"Neal Stephenson & Frederick George - Interface" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sterling Bruce)

War required lots of parachutes. Parachutes took a hell of a lot of nylon. One of the feedstocks required to
manufacture nylon was cellulose. One excellent source of cellulose happened to be corncobs. And John
Cozzano's factory had been throwing away corncobs by the hundreds of tons ever since it had gone
into production. The heap of corncobs that rose from the prairie outside of Tuscola had now become the
highest point in several counties and could be seen from twenty miles away, especially whenever pranksters
set fire to it (photo).
Sam Meyer contacted everyone he knew. A lot of these were recent immigrants from Central Europe
and were only too happy to invest in a parachute factory, knowing that it could have only one conceivable
practical use. John got the nylon production unit up and running just in time to throw out a very low bid on
a very large government contract. The next year, Allied shock troops poured into Normandy borne on
billowing canopies of Cozzano nylon (photo).
Peter came back from war with bad kidneys and a bad leg. While he was not well equipped for doing
physical labor, he performed a useful role as a troubleshooter, figurehead, and conversationalist of CBAP until
he died of kidney failure in 1955. His father, Giuseppe, died two months later. During the interval between
the war and these deaths, things had gone smoothly for the Cozzano family, except for the annihilation of the
ancestral farmhouse in 1953 by a tornado (photo).
Two times in two months, the entire Meyer clan, led by Samuel and David, came down from Chicago to
attend funeral services. Hotel rooms were scarce in Tuscola and kosher kitchens nonexistent, so John
and Francesca put the Meyers up in their big stucco house and did what they could to provide them with
acceptable cooking facilities. Francesca learned to keep a blowtorch handy so that Sam Meyer's son-in-law, a
rabbi, could perform a ritual cleansing of her oven (photo).
During these visits, William Cozzano, now thirteen, shared his bedroom with a number of younger
Meyers, including David's son Mel, who was the same age. They became friends and spent most of the time
down the street at Tuscola City Parky playing baseball, Jews versus Italians (autographed baseball in glass
box).
 A year later Samuel Meyer died in Chicago. The Cozzanos all came north. Some of them stayed with
the Domenicis, but the Meyers returned the favor by giving other Cozzanos a place to stay. Mel and William
shared a mattress on the floor (photo).
After that, Mel and William stayed in constant touch. They liked each other. But they also knew they were
the eldest sons of families that had accumulated much and that if they screwed up and lost it, it would be no
one's fault but their own.

The remaining space in the office was filled with William A. Cozzano's personal memorabilia:
A black-and-white photo of his parents, the Olan Mills logo slanted across the bottom, shot in a
makeshift traveling studio in a Best Western motel on the outskirts of Champaign-Urbana in 1948.
An assortment of six-inch-high capital letter T's, made from cloth, mounted under glass, along with a
corny photo of the seventeen-year-old Cozzano, pigskin tucked under one arm, other arm held out like a
jouster's lance to straight-arm an imaginary linebacker from Arcola or Rantoul.
Diploma from Tuscola High.
A photo of William with Christina, his high-school sweetheart, on the campus of the University of
Illinois, where they had both attended college in the early sixties.
A wedding picture, the couple flanked by eight roughed and false-eyelashed sorority belles on one side
and seven tuxed and pomaded University of Illinois football players, plus a single Nigerian graduate
student, on the other.
Diploma (summa cum laude) with major in business and minor in Romantic languages.
A battered and abraded football covered with thick stout signatures, marked ROSE BOWL.
Two photos of Cozzano in the Marines, mounted side by side in the same frame: one, picture-perfect
William in full-dress uniform, staring into the distance as though he can see a tunnel of light in the sky at one
o'clock high, JFK in glory at the end of the tunnel, asking William what he can do for his country. The