I was born in Pennsylvania to a working-class family. All four of my grandparents emigrated from Calabria in southern Italy. No one on either side of my family had attended college. I was the first. Fortunately, I did well enough in school to earn a university scholarship. My parents wanted their sons to be "professionals." Since the only professions they were acquainted with were medicine and law, they urged me to become either a doctor or a lawyer. So, I declared a pre-medical major, and began courses in biology, chemistry, physics - all of which I soon found I had little interest in. Instead, my interest turned to trying to understand why the United States was fighting a devastating war in Vietnam. Why was the enormous wealth of our society so maldistributed? Why was our society so divided by race, ethnicity, class, and gender? I turned to the study of history at that point to help me understand how our world had become something I found disturbing.
After earning my B.A. at the University of Pittsburgh, I moved with a group of friends to San Francisco. Arriving with very little money, I found a job with the San Francisco Department of Welfare as an AFDC eligibility worker. After a while, I detoured to the University of Oregon to study History but left after two years of non-stop rain and gray skies. I returned to San Francisco's Welfare Department and worked as a MediCal eligibility worker; but I decided to continue the graduate study of History, soon earning an M.A. at San Jose State University. I was then accepted for the Ph.D. program in History at the University of California, Berkeley. I was not only enthralled with my professors and fellow grad students, but I also met my future wife at Berkeley. I have been married to Mary Jane Zappia for nearly 41 years. We have two daughters, Angela (34) and Gabriela (30).