Dr. Mariano La Via (interviewed by Laura Mina on September 15, 2023)

Dr. Mariano La Via (interviewed by Laura Mina on September 15, 2023)

2023-09-15

Mariano La Via was born in Rome in 1926. La Via was a young man living in Italy during World War II and describes those harrowing times, losing friends, and then arriving in New York by sea, and seeing the Brooklyn Bridge. An immunologist, Dr. La Via moved to Charleston in 1979 to work at MUSC in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine. His career focus includes time spent at the forefront studying and fighting the AIDS epidemic in Atlanta and Charleston during the 1980s.

Mina, Laura

Cox, Danielle

WAV

Audio

English

MarianoLaVia_OralHistory_20230915

1:47:14/1.06GB

00:00,000 Laura Mina

Okay, I'm going to point this towards you. So, my name is Laura Mina, and I'm the head librarian here at the Charleston Library Society, and today is September 15, 2023, and it's 12:20 in the afternoon. And this afternoon I have Mariano La Via, who is a long time resident of Charleston, South Carolina. So, Dr. La Via, tell me a little bit about your background, where you were born, when you were born, and what life was like at that time.

00:52,920 Mariano La Via

I'm glad they're sitting down. (both laughing) I tell you when I was born, it may shock you, I was born in Rome on January, at the end of January of 1926, which makes me contemplating very peacefully the arrival of my 98th birthday this coming January.

01:20,840 Laura Mina

It's very special.

01:21,840 Mariano La Via

I don't know about special. I don't know about special. I don't consider birthday special. That just happened. It's another day. It means you're a year older.

01:32,680 Laura Mina

It means you've accomplished another year of life.

01:35,320 Mariano La Via

I guess, but you know, the problem is that every day I wake up in the morning and say, "Here's another day. Keep on going." We're worried about tomorrow when it comes.

01:47,880 Laura Mina

One day at a time.

01:50,520 Mariano La Via

But so that's a little bit soft. What did I do? Well, I moved a lot. My father's family was caught in the big financial mess of the late '20s, early '30s. I was just born, and they had some significant financial problems, not of their own doing, but because of the imprudence of an in-law who had married my father's oldest sister. So my father, who was aspiring to a university chair in philosophy and had the benefit of having been one of the four pupils of Giovanni Gentile, who was a philosophical powerhouse in Italy and even in Europe in those days, he felt that, you know, he would be able to stay home, live with the family there, live with my mother and whoever children came because his father was well to do and could do it, and do what was supposed to happen, prepare his scientific or philosophical production, write books, articles and so on, and then concur.

03:52,060 Laura Mina

Can you hold on just one moment? I'm gonna stop whoever that is from hammering. Do you hear that? I can hear that, and it's making it hard for me to hear you, hold on.

04:01,140 Mariano La Via

That's what happened. So at that point in time, my father was faced with the choice of having to work to support the family while he was working on preparing what would eventually have gotten this university chair that was at that time the apex of a career. So he taught high school and made some money teaching high school, but also moved as there appeared to be some progress in his career, getting closer and closer to the final goal, university professorship. What happened a couple of years later is that he had a conversion crisis and so abandoned Giovanni Gentile's philosophical bent, let's say, let's call it this way, and started working on a critique of his master and a devising of a new philosophical system that he called absolute realism. So what happened, Gentile was very powerful, and so he just, every time my father presented his credentials to the committee that set up every year in Italy to choose three people for university chairs, Gentile would always boycott them underground, and so he had to wait 10 years before Gentile said, "I don't agree with La Via, but he's finally shown me that he really has a viable system of philosophy, therefore I will stay out of the way." And that was the year the Second World War started.

06:30,120 Laura Mina

Your dad sounds like he was very persistent and he was an academic who really believed in his work.

06:38,660 Mariano La Via

Exactly. So after, let's see, Assisi, Pérezio, Genoa, Urbino, finally after four moves, we moved to the chair that was available in Sicily, in Messina, and we spent all of his career.

07:07,700 Laura Mina

So your family was, so Urbino, Assisi, so that was mostly in the northern part of Italy?

07:17,300 Mariano La Via

Yeah, from Rome we went to Assisi and to Varese, which is right at the foot of the Alps, north of Milan, then from there we went to Genoa, which was on the coast, pastel in the north. Then from Genoa we went to Urbino, because that was the big promotion, because Urbino, he could shed the teaching of high school and work at the university level. Nubino is a university, it's a small one, but it's very well known and it's very good. So he was able to get a, not a permanent position, but a temporary position that would carry him for a couple of years, and it turned out that after three years of that, the final thing clicked. So I was in 1936, I was 10.

08:19,440 Laura Mina

So early on—

08:21,740 Mariano La Via

No, wait, excuse me, 1939. I was 13. And I ended up, my mother said, "Why Why don't you go spend the summer with your grandmother on the southeastern coast of Italy where my grandmother went every year to be with one of her daughters. And so I went down, got on the train, traveled all night, arrived, spent the wonderful summer. One week before I was supposed to go back, one of my uncles who was there turned on the radio in the morning to listen to the news and Hitler had just invaded Poland.

09:01,500 Laura Mina

So you heard or you your family at 13 years old you directly encountered the beginning of the Second World War.

06:15,000 Mariano La Via

Exactly. So I went back home and the first thing that happened and my poor father was deprived of his only pleasure in life, coffee. Coffee disappeared from the market completely. For the next several years, people in Italy drank what they could concoct. The most common thing was barley that was roasted like coffee, ground, and then "coffee" was made with this roasted ground barley. (laughs) Besides the fact that there were other things, I had to get up at four o'clock in the morning to go stand in front of the butcher shop because meat was in very scarce supply. And usually by the time I got there, I would be third or fourth in line if I was lucky. And the butcher, luckily for me, was only a block away from our house.

10:21,280 Laura Mina

So you were experiencing rationing?

10:23,860 Mariano La Via

Well.

10:24,860 Laura Mina

And shortages?

10:25,860 Mariano La Via

Absolutely. So we are rationing and shortages.

10:31,960 Laura Mina

So in that time period, you also experienced the rise of fascism and Mussolini, correct?

10:41,880 Mariano La Via

Absolutely.

10:42,880 Laura Mina

And what was that like?

10:49,500 Mariano La Via

It was very hard for my father because it was very, you know, at my age I didn't understand what was going on. This was between the age of four, five, and thirteen. And then when the war started, it was even more confusing. So my father suffered a great deal. My father had to, as a government employee, be a member of the fascist party. Otherwise he wouldn't get paid.

11:33,920 Laura Mina

Yeah.

11:34,920 Mariano La Via

It was like forced acceptance for the livelihood of your family. I have a picture of my father with this little thing on the lapel that signified his belonging to the fascist party. My father was arrested.

11:52,840 Laura Mina

He was arrested?

11:53,840 Mariano La Via

Yeah. And interrogated for one whole day. And they let him go because they thought that his ideas were not in keeping with the fascist ideas.

12:07,120 Laura Mina

Well, as a philosopher, a free thinker, a man of letters, a scholar, those are usually the people that are targeted in a dictatorial environment. And it sounds like your father had that experience.

12:24,920 Mariano La Via

Yeah, that all happened after we went to Sicily. He started there, and two years later, as the war was getting hotter, and they were beginning to bombard from the sky the area where we were, not very frequently, was mostly the British that were doing that, so they would come maybe once or twice a week. My mother decided, "Let's go to Rome for Christmas, because I spent time there." Okay? Two years after we got there, we went to Rome for Christmas vacation. And what happened? We were stuck. We couldn't go back.

13:04,320 Laura Mina

For how long were you stuck in Rome?

13:08,200 Mariano La Via

Well in Rome, only for about a year. But then in Italy, in the summer, you don't stay in the city because the children need to have some space to do something, to be out in the air and so on and so on. a custom back in those days and it still is in Italy. When summer comes, people get out of the big city and they go to out in the country, they go to the beach and so on, which is what we did. But, so my mother said, "Let's go to Urbino." We know Urbino, it's a small town. It's in the mountains, it's nice, it's great. We weren't there, we have friends still that we had made when we were there before. So we went back there. So one year and a half years in Rome, we went there. And finally, in 1945, we were able to go back to Rome. And back to Sicily, where we had no house anymore. Everything had been stolen, destroyed, or something.

14:15,760 Laura Mina

So you reference air strikes essentially. What was that like as a child with, I mean, here in the United States, we can only conceive of what that's like. We can guess at what that might be as an experience for a child. But you directly have that experience. What was that like? Do you remember air raid sirens? Do you remember having to have blackouts at night? Like what was that like for you as a child?

14:50,100 Mariano La Via

I remember, and I remember very simply when the British started coming to Messina and throwing a few bombs here and there. Okay, there will be a siren going on, of course. And then when the thing was over, the siren would come the second time. I went to bed, went to sleep, and I still remember that I did not have to wait for the siren to come. The siren is a little thing that whirls. When the whirling started, the little sound would wake me up every time.

15:21,200 Laura Mina

Wow, where did your family go when that happened?

15:23,300 Mariano La Via

That's subsidized. There was no air raid, anything, because our house didn't have a basement. So we went down to the first floor where there was a retired army person that was living with his wife, And we all find out when it's a perfect. And spent the evening there until we heard bombs falling here, bombs falling there, and hoping they wouldn't fall on our house, which never happened, thank God. So that was my experience.

15:58,380 Laura Mina

How did your parents explain that to you? I mean, how did you navigate that? How did they navigate that with children?

16:07,980 Mariano La Via

By trying to live as normal a life as possible during the week and a half or so between these air raids that were very, you know, at the beginning they were not very frequent. The reason we couldn't go back after we went to Rome for Christmas was that the big push from the Allies came. And by then, what had happened was a total political upheaval. Italy signed an armistice on the side. The German Mussolini was captured and the Germans grabbed him, brought him up to the northern part of Italy. where he set up a mock republic that lasted for several years, which is all historically documented. And essentially, Italy became a free war area between the Germans. They were trying to keep the Allies from coming in, and the Americans on the West Side and the British conglomeration of Gurkhas and Indians and Cypriots and Greeks and so on, because Britain had all these people that were all part of the side where we were. That's where I learned English because they were coming up.

18:00,020 Laura Mina

So you learned English essentially from the Allies.

18:03,060 Mariano La Via

Yeah. I got mad. I knew German because I'd taken five years, four years of German in high school. And so I said I have to learn to understand what languages people speak. So I learned English. And I learned English by just learning. I can tell you a little story which is very interesting. One day, well, first I had my brother who had had English in school, the four years that everybody has to have in Italy, you know, this mandatory in high school. You have to have four years of a foreign language, chose English. I used to wake up in the morning and say, "How do you say this in English?" So one day, Baptist under fire, I was in the square of this little town of Vino, And a jeep stop, this guy came off, came straight to me and started talking to me. My friend and classmate in medical school at that point, I started medical school, who had had English in high school and was next to me, new vocabulary. I didn't know vocabulary, so I kept asking him, "How do you say this? How do you say that?" All I did, I was able to explain to this lieutenant of the Canadian Army that the place where he wanted to go was that way. So then he decided that he liked me, so he said, "You know something? I'd like to invite you. We're having a dance tonight at our office." I said, "Well, why don't you come? Do you have a girlfriend?" I said, "No." I said, "Well, come anyway." So—

19:39,780 Laura Mina

That's nice. Yeah. Was it fun?

19:42,780 Mariano La Via

It was fun. And so that was essentially my introduction to English.

19:48,780 Laura Mina

Wow.

19:49,260 Mariano La Via

Which continued because when we were able to go back to Messina in 1945, Messina is a port city and had a medium-sized contingent of British Navy there in port. and I befriended a dentist who was a lieutenant in the British Navy and an engineer who was from Malta. So he spoke Italian, he spoke English of course because Malta they spoke both. And I spent hours every week with these guys doing things you know, going around showing them things that they didn't know, and celebrating birthdays and so on and so on. So by the time this was over, I had it introduced to my German.

20:46,520 Laura Mina

Wow. So I mean there's nothing but like immersion, right?

20:50,960 Mariano La Via

Right.

20:51,960 Laura Mina

Immersion with friends.

20:52,960 Mariano La Via

Right.

20:53,960 Laura Mina

And there you've got the patience, yeah.

20:54,960 Mariano La Via

Yeah. And interest because you have to be interested. None of my brothers, none of my brothers was able to do that. I don't know why. But they didn't. They did it later because they had to.

21:08,240 Laura Mina

So that actually brings me to, you know, I see listed a number of brothers. So what—tell me about your brothers and where you belong in the line of siblings.

21:22,200 Mariano La Via

Number one.

21:23,200 Laura Mina

So you're the oldest brother.

21:25,160 Mariano La Via

I'm the oldest. The only one that, well, one of the only two that are still alive. I'm still here and my youngest brother who's 16 years younger than me is still around.

21:42,200 Laura Mina

What's his name?

21:43,200 Mariano La Via

Luigi.

21:44,200 Laura Mina

Luigi. And then I see Francesco.

21:47,200 Mariano La Via

He died the last time we were in Italy seven years ago. I was there next to him, when he died.

21:55,200 Laura Mina

He died.

21:58,820 Mariano La Via

He moved away. He moved to northern Italy, and we didn't see him very much after we grew up. I mean, I was away, so I left home. I came to this country, so I would come to that later. He died—I remember I was walking into the house here in Charleston. My phone was ringing and I picked it up and it was my sister-in-law. She says, "Mariano, I have some very sad news. Your brother, which was ever died this morning. He had a stroke."

22:42,140 Laura Mina

And then Nicola?

22:43,140 Mariano La Via

Nicola died just before his seventh birthday.

22:46,140 Laura Mina

Seventh birthday?

22:47,140 Mariano La Via

Yeah. That really, really was horrible for my father because he was the last one of my brothers being born. Luigi was born several years later. There were about four years between Nicole and Luigi. Then Nicola developed what is an acute necrosis of the adrenal glands and that dropped her blood pressure to zero and you died. He died. He walked he Night, he was perfect. You know went to bed walk up in the morning was a little groggy But one of us then--

23:26,000 Laura Mina

Wow do you remember that happening?

23:28,340 Mariano La Via

Mm-hmm was that

23:31,000 Laura Mina

Was that--

23:31,940 Mariano La Via

We were in Rome. We are just we were during the period before we went to a vino In fact, we went to be no without him and my father was really devastated. But my father has really become very attached to him since he was the last of the children for quite a while, for several years. So yeah, it was not a very good thing.

24:01,220 Laura Mina

So sorry. So his name, your father's name was Vincenzo La Via. And then your mother's name was Carmela Carbone?

24:11,180 Mariano La Via

Carbone, yeah.

24:12,180 Laura Mina

My sister worked at a restaurant in New York City called Carbone. So was your mother, did your mother and father stay married throughout your life?

24:27,500 Mariano La Via

Yes.

24:28,500 Laura Mina

How did your mother navigate the loss of Nicola?

24:40,940 Mariano La Via

She, you know, I think that when I was at that age in my early teens and I was living between Rome and Urbino, you know, in that very bad, strange period, you know, and then we came back and so on, and then we went back down not to Sicily. It's very difficult for me to say, to answer that question because the way people react to the death of a family member, I noticed back in those days, and I found the same thing here. It's directly related to what is their foundational belief in life and death. And if you have, a foundational belief, that essentially looks at that as a transition point to a different life. Then it's easier to deal with it. I mean, grieving is not, you know, I had the pleasure of small parenthesis during my Denver eight years of getting to know Elizabeth Kubler-Ross

27:07,520 Laura Mina

Really?

27:13,400 Mariano La Via

She was married to one of my colleagues. And we used to get together with the residents in our department, because my wife was still doing a residency in pathology, my first wife. So I was clearly invited to these things and and Manny Ross was Elizabeth's husband was still a fellow and so he was invited also so and I got to know her very well and I read her books. And it's it's clearly I mean she addressed the process of grieving very well and it's very important. But you know I'm facing death every day at nine almost 98 you know you discuss your miseries every day. My wife carefully just this morning said you know this guy he was he was a physician I said no you lived in Wadmalaw Island or something I said you no, I don't know but you know it's... So my mother, yeah, my mother clearly was not very, very happy. I mean, you cannot be happy when, you know, it's your child. It's your child whom you've carried for nine months and then it was your youngest child for four or five years, six years, and then all of sudden, bingo, in six hours, gone.

29:26,260 Laura Mina

It's devastating and yeah, I mean people really respond to that very differently, but it's the greatest fear of a parent to go through that. But it also, you know, I mean, I know this is kind of out of order, but there is a parallel to it that you encountered a lot of death through your profession and the time in the world when there was a tremendous epidemic happening and you were on the front lines of it essentially here in Charleston. So you have had a lot of experience with grieving, is my guess, and that--

30:26,740 Mariano La Via

I was thinking of it this morning.

30:29,940 Laura Mina

Yeah.

30:30,780 Mariano La Via

Yep. I've seen a lot of people, not because I was a clinician, but because of what I was doing for, as a service to infectious disease people who are treating these people. And I got to know these people because they were coming by the lab so that we could take their blood and analyze what was necessary. And you know, at the beginning, what there was nothing you could do, all you could do is just grieve when they were dying.

31:10,580 Laura Mina

So just for the context of the HIV pandemic, would you call it a pandemic or epidemic?

31:18,620 Mariano La Via

Well, it was not a pandemic because it didn't. Although I think at one point it did spread so widely that maybe it should have been. But then there was something that could be done unlike the HIV, I mean the COVID. So because there were drugs that were developed that worked. And so let's call it an epidemic, which is what really the people that know these things characterize it as. But it was even in Charleston. It was pretty bad.

32:05,860 Laura Mina

So, you know, there's, you've had these like tremendous life experiences that have, you know, that have meant a lot of loss, but also a lot of adaptation and world experience that most people don't have in their lives. So, when, so I'm going to move us to the place of of what happened and how you came from Italy to the United States. Tell me about that and was it at the behest of your family, was it with your family, what was that process? It sounds like you were in, were you in Urbino or Rome and then you came? Or what was the, what was the timeline of that?

32:59,620 Mariano La Via

When I started medical school, it was during the Second World War.

33:03,860 Laura Mina

Right.

33:04,860 Mariano La Via

Okay. And I transferred, I had to transfer to Messina because I couldn't stay in Rome. Because my mother told me, she said, you know, you cannot stay with one of your uncles who live here because they wouldn't be fair. We cannot support you here, so you come home with us. So I transferred. which is very easy in Italy, just transfer, just go and register at the new university. So I finished there. When I finished, I went back to Rome because there wasn't much to do down there. I had a very, very short employment with one of my professors, but you know, I wasn't anything that would support me. I mean, so I was still getting money from my family to live. I'll go to Rome and see what's going on there. It was a little bit better so I could find. But I wanted to get away. That was something that somehow my mother had always hoped that my father would do when things were tough and he was not able to break through the barrier we talked about before. And I don't know why I got that thing but then I looked around and Germany was, I had been to Germany for two weeks on an exchange, a student exchange, short three years after the war ended.

34:36,860 Laura Mina

Wow.

34:37,740 Mariano La Via

I had been to, I knew England because, you know, it was a place for a lot of good things that happened, but England was wiped out.

34:49,540 Laura Mina

Right.

34:49,900 Mariano La Via

France was in a nightmare.

34:52,260 Laura Mina

Right.

34:53,620 Mariano La Via

So what was still semi-normal in Europe were the Scandinavian countries. Do you want to go there and learn another language and do something? My interest had developed by then. I wanted to do immunology somehow in some way or fashion. I decided I was going to stay in academia because I wasn't interested in going out and being confined to to practice in medicine and not be able to do some research and some teaching which was one of my major interests so that meant academia, you know. Maybe my father infected me. I don't know So I decided that I would try to go to the only place that was still reasonable to go to, the USA.

32:54,000 Laura Mina

Why was that reasonable?

35:56,820 Mariano La Via

Because they had, you know, they had what my impression for what I saw and for what I gathered by talking to people was that the problems, the United States were touched by the Second World War, but not to the extent that Europe was. I mean, there was no fighting in this country going on. I mean, the Germans tried to land somebody in Chicago, the submarine is there exhibited at the Museum of Science and Industry, and they threw some bombs over on the West Coast, I think. And that was it.

36:43,820 Laura Mina

Oh, you mean in Pearl Harbor?

36:45,540 Mariano La Via

And then, no, no, no, I'm talking about, and then of course, Pearl Harbor was the absolute disaster. Please.

36:55,060 Laura Mina

So you directly experienced the physical devastation of the European continent and England. I mean, it sounds like, I mean, I lived through 9/11 and I remember going to, I'm a New Yorker. And so I remember seeing ground zero. But the idea that there was such a high level of destruction throughout that continent and you saw so much of it.

37:30,540 Mariano La Via

You know, Messina was wiped out. Messina was bombed, don't worry, I just turned it off.

37:37,580 Laura Mina

Thank you.

37:42,620 Mariano La Via

Messina was bombed every day, three times a day, beginning in January, because they were trying to prevent the Germans from bringing in more material. So they were planning the invasion, which was supposed to be a tripartite thing, was supposed to be in the western corner of Sicily, which happened, south of Rome, which happened. And unfortunately, it was halted when they reached Monte Cassino. They had to destroy the monastery because the Germans were there and it was up high and they just couldn't do anything except to bomb them out of existence. And then all the mess that was happening in the north with the party's houses were--

38:43,820 Laura Mina

What a mess.

38:47,060 Mariano La Via

I mean, I saw people that I knew in Urbino were there during that interim, when we went back from Rome. Friends of mine that I had had some contact with in the afternoon and were found dead the next morning, killed by the Germans because they were going to do something at night that was meant to be.

39:14,300 Laura Mina

Yeah, yeah, covert.

39:20,420 Mariano La Via

I will give you a very little thing. One of my classmates was a guy in medical school, was a guy that was a son of an Italian family in Boston. His father was a very staunch believer in the fact that the Italians had it all. And so he decided that his son would not go to school in this country. He would go back to school in Italy. He sent him back. The guy got caught by the beginning of the war, never came back. And so he ended up going to medical school there. The entire family came at graduation time they arrived with a big American car. Very hard to navigate the Italian streets, but they brought it. They toured and saw it and asked me to accompany them at one point. One of his sisters, one day we were talking and he said, "You know, it's really interesting. All the young people that I have gone out with in the United States are like children. You're all grown up." I looked at Adele, we went through a war.

40:41,680 Laura Mina

That's true, yeah.

40:46,020 Mariano La Via

That makes you grow up fast.

40:49,320 Laura Mina

Yes. It gives you a very different set of life experiences.

40:53,860 Mariano La Via

Yeah.

40:54,700 Laura Mina

It becomes about survival and adaptation, and there's just, there's little else. It's Maslow's hierarchy, right? And so, yeah.

41:05,500 Mariano La Via

And one of the things that when I came, finally, and we'll get back to that in a second because I can tell you this little vignette. It was interesting when I came, and this was a country of children, the parades, the graduational exercises, gaps and gowns and all sort of funny things. Come on, grow up. It's not a joke, it's life. But anyway, let's go back to where we were. I'm sorry that I keep…

41:49,160 Laura Mina

Please, no, because the thing is, you know, your experiences, there's very few people… I think you might be the only person I've ever met that was in Italy during World War II. You know, my family, my great grandfather, actually a few of my great grandparents are from Italy, but they left before World War II. So hearing this, it's so powerful. And I think the vignettes are the things that make history. They're the things that are lost to the noise of time that really bring history to a life, to life and show how it was really lived rather than the generalizations that so many of us know. But you made a decision to come to the United States. You had been through--

42:42,920 Mariano La Via

Yeah, I mean, I made the decision because I needed to find out what's going on. There were no jobs in Italy either. So I needed to find out something. And I came and it was tough. I got in touch with these people at the University of Chicago through a group that I started working with that was doing some outreach programs with university, high school students and so on, they had retreats and things like that. So they said, "Can I talk about this?" And they said, "Yeah, we know somebody there at the University of Chicago. He's a member of our group who's working out there. Maybe he knows someone," because he was a physicist. I'm quite removed from what I was interested in. But he talked to a professor in the Department of Biochemistry who was Peruvian. And we had been doing some of the seminar work on the radiation damage.

43:59,180 Laura Mina

Radiation damage from nuclear war?

44:02,740 Mariano La Via

From?

44:03,740 Laura Mina

The Hiroshima?

44:04,740 Mariano La Via

Yeah, from isotopes, from nuclear bombs and so on. Those sorts of radiation damage would they count. So he put me in touch with this guy. And this guy said, "Yeah, I can talk to Bob Wiesler very well. He's a young assistant professor in the department of pathology and wanted to correspond with him. So I correspond with Bob Wiesler and Bob Wiesler said, "Yeah, sure. If you want to come for a year, that's fine. But we don't have any money. So you better find some money. And you better get a visa of some kind to come." So three years.

44:42,980 Laura Mina

You were there for three years?

44:45,980 Mariano La Via

Couldn't find any money. Couldn't find any money. I couldn't find any money. I applied for a visa. They turned me down. The secretary said, "Come back. Reapplied." He said, "Wait a year or so, reapplied." Reapplied. I remember going there and she said, it was just wrong. He said, "He just got back on vacation. Hopefully he's in a good mood. So she walked into the the door of the council came back smiling and she said you got it. Wow. Three month visa. Visitor visa. I had to demonstrate in writing with documentation that I would go back to Italy. There was no planning to come here and then stay Because they were trying to avoid having masses of people now emigrating with some kind of so anyway Go to Chicago and what do I do? I Had I put together some money borrow some money from my parents from God My parents didn't know what they gave. And seven days later I was in New York from Naples. It took me seven days from Naples to New York. Naples, Gibraltar, Portugal overnight, and then straight across to Halifax overnight in Halifax and then I remember my New Yorker cabin mates who said, "Oh, you have to stay up and see the lights in New York. They're so beautiful." So I stayed up all night seeing the lights on New York, but you stay there. You don't go in until the next morning because they had to clear us out.

47:07,180 Laura Mina

Did you go through Ellis Island?

47:09,620 Mariano La Via

not was after it was done, but it was still, you know, they, they, they, you went through and they checked all your documents and everything.

47:18,180 Laura Mina

So do you remember coming through like the Verrazano Straits into Manhattan? Yeah. So you...

47:25,700 Mariano La Via

Under the bridge.

47:26,780 Laura Mina

Yeah.

47:27,780 Mariano La Via

Yeah. I remember that very well.

47:30,060 Laura Mina

It's a big, it's a big bridge. It's hard to forget, right?

47:32,580 Mariano La Via

Oh, yeah.

47:33,860 Laura Mina

So you came by sea.

47:37,740 Mariano La Via

I don't think it was much in those days. I mean, my first two trips back were by sea because aviation was not really doing very well in those days. I mean, they were just beginning to do all, you know, Pan Am was the one, and TWA were the two figures, but they didn't have to manipulate. They had, you know, they were expensive, but the voyage by sea was short, was faster, and it took only five days, not seven, because it went straight.

48:12,660 Laura Mina

Right.

48:13,660 Mariano La Via

So with New York, Genoa, or New York Naples, that's it.

48:18,460 Laura Mina

So you hit the shores of New York on a three-month visa.

48:22,420 Mariano La Via

Yeah.

48:23,420 Laura Mina

And then you went to Chicago from there?

48:27,060 Mariano La Via

I had one of the people that was, that had helped me to get in touch with Dr. Barone and then in turn with Bob Wiesler, happened to be in New York for some reason. He told me, "If you had time to stay there a couple of days, I'll drive you back." I said, "Okay." So then he said, "But I have to stop in Boston. I'm in no hurry."

49:04,740 Laura Mina

A little out of the way.

49:05,740 Mariano La Via

I had a three-month visa, but I'm not as well because I don't know if it doesn't work out, because at that point I didn't know how long my money would last, and it's it from Chicago. There was no sign that they would help me to survive. So I said, "Well, since you're stopping in Boston, "I made," there was a guy in Boston that I had somehow found out was there, and somebody, I can't remember who said, "Mariano, if you ever get to Boston, "go talk with him, he might be able to talk to his boss." He was Italian. And I did go to see him, and you know what he did? He thought I didn't speak English very well.

49:58,280 Laura Mina

He told you you didn't speak English very well?

50:00,480 Mariano La Via

Right, so he talked to his boss in English, and he said, "So, you don't really want this guy. "He's nothing, he hasn’t done anything."

50:10,440 Laura Mina

Huh, little did he know, what laid ahead.

50:13,760 Mariano La Via

I hadn't done anything at that point, I agree. So maybe, but you know, you don't get, anyway. So that being the end, but I arrived in Chicago and so finally I went over and I said, you know, here I am, I don't have any money. So Bob Wiesler said, well, Mariano, I don't know. Let me talk to my chairman. So I talked to the chairman and he said, can you come back tomorrow for sure? So I came back tomorrow and she had me meet with Paul Cannon, who was the big nutritionist who had done a lot of research on nutrition for the Navy on some Navy contracts during the war. And he was very well known for that.

50:56,480 Laura Mina

Come on in. Oh. Hi. Not finished yet? No, we're still chatting. Okay. I'll just go upstairs.

51:11,480 Mariano La Via

Okay. Very good. Why in the world is my phone... Why won't my phone leave me alone? I cannot believe it. No, I turned it off. It keeps ringing. I don't want to answer, I don't want to answer.

51:26,980 Laura Mina

Technology.

51:29,840 Mariano La Via

Yeah, anyway, so to make a long story short, after two or three visits and so on and so forth, Dr. Cannon, who had discouraged me and he said, you know, this is, we're just coming out of the war, we don't have enough money, everything is this and then that, and we'll see what Dr. Wiesler can do. Okay, fine, thank you so much. So Bob Wiesler called me two days later, called me, they said that they had found some money.

52:03,200 Laura Mina

Wow.

52:05,240 Mariano La Via

So I can give you $200 a month and you'll have to pay social security and taxes. And I had a place to stay, which was a student thing. And I was paying $100 a month there. And getting some meals too. It wasn't very elegant, but it was okay. So, you know.

52:33,540 Laura Mina

Well, cheap.

52:34,380 Mariano La Via

It was a bed to sleep and--

52:36,020 Laura Mina

And you had been through World War II, so you had the adaptive ability to be able to tolerate that.

52:41,980 Mariano La Via

Exactly.

52:43,340 Laura Mina

So, you know, not to make light of it, but, you know, as you were saying, you knew that, you know, being under that duress, it forces us to be able to, or I can't speak to that experience, but I know that duress forces people to adapt, have to be flexible, have to live with the minimum, and that prepared you well for the experience of being an immigrant to the United States.

53:11,200 Mariano La Via

I have a lot of vignettes that I can tell you about after we finish, maybe, so that you know how the-- that couple of years in Urbino in the interim, you know, until we could go back to Rome and then back to Messina, were spent. My mother used to send-- she found the truck driver because they were the only people who could go through because they had to go through the German lines. The Germans were north of us and the Allies were south. And they came- so if this truck driver could do that, she used to get a suitcase and send them meat and bread and things like that. Rome was starving. Because the Germans were taking everything. I remember reading about that at some point. The mayor in our town gave us 100 pounds of wheat to get it away from the Germans.

54:10,900 Laura Mina

Wow.

54:11,900 Mariano La Via

So I used—

54:12,900 Laura Mina

Your family 100 pounds of wheat?

54:14,900 Mariano La Via

Each family.

54:15,900 Laura Mina

Wow.

54:16,900 Mariano La Via

it, put it away because the Germans would take it. So I used to go down to the mill, have it milled, get the flour, make ten pounds of flour, make bread once a week for the family.

54:39,020 Laura Mina

You made bread for your family? I bet you made very good bread.

54:44,380 Mariano La Via

The lady next door, asked my mother, she said, "How come Mariano makes such good breads? Can you give me the recipe?" So I said, "Yeah, tell her that the recipe is very simple. I use, you know, you save the dough to which is the starter, okay?" And since I had biochemistry already, I used to add a little sugar to it because the yeast grew faster. And so the bread got flopier. Well, that's, but you know. So I told her, I said, "You know, this, the recipe." So she said, she tried and said, "Oh."

55:19,180 Laura Mina

I bet you still make bread. Do you still make bread?

55:21,540 Mariano La Via

No, I don't make bread anymore. I buy it. (laughing)

55:25,060 Laura Mina

The conveniences.

55:26,060 Mariano La Via

I cook, but I don't make bread. But anyway, you know, it's, yeah, it was--

55:32,340 Laura Mina

Forced adaptations.

55:36,940 Mariano La Via

Well, you know, we were walking home one day after I'd been there for about a year, and they helped me to extend the visa so I could say and they could pay me a little money which was part of the whole thing. Bob Wiesler was living across the street from where I was and so we used, many times we walked together to go home. And I've gotten very close to him. He has a very wonderful family and the whole thing was a family. It was a great department. I mean, it's unbelievable. But he said, "You know, we like what you do." I said, "Thank you very much." He said, "Have you thought you might want to stay?" So I said, "I can't. I don't have a visa. That will allow me to." He said, "Well," he said, "you know, there are legal ways to do that. the important thing is you have to make a decision. So let me know. What would you do? It's a gift.

56:46,100 Laura Mina

Right? And it sounded like your family supported you being here. It sounds like they wanted it.

56:51,540 Mariano La Via

Yeah, my mother and my father were just, my mother always told me it's your life. And you had to do what you see as being the thing that will help you to live your life in the way that you want to live.

57:11,220 Laura Mina

My father is very much like that.

57:13,940 Mariano La Via

And my father never said anything. My father wrote it in his little room, smoked these big cigars, Italian cigars, Toscani, and wrote philosophy.

57:28,000 Laura Mina

Your mom sounds like a very evolved person.

57:31,180 Mariano La Via

My mother was incredible. My mother was just the best mother anybody could have. At the age of 13, when I went down to see my grandmother, she gave me the keys to the house. She said, "You're an adult. Here are the keys to the house." Wow. I don't know if my mom would have said that about me at I said, "I'll trust you. I know you won't do anything wrong."

57:55,620 Laura Mina

Wow. So you really trusted me. She really believed in you.

57:58,620 Mariano La Via

Yeah. She was really great. Anyway, that's my story. I don't know. What else do you want to know? What have I done for the Charleston Library Society? Nothing.

58:10,620 Laura Mina

Well, I want to take you in a little bit of a loop for a second. So I know that you were in Chicago for about eight years, and then you were, right?

58:18,620 Mariano La Via

Did my residency there and worked for three years on a very junior type of the appointment, which I was sort of, you know, so-so. Then I decided I met this medical student who kept disturbing my peace and we ended up getting married. I had to get away because Chicago was really, I had to cut the umbilical cord. And so I started looking for a job. Bob Wiesler was not very happy. He wanted me to stay, but he had nothing that he could offer me. It would be a career path. So I ended up, I interviewed three places, Rochester, Denver, and Chapel Hill. Chapel Hill didn't work out. Rochester, okay, I mean, the chairman there was really, really very, I mean, wonderful person, and I would have gone, but when I went to Denver, I was able to have lunch outside with the person that took me around, was an Italian, and so they asked an Italian guy, an Italian virologist to sort of be, shepherd me through. And he took me to lunch outside in January, with 70 degrees. I said, and the sun shining brightly. I said, you know, everything else being equal, pick the weather. In Rochester, I think I remember it, I came to pick up at the hotel. There was a little drizzle that was coming down. It was not drizzle, it was snow. And I said something, I said, "Well, Mariano, if you come here, you get to get used to this. This is practically every day we have two or three hours of this." So I compared them every day. Then I said, "Mm-mm." I mean, he kept writing to me. He really wanted me and he kept writing. And Bob Wiesler started asking me, If you want to come back, I still have a job for you.

01:00:41,660 Laura Mina

That's about right. You catch your people's hearts, so I understand that. So you went to Colorado, you were there for, it looks like, eight years.

01:00:52,940 Mariano La Via

You're like number eight, if you're like-- I had for eight years and had five children.

01:00:56,940 Laura Mina

You had five years when you were living in Colorado?

01:00:58,940 Mariano La Via

Five children. Eight years, yeah. My wife finished a residency, finished medical school because she hadn't graduated when we moved, finished medical school, finished the residency, and we -- and then my dream fell apart.

01:01:17,280 Laura Mina

-Your dream fell apart?

01:01:19,280 Mariano La Via

-The Republicans won the legislature.

01:01:23,320 Laura Mina

-In Chicago?

01:01:24,960 Mariano La Via

No, in Colorado.

01:01:26,620 Laura Mina

-Sorry, Colorado, my apologies.

01:01:28,520 Mariano La Via

-And so, first thing the governor did, he cut the budget for the university, including the medical school, the president of the university resigned on the spot and left.

01:01:42,000 Laura Mina

Wow.

01:01:44,120 Mariano La Via

The dean of the medical school, who was my idol, I had known him when I was in Chicago because he had come there to do a side visit for a big grant that we were applying for. And he, when I went to Denver to interview, He asked to have me come by his office. The deans don't do that. He did. And he told me, he said, "Mariano, we want to make this the Harvard of the West." So he lasted two years and then he went to Stanford.

01:02:18,900 Laura Mina

That's kind of like the Harvard of the West.

01:02:23,940 Mariano La Via

So my chairman lasted a couple more years, but then he ended up going back to New York where he had grown up. And then he ended up going to Chicago to be the dean of the University of Chicago Medical School.

01:02:37,580 Laura Mina

Well, it comes back to Chicago.

01:02:42,860 Mariano La Via

So the new chairman said, "Oh, I'll support you. I really think it. I like what you do, as far as work." This was in Chicago. I had gone to a meeting and he wanted to see me and he said, "I'm here. Let's talk." And so I just had done plenty of this, plenty of that. I will promote you. I'll raise your salary." So I went back to Denver and told my wife, I said, "You know, things look pretty good. We're going to stay here." Well, he came, started his job, interviewed everybody, and when he came to me, he said, "You know, I'm really not interested in what you're doing because I am an oncology person and I'm interested in tumors and tumor pathology and so on and so forth. Immunology, I don't know very much about it but you know, I know you know Frank Pixar, you know this and that, you know all these people. You know it's okay, you have tenure now and I cannot touch you. So, but I can't raise your salary and I have to cut your space, your research space. So I started looking around and I remember I had a one and a half hour conversation with Bob Wiesler because I always consulted him. And at the end of the thing he told me, he said, "Mariano, you can be a big fish in a small pond but a small fish in a big pond." I had an offer from the University of Pennsylvania. Great job, great school, great everything, immunology, they were really. But salary was less than I was making in Denver.

01:04:44,100 Laura Mina

In Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania?

01:04:46,300 Mariano La Via

And I told him, I said, "You know, I can't support my family." I said, "But you know, that's all I can tell you. That's all I can give you. That's what they allow me to pay you. I can't get any more money." So I hope you will come. So I ended up taking something else because, you know, when you have a family to support, I ended up taking something else, which was really my major mistake. Because this guy really sold me a scam.

01:05:20,460 Laura Mina

And that's Bowman Gray?

01:05:22,460 Mariano La Via

Right.

01:05:23,460 Laura Mina

Is that what you say?

01:05:24,460 Mariano La Via

He was doing everything, and I was going to help him set up the entire research wing of the department and then do my pathology work, of course, which was part of the whole thing and the teaching and so on. And after I had to buy the house, because we rented a house that was offered with an option to buy, I ended up having decided to buy it after we looked at everything and I told him, "I think so." I went to talk with him. I said, "Okay, when do we start?" I said, "When do we start what?" I said, "You told me all this." He said, "Mariano, I don't have any money." So I went to talk to the dean, and the dean said, "Mariano, I'm sorry. That's what the chairman says. I can't help you." So I let people know that I was available. Then three years later, through a series of circumstances, Emory brought me down. new chairman. They didn't have anybody that could do any immunology teaching to the students so he brought me down with an honorarium and travel expenses twice and then after the second offered me, said if you're interested I'd like to offer you a job. I'm setting up the department. I'm new. So I ended up getting there. So I went there for eight years and I would still be there except that I started thinking about retirement and after looking around I decided I liked Charleston and it was a good place to retire. So I quit looking. And I used to come from time to time. My friends had moved here. I had students moved here. And I liked Charleston. So I used to come for a variety of reasons. And then someone moved there whom I had known. and it knew a book I had co-edited with one of my Denver colleagues that was used widely for non-medical students teaching, and in some places also the supplement to medical school teaching.

01:08:05,820 Laura Mina

What was it called?

01:08:07,820 Mariano La Via

Principles of Pathobiology.

01:08:10,820 Laura Mina

Light reading. Just kidding. Light reading. That's a joke.

01:08:16,820 Mariano La Via

You can read it if you want to.

01:08:18,820 Laura Mina

Actually I'm very curious.

01:08:20,820 Mariano La Via

Actually I was trying to get your neighbors here to find, because I have only the third edition, and I cannot find the first and the second. It was my fault because they told me, the publisher said, If you want them let us know because we're you know, we're not selling much anymore. So we're not going to reprint it so went to through three editions and and and I neglected to do so I saw you know time passed and then now and they said that it would put but I've never been back to Said something to Polly. She said But I haven't been back. It's my fault. I keep—I've let things slide. But anyway, back to—

01:09:07,660 Laura Mina

You're about at 1979, right?

01:09:11,780 Mariano La Via

Yeah, I this guy when I came and I called him and I'll say how are you doing? You know he didn't move the air from From Medical College of Georgia and And You know with Through the this book and through other things and he had asked me to go lecture to some of his residents from time to time Atlanta come over to Athens and then So anyway, he called me and he said, "I've been here." And I called him and we talked over the phone. And I went back, was sitting in my office, my phone rang, and he said, "Mariano, this is Armand Glassman. I need you." He said, "Armand, I'm not moving. I'm past 50 and I made a resolution some time ago that I would not make another move after 50. So six months later I arrived here with a box of my special mice that was using for some of my experimental work that I could not put on the shipping van. I put them in my car and I called the guy after I arrived and he said, "Call me and we'll put them in the animal quarters." So I called him, I still remember, from the telephone on the corner, what used to be the Sears store downtown.

01:10:51,240 Laura Mina

Was that up that way, by Calhoun?

01:10:52,240 Mariano La Via

Yeah, the one over here, the one that used to be the old orphanage and then became—

01:11:01,240 Laura Mina

Oh yeah, the Jenkins Orphanage.

01:11:02,240 Mariano La Via

And then it became the Sears store and there was a phone on the corner there and I stopped the car and I picked up the phone and called him. I said, "I'm here." And he said, "Come over." I still remember I went to the, to the Holiday Inn, the Round Holiday Inn to spend the night there because I had to rent by miracle. I found an apartment three weekends I came and there was nothing to rent and I found a miracle. I found one wonderful apartment on Queen Street.

01:11:31,400 Laura Mina

So right here?

01:11:33,480 Mariano La Via

Yeah, right down across the across Meeting on this side.

01:11:42,520 Laura Mina

Okay.

01:11:44,520 Mariano La Via

And so I mean, but my furniture had to arrive and everything. I slept at the hotel for one night and then the lady said, "Look, I've got a cot. I'll give you a cot if you don't want to stay in the hotel." And she was so nice. And so that's what I did.

01:12:04,200 Laura Mina

Where was your wife and children at that point in time?

01:12:09,360 Mariano La Via

My wife and children at that point in time were in a small town on the state line between Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where she had transported her whole family when she sent somebody to my office at Emory University to serve me some papers.

01:12:41,480 Laura Mina

So she served you papers, you divorced, and she moved to—

01:12:51,740 Mariano La Via

She had a great job in—first of all, I don't know, the Atlanta move was really very bad because something was going on. I couldn't figure out what was going on. She took up with a young high school graduate that she brought down to work in her lab from someplace. Anyway, at the suggestion of the guy that she had hired to be the supervisor of the lab who knew this fellow. And said, "Well, you know, this guy, he's just finished high school two years ago and he doesn't have a job. I know he could come down. He can do some of the menial work like wash, glassware, do things like that." I was, I had to go to a lab, I mean, I had to start my job there. She just, the first thing, "Well, I'm not ready to move." That's why after we sold the house and this and that.

01:14:02,480 Laura Mina

So she didn't come to Atlanta with you or she did?

01:14:06,360 Mariano La Via

She ended up coming finally, yeah, about a year later. And got a great job at Piedmont Hospital.

01:14:14,280 Laura Mina

In Atlanta?

01:14:15,280 Mariano La Via

Yeah.

01:14:16,280 Laura Mina

And were you still married at that time?

01:14:18,280 Mariano La Via

Yeah. We were married at that time. But she got this guy to come to Atlanta. And then after I was served those papers, she decided, I don't know why, that she didn't want to stay in Atlanta. Quit the job. They got married and moved to this little town. And that ended up very badly because this guy didn't do anything. He kept-she told me, I remember, when we finally started talking, I got a little bit more than we had for a long time. She said, "You know, he used to go out and buy me a present for my birthday and charge it to my credit card."

01:15:06,220 Laura Mina

Oh.

01:15:07,220 Mariano La Via

Oh.

01:15:08,220 Laura Mina

Mm-hmm.

01:15:09,220 Mariano La Via

Not only that, but he sued her for support for--

01:15:14,260 Laura Mina

The children?

01:15:16,260 Mariano La Via

Yeah. And won.

01:15:18,260 Laura Mina

That's so strange.

01:15:21,260 Mariano La Via

In the area that part of the country, evidently, they believed that women and men had equal rights. He won. She had supported me for four years because he claimed that he had stopped his studies and hadn't been able to go to college because he was supposed to stay home and watch the children while she was going to work.

01:15:46,940 Laura Mina

Well, that must have been really hard for you to not be around your children.

01:15:55,580 Mariano La Via

Yeah, I mean, I couldn't go there. I mean, there was almost over a thousand miles away from Atlanta. So I had to fly, take three flights, because I flew to Chicago. Chicago there was a little plane, but clearly Charleston, Atlanta, then to Chicago, then a little plane that was going to that little airport, one of the little--

01:16:24,940 Laura Mina

Propeller planes.

01:16:25,940 Mariano La Via

Propeller planes. And, you know, and I could do it. I could do it at Christmas time. I could do it sometime during the summer, but I couldn't do it just anytime I wanted to. Yeah, I didn't spend a lot of time with my children. But, that’s life.

01:16:43,980 Laura Mina

That's a big loss. But it sounds like you just kept moving. And you, so you lived in Charleston. You lived at this apartment on Queen Street. And were a professor at MUSC. And it looks like from 1979 to 1991. So it sounds like you didn't retire right away.

01:17:09,060 Mariano La Via

I retired in '91 and then I stayed on as an emeritus professor for six more years because I wanted to continue doing some research that I was doing on the effect of stress on immune response and disease.

01:17:29,460 Laura Mina

So you, how did, so when you were at, Over the years, you began with getting a medical degree and then you moved into the deeper research aspect of medicine and you followed that trajectory and became an immunologist, right? So what were the different, kind of briefly, What were the different kind of strands of your study, and where did you end up?

01:18:07,500 Mariano La Via

Okay, my, what I was, what Bob Wiesler told me, he said, "Mariano, I don't want you to make any decision, until you talk to the three people in the department that are doing some serious research." One was Earl Bendit, who ended up going to be the chairman of the department at the University of Washington, up in the Northwest. And the other one was Bob Briesler, who was doing some immunological work, but his primary interest was in atherosclerosis and the mechanism of fat deposition and arteries and so on and so forth. And he had a big huge program project that went on for years until he got a little losing the mind and then he had to sort of quit working. And then the other one was a surgical pathologist, Paul, I can't even think of his last name, was doing some stuff, tissue, tumor pathology and so on. I talked to all three of them and then I told them, you know, my major interest which developed in medical school is immunology and I know that the immunologist is going to become very important in medicine. I can see it after, I graduated and immunology started growing because when I graduated, immunology was about this. And now we're dealing about molecular immunology.

01:20:04,280 Laura Mina

So you were learning early on that diving into the body’s ability to fight sickness was something you wanted to pursue. And so you pursued it and it brought you to the front lines of the HIV pandemic here in Charleston.

01:20:22,080 Mariano La Via

And it's a very good connection.

01:20:25,000 Laura Mina

Right?

01:20:26,000 Mariano La Via

Not very happy. Very good.

01:20:28,080 Laura Mina

It's not a happy connection, but it happened and it was necessary. So it was the direction of your field. And that work of immunologists is I just remember so well, you know, I grew up like, you know, my high school years were during HIV. I was in New York. I was very, very influenced by what I was hearing about it and the discussion of it being this virus that hit the immune system so very hard and it created kind of like a hopeless situation for people.

01:21:09,640 Mariano La Via

That's exactly the point of the whole thing was that this was something that really, really interfered with people's lives.

01:21:30,000 Laura Mina

And like it was petrifying.

Mariano La Via
And it was, I still remember the conference in New York, the New York Academy of Science, and they were debating whether it was a bacterial infection, whether it was a viral infection, what it was. I mean, you know, for three days. And the emotional component for anybody who was in any way touching this disease from the outside. I mean, you know, June gives me a hard time. He says, "Well, you know, this gay guy said you come to this and that." And I told her, I said, you know, I had a very, I developed a close friendship with a guy in Atlanta who was one of the old-fashioned gays He and his partner have been together for 30 years and he used a joke and he said, "You know, I guess they're in Atlanta that looks like they're putting something in the water because everybody comes here."

01:22:42,520 Laura Mina

Yeah, well I think there's a safe place for populations.

01:22:49,000 Mariano La Via

And he was, I mean, I still remember. And one day he called me and said, "You want to go meet my parents?" I said, "Yeah, I'd love to." He was from one of the Louisiana bayous, and he had moved to Charlotte to Atlanta, and he was working for the phone company, was an engineer. I said, "Yeah, let's go." So he borrowed his pink Cadillac from his partner. We drove the pink Cadillac to the bayous country on Louisiana.

01:23:21,960 Laura Mina

That sounds like an adventure. I can't even imagine.

01:23:25,880 Mariano La Via

And so June keeps telling me, "Wow, all these contacts, come on, what is it? Did they ever make a pass at you?" I said, "No, June, they didn't." And it's so funny.

01:23:38,480 Laura Mina

It is. It's a beautiful thing and it's, you know, I grew up very close to it. I grew up in a town that was very close to Fire Island. And, you know, it was, but, you know, I grew up during the AIDS pandemic. and I, or epidemic, and it was the messaging in high school and throughout my early adult years was just that this was a death sentence for people. So when you were doing the work around this, what did that look like and what were some of the discoveries you made? Cause it was very powerful science at that time.

01:24:18,200 Mariano La Via

Yeah, well, my major involvement was to work with infectious disease people to provide laboratory support. Okay, number one, because I developed a false-automatory laboratory at the medical university, which is still there and it's grown and is already on this third director now because Sally Self, whom I trained and who took my job, retired, and this guy is now here. I don't know, I've never met him, so. But that's what we did. Then there was clearly my association with two or three other people that had what was the only thing with the week or two, some kind of way of devising mechanisms to control this thing and trying all sorts of things.

01:25:24,900 Laura Mina

Like antiviral?

01:25:27,900 Mariano La Via

And that was the hard part, devising whatever. We didn't know. There was nothing at the beginning, nothing.

01:25:36,900 Laura Mina

There's no way to interrupt the infection.

01:25:38,900 Mariano La Via

Right. You shut up clinical studies and you try things. I said, "Remember, I was saying, "we ended up going back to NIH." She left here at one point. I was very upset because we had been working on one of these clinical studies, which ended up in nothing because it didn't seem to make much difference between the ones we were treating and the ones we were not treating. This kind of stuff. But I mean, and that really is not a very pleasant thing to look at because these guys and these girls were dying right and left. And then you get interested and you say, "Well, how can we offer some support?" And I helped with three or four or five other people were involved because of their belonging to the gay community, trying to devise how can we support the people in some ways. So this thing which has changed name three times was set up and still going, they've grown, they've been able to attract support and so on, including my little track every year. And so we did everything we could, and that was not the research. My research veered a little bit because the problem was a problem that was slowly solved by the pharmaceutical companies that were able to find things that would work.

01:27:57,200 Laura Mina

It might intervene in some way.

01:28:00,520 Mariano La Via

Exactly. And now, of course, now it's become not a disease that you die of, it's a disease that you manage. There is no vaccine and there is no way the vaccine can be made. It's been tried and it just doesn't work.

01:28:14,480 Laura Mina

But you watched it come around a corner and it took a long time to get around the corner and science tried perpetually to find a reason for its existence, a way to stop it, and then finally pharmaceuticals caught up and were able to start intervening like antiviral medications. And I remember those medications hitting the market and being prohibitively expensive.

01:28:38,920 Mariano La Via

Oh yeah, I mean, not only that, but I mean, some of these guys told me, you know, I have to take 10 pills every day. Yeah, I was like, "Are you kidding?" I said, "No, I have to take 10 pills every day." But not anymore.

01:28:51,040 Laura Mina

Right.

01:28:52,040 Mariano La Via

Yeah. And incidentally, the thing that has happened is that the antiviral, which is the major antiviral used for HIV control is now in combination with another antiviral, the one that is used for COVID.

01:29:10,880 Laura Mina

No kidding. It's amazing how science builds on its own.

01:29:13,880 Mariano La Via

It's a combination of these two antivirals. The one that existed and the one that was, well, what they did, they tried it and it seemed to do something in COVID. So they said, well, let's see if we can make something similar, But not the same. And see how the combination works. And it did.

01:29:30,880 Laura Mina

And it did.

01:29:31,880 Mariano La Via

Yeah. I had COVID because my wife's younger daughter who is a Halloween nut had a little party at her house and of the 12 people she invited, six got COVID including June and me. And her dad and her stepmother. So anyway. To make a long story short, you know, Paxlovid, five days.

01:29:57,240 Laura Mina

Yeah.

01:29:59,360 Mariano La Via

And you know, and it's a miracle drug.

01:30:01,560 Laura Mina

Yes. So, I mean, you've now lived through the AIDS epidemic and now you've lived through the COVID pandemic. You've seen these drugs that have intervened. I mean, that's humongous, like, feat of human accomplishment. And to have been on the sidelines of this, essentially watching it, is pretty amazing. So I know that we've been speaking for a while, so I know that you're probably ready to wrap up. And so I'm just gonna bring you to one last thing before we wrap up.

01:30:36,640 Mariano La Via

This must be the--

01:30:37,480 Laura Mina

Tell me about June, and tell me about how you met, and what your life, what’s happened in your life since that happened, and when you met as well.

01:30:52,480 Mariano La Via

HIV brought us together.

01:30:54,680 Laura Mina

No kidding. Well that's a powerful thing. So tell me about that.

01:31:02,680 Mariano La Via

I had some very tough years between some very tough years between my divorce and my couple of adventures. You know, I think in Italy there is a saying that are called a nail chasing a nail.

01:31:34,280 Laura Mina

A nail chasing a nail?

01:31:36,280 Mariano La Via

Yeah. (speaking in foreign language) A nail will chase an nail. So, you know, the nail is a bit upset and you try to find another aide and it doesn't work. So anyway, one of my colleagues who was in the Department of Family Medicine and did a lot of counseling and so on. Decided to have a two-day meeting entitled A Community Reaction to AIDS. So he had a speaker that came the first night to talk about the HIV from what was known at that time. And then the next day, a series of small meetings, each of which will be led by two people, a physician and a non-physician. So he asked me if I would, said, "Sure." He gave me, as in opposition, the guy who was the, whatever, you call it, administrator of, the head honcho of the Roper Hospital. Well, so I went there. The night before, there was this talk, and then there was a little party in the ballroom at the Francis Marion Hotel. I stayed behind after the talk ended to talk to some people. So when I arrived back at the party, it was, you know, the party was in full swing and so on. And I saw one of the nurses that was part of our small group that met weekly to discuss, you know, progress and things that could be done and so on and so forth and how to deal with the health department that wanted this report that is an infectious disease thing that we were totally opposed to do at that time anyway because that may be later, but not right now. But anyway, so this nurse was there and she was talking to this woman. I looked at this woman and I saw this wonderful, nice. And I said, oh boo, over there. I said, I got to meet this woman. I don't know who she is. So I went over there and I said, "Hi, Pat, how are you?" Like the nurse. And she said, "Fine, were you here?" I said, "Yeah, I was here." I said, "I just got delayed." So she said, "I want you to meet June." So she introduced me to June and then after we talked about 10 minutes, she said she saw somebody she wanted to talk to her, she says, I need to go over there and talk to this guy. Would you forgive me? I said, sure, don't worry. So then June started telling about also things about herself and the fact that she lived with her father who was Irish and from Belfast and had come here and married here And had two daughters. She told me all sort of things.

01:35:27,780 Laura Mina

You’re easy to talk to, so I'm not surprised.

01:35:31,120 Mariano La Via

Yeah, so I said, you know, I'd really like to meet this guy. He sounds like a little bit like my father.

01:35:37,520 Laura Mina

Belfast was a difficult place.

01:35:39,320 Mariano La Via

She said, oh yeah, sure. Well, this was February of 1989.

01:35:45,220 Laura Mina

Wow, okay.

01:35:46,940 Mariano La Via

So I never saw her very much because she was busy wandering around the hospital, social workers move a lot. And I really wanted to get to know her a little bit better. But every time I called her phone, the phone that was listed, their department would answer and say, "Why don't you page her?" Well I wouldn't go to page her because I don't want to disturb somebody doing so. There was no reason for me to page her. So I said, so finally I discovered where she was. She was at a little office and I decided to do one thing. My good friend and one of the people who had been involved in that little meeting when We set up the support group for the HIV, the AIDS HIV people. Verner Gross, who had a flower shop downtown. I called him and said, "Verner, I want you to make one of those beautiful bouquet that you make and send it to this place. And don't put anything in it, just send it." Okay, Mariano, will do. Incidentally, he lived with me for a year because he was completely wiped out by the hurricane. And then very scandalous because he was gay. I thought so. I don't know what people thought, but it doesn't bother me. I've got broad shoulders and, you know, as I keep saying, no matter what you do, they’ll think something. So, all right. She claims that she knew who sent that, but how do I find out? I don't know. Anyway, all her colleagues were wondering, "Oh, what's going on?" So anyway, what I had found out during that conversation the first night is that her, she had remarried and her husband died of some liver problem, I don't know exactly what, only nine months before I met her. So I just respected her, her grieving. Didn't push her to do anything. And so finally one day I told her, she was going to a meeting and some talk that I wanted to hear also. So I said, well, I really want to hear that talk too. And the talk ended, it was about dinner time, you know, 7.30, 8 o'clock. I said, "Would you like to-can I take you to dinner? You're not going to go home and cook at this time." I said, "Listen to him," or he never cooks. I know, she survived anyway. So anyway, I-she said, "Oh, yeah, yeah." Well, I said, "Well, my car is outside." I said, "No, no, no, I'll drive myself." All right. We went to that little restaurant that it's gone, it's been gone for a long time. It was a restaurant. They also sold Italian things. What's the name of this lady that had it? We still see her all the time and she's still doing catering now. But she quit the restaurant business. It didn't work for her and she didn't want to devote so much time. And so she decided to do catering and she does catering and does very well. She very, very good cook. But I can't remember her name. That the restaurant was called, was called, what's her name? So that was it. And then... I like emeralds.

01:40:18,780 Laura Mina

Emeralds are beautiful.

01:40:21,780 Mariano La Via

Yeah. I do. I liked them forever. In Atlanta, it was a shop that sold nothing but emeralds emeralds in one of the shopping centers. I used to go there and look around and got to know emeralds pretty well. When I wanted to give her something, and I said, "Well, why not an emerald?" No. She had blue eyes, emeralds are, you know, blue, green, whatever, so. So I saw one in a window of a place in Rome that I used to walk by, and so I walked in, and the guy said, "What would you like?" I said, "Well, I'd like for you to make a ring for me." for example, and not for myself. So we talked and so, and I kept going back to this one. He kept saying this and that and then and then. So finally at the end of the conversation he said, "You know emeralds, don't you?" He said, "A little bit, not as much as you do because you're the professional." Well, so you picked a very good one. Thank you. So I decided to invite her to dinner and had Verner make a thing of white tulips, because I discovered that she likes white tulips, and put the thing in there and go to my favorite restaurant and said Verner. And go ahead, my favorite table is always the one in the corner there and deliver it there, and then you know so that worked out. Except that she I went there and I got a drink in the bar and sat down and waited and Jiri Jilich was at that time my favorite restaurant I'm sorry that he ended up…

01:42:12,500 Laura Mina

What was it called?

01:42:16,500 Mariano La Via

Jiri Jilich was the name of the guy. The restaurant was called Jelix.

01:42:20,500 Laura Mina

Jilich, okay.

01:42:21,500 Mariano La Via

Yeah. And he came over and said, "Dr. La Via, "there's somebody on the phone for you."

01:42:29,580 Laura Mina

Really?

01:42:31,320 Mariano La Via

I stepped down. I've been there for an hour and a half. And she said, "Oh, I'm sorry, I'm just kind of "a little late, you know, I was delayed at work and so on. "I'll be there quickly." She showed up about 25 minutes later.

01:42:45,200 Laura Mina

Always waiting for women.

01:42:48,400 Mariano La Via

So we went, sat down at the table, and she looked at these things. Oh, these flowers are so beautiful. So I think she looked further and found these things. Oh my goodness, what is this? So anyway, there was a present.

01:43:03,160 Laura Mina

Did you get engaged right then and there?

01:43:06,360 Mariano La Via

No, no. I didn't want to disturb her grieving. I mean, she was still, And she was also concerned by the fact that she discovered I was 15 years older than she is, and I was here. So she said, "I'll have to wait until I'm 60.” I had to wait three years.

01:43:33,840 Laura Mina

You're really good at just sticking it out.

01:43:38,440 Mariano La Via

What was I gonna do?

01:43:39,480 Laura Mina

I don't know, but I mean, I'm just hearing a theme of that. I'm hearing a theme of that with your dad. Yes, and I come, my, my, my interlude was something I'm not very proud of because I did also crazy things and I hurt a lot of people in the process and, and that's the way life goes. So I thought I discovered the famous thing that really is the thing. So.

01:44:19,680 Laura Mina

What's the thing?

01:44:22,680 Mariano La Via

Whatever you want to call it. The important thing.

01:44:27,760 Laura Mina

What is the important thing to you?

01:44:32,760 Mariano La Via

Somebody who whom I can love not By using the word love as it's common interpreted, but they're using it in its true sense Because love true love is spelled W-O-R-K

01:44:59,720 Laura Mina

To you, that's what love is?

01:45:01,720 Mariano La Via

To anybody who believes in true love.

01:45:05,380 Laura Mina

It's work.

01:45:08,880 Mariano La Via

Yep, takes a lot of effort. It really does. It's not something that comes. I discovered it by all my little escapades and so on and so forth.

01:45:20,600 Laura Mina

I think you're right about that. Yep. I think you're right about that. And you know what? That's the perfect place to end. Imparting your wisdom about love, it is work. Brilliant.

01:45:41,720 Mariano La Via

No, I'm the son of my father. My father taught me a lot. My father didn't talk very much. But my father showed.

01:45:54,520 Laura Mina

Right. Yeah, well we can say as much as we want, but we have to deliver right yeah? Yeah, well, thank you so much What a treat we're really lucky and when the community's been really lucky to have you and You just you bring so much to the library society, but you just bring some you brought so much to Charleston And I'm grateful that you're here. Thank you

01:46:26,480 Mariano La Via

Thank you.

01:46:28,000 Laura Mina

Is there anything else you want to add at all?

01:46:31,000 Mariano La Via

I love you.

01:46:32,000 Laura Mina

Oh, I love you, too

01:46:33,420 Mariano La Via

Thank you really

Laura Mina
This has been my pleasure. I've been looking forward to it for a very long time. Yeah, I think I talked to you about this like two years ago Long time

Mariano La Via
Yes I remember

01:46:53,380 Laura Mina

Yep, I remember you're very special person So we've left June to wait for you this time we'll have to give her an emerald ring

01:47:07,060 Mariano La Via

Sorry, no, she’ll survived

01:47:11,620 Laura Mina

[LAUGHTER]