Biography of Joseph Bodo

Joseph Bodo was born March 19, 1930 in Debrecen, Hungary, to Marton and Rosa Bodo.

As a young man, Joseph was apprenticed to the radio station, where he received harsh treatment but excelled in radio repair and morse code keying and transcription.  He won regional morse code competitions handily.  His father was a resourceful man, who ran a small store and worked as a firefighter, among other jobs.  When Joseph was unable to walk after a disciplinary action at the radio station, his father pulled him from the apprenticeship.

As a teenager, the war raged around him.  He narrowly escaped death from bombings and battles nearby, and conscription into the German military.  He visited the aftermath of battles to gather electronics and other equipment, which he would repair.

After the war, Joseph applied to attend university in Budapest, but was rejected by the Russian government on the grounds that he was not a Communist.  Instead, they placed him in a forced labor camp which few were able to survive for long.

At that time, as it happened, the radar factory in Budapest lacked a competent morse code operator.  When charged with correcting that situation, the manager of the factory looked for the fastest and most reliable morse code operator on record.  Luckily for Joseph, the records existed, and they brought him out of the labor camp, and into the employ of the radar factory.  He was allowed to go to school at the University of Budapest at night, where he studied engineering.

The Hungarian Revolution of 1956, began by students at the University of Budapest, succeeded.  Later that same year, Russian troops retook the country.  As the Russian military made their rounds, Josephs father managed to get a message to Joseph, saying, "Don't come back.  They are looking for you."  The border was closed by that time, and the Russian security police were rounding people up, never to be seen again.  Joseph fled.  

Later in life he would tell us, "I can hardly believe what I did.  Jumping from train car to train car.  Sleeping in hay.  The old people gave us whatever they had, whatever we needed, and by the time we reached the border, I was in a big group - men, women, and children - bearing all manner of weapons.  When we reached the border, we forded a frozen river, at a junction guarded by a single guard in a guard tower.  When he saw the overwhelming force approaching, he put his telephone on the corner of the guardhouse near us, and his rifle on another corner, and faced away from us.  In this way, he preserved his life.  We crossed the frozen river.  When we reached Austria, they were very kind to us.  They gave us food.  I hitched a ride in a meat truck, riding with the cold meat, to the London embassy."

The British embassy had already offered asylum to many refugees - as many as it could.  Joseph managed to make his way to the American embassy, which had likewise exceeded its quota, so he could not be offered asylum in the United States.  Undeterred, Joseph waited all night at the US embarkation center, into the next morning.  As it happens, two Hungarian refugees had engaged in a bar fight that night, and were arrested, leaving two spots on the last transport to the United States.

Joseph arrived in Camp Kilmer, New Jersey, by plane.  He told us "I was puzzled by the lights on all the houses.  I couldn't make head nor tail of it.  Later, I learned these were Christmas lights."  He would take up these "Americanisms" with gusto in the future.

Every refugee who arrived in the US from Hungary did so because an employer in the US generously offered them a job, in order to provide a new life to a refugee.  Joseph's sponsor was a small hotel owner from the midwest who offered to employ a Hungarian as a bellboy.  He asked Joseph what he really wanted to do with his life. Joseph said that he was very grateful, but wanted to live in New York.  His sponsor released him from his duties as a bellboy, and wished him well.

Eighty-second street was the Hungarian section of New York, where Joseph found work in odd jobs.  One of those jobs was as a furniture mover, which he described as both shockingly strenuous and dangerous.  He was necessarily frugal.  When he ate out, he bought meals at the end-of-day sell-offs for a quarter.  He stood out back of jazz clubs, in the freezing cold,  with the rest of those who could not afford the entrance, listening through the door.  Sometimes, jazz greats would come out back on their breaks, shake their hands, and play a few riffs for them.

Joseph hustled.  He fixed broken electronics and sold it on the street.  In this way, he met a former professor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  After talking with Joseph a while, the professor was suitably impressed, and began to advocate for his admission to MIT.  Joseph was offered a scholarship, took the opportunity, and attended MIT for one year, studying electrical engineering, after which he returned to New York, where he obtained a job as an electrical engineer.  An avid reader and lifelong learner, he studied digital electronics of his own accord, and subsequently obtained a job in that field.

He met Valerie Palmer at a YWCA dance.  She felt he was quite clever and persistent, but his command of English was very weak.  She wasn’t sure about him.  His persistence paid off.  He spent many evenings together with Valerie in the German section of town, around eighty-sixth street, where there was good food, drink, and dancing.

In 1961, Joseph traveled to England with Valerie, where they were married.  He won a job at AMPEX in Redwood City, California, as an engineer, and moved there with her.  He worked at AMPEX from 1961 to 1965, advancing data storage technologies.  In 1964, Valerie gave birth to their first son, Martin Joseph Bodo.

In 1965, Joseph accepted a job at Sylvania Corporation (Later GTE and General Dynamics) as an Engineer/Analyst.  The family moved to Los Altos, California.  Joseph worked on national defense projects in the government systems division of GTE.  He was proud of this work, and treated it as a patriotic mission.  

Valerie and Joseph were graced with three more children, Christina, Richard, and John, and seven grandchildren, Joseph, Matthew, Sarah, Anne, Brandon, Josephine, and John Leonard.  Joseph retired from GTE, after over 30 years of service, in 1995.  He was an avid photographer, electronics enthusiast, philosopher, jokester, and collector of cameras and records.