud of both the city and myself for being human melting pots. Irish, Ukrainian, German, Swiss, polish, Austrian, Scottish — the branches of my family have proudly documented our history, including those ancestors who came through Ellis Island. I often wonder if, while passing by the Statue of Liberty on her arrival to the land where “the streets were paved with gold,” my 16-year-old great grandmother could imagine that her grandson-in-law would some day repair Lady Liberty’s crown with his own hands.
“Thirty years ago, when I was an infant, the Statue of Liberty was refurbished for its 100th anniversary, and my father handcrafted the windows in her crown. Windows through which millions of us have looked upon the harbor where our ancestors arrived. The windows through which you can look down and see the poem which declares our national values, that declares we are better than what is happening today.
“Today, with so much uncertainty, there are very few things that I am certain about. But I know that as long as that statue stands, we will be reminded of what we stand for. And my dad built it, so ain’t nothing gonna shake that crown.”
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