The Once and Future Draftsman...

In 1950s France, when one was 14 years old and--by US convention--in, approximately, the eight grade, one had to make a decision about the direction in which one was going to go on one's educational path toward gainful employment. The truth be known, Jean dreamed of being an architect. He wanted to be an architect. However, from his point of view, that was an unrealistic goal for the son of a financially-strapped working class family in the 14th arrondissement of Paris.

Jean's father, Louis Ernest Marcel Ganné, was a journeyman slate roofer with a foreman's competence and an anarchist's intractability--that kept him changing jobs annually--who worked on the roofs of the Louvre, among others--after living through the German Occupation of Paris, having to flee the city with his family to avoid deportation for the purpose of forced labor in Germany (a fate that befell Jean's Uncle René who did not see his only son until the little boy was six years old), and living in the woods surrounding Le Blanc, Indre, France as un maquisard while his wife and children lived in town with their maternal-grandmother until the liberation of Paris, on August 25, 1944, and, ultimately, all of France, in 1945.

Jean's paternal grandfather, great-grandfather, and great-great-grandfather had all been des étameurs, a profession named for the verb étamer, meaning "to coat with a layer of tin." Thus, Jean's paternal ancestors were, to put it plainly, French tinsmiths. His maternal grandparents were domestic servants--his grandmother, a cook, and his grandfather, a handyman-- to a bourgoise family in central France and their parents had been agricultural dayworkers--not land-owning farmers, but, rather, peasants, who labored on the land of others, in 19th century France.

Thus, at 14 years of age, Jean Ganné chose to enter L'Ecôle Saint Lambert in Paris to pursue the profession of un tailleur de pierre. World War II had wreaked havoc on the villages, towns, and cities of France. From north to south and from east to west structures from the most humble to the most illustrious had been devastated and Jean calculated that there would always be enough work for a well-trained stone worker. Almost 6 decades of working in his chosen métier have proven him right on that count.

"Leavin' California in the Broad Daylight..."

On March 17, 2008, Jean Ganné and friends loaded up a 20ft ocean freight container with almost all of his worldly belongings--and those of the American wife that he picked up on his journey through 20+ years of living and working in stone in the United States of America--and had it trucked away to the Port of Los Angeles for shipping to the Port of Le Havre in northwestern France.

Jean himself left for France on April 5, 2008 to catch up with his container, which was due to clear French Customs in Le Havre on April 22nd and arrive by truck at his house in central France on April 25th. He also had lots of family visiting to do, having not been in France for at least a year.

While I realize that stories commonly start at the beginning--if one is a novelist--in a sense, the story of this French immigrant tailleur de pierre / stone worker can only be told by beginning at the impending completion of his sojourn in America. The primary reason for that being that Jean is now, and has always been, the soul of self-effacement. He simply isn't one to blow his own horn, nor draw attention to himself. Although that can be a refreshing quality in an artisan, it is also a formidable obstacle to getting to know and understand a friend, neighbor, coworker, grandfather, father, husband, brother, and son. Thus, the necessity, at this time in his life, of having a ghostwriter, with an indelible streak of the archivist, committed to documenting his experiences and accomplishments in ways that will leave a significant legacy to his immediate descendants and closest family members.

Suffice it to say that it took several months of fairly constant badgering to convince Jean Ganné of the wisdom of making a concerted effort to set down, clearly and carefully, in permanent form, a record o f his 2 decades of life and work in the USA. It would undoubtedly have been much more difficult and taken much longer had it not been for the fact that he has two lovely daughters, Hélène and Anne, who are now just hitting their forties; three beautiful grandchildren, Anastasia, Max, and Celía, who are 14, 12, and 11, respectively; a devoted elder sister, Pierrette; a brother, Pierre, ten years his junior; two nieces, Catherine and Véronique, and nephews-in-law, Olivier and François, all closing in on their fifties; and four grand-nieces and -nephews, Nicolas, Jean-Baptiste, Elise, and Marie, the four of them in their early- to mid-twenties, for whom he is, in fact, the remaining patriarch if the Ganné family, after the death--on Christmas Day 2006--of Alain, his brother-in-law of 50 years, Pierrette's deeply-missed husband.

"Have Rasp, Will Travel..."

On December 27, 1987, having celebrated his 51st birthday only 7 weeks earlier, Jean Eugène Marcel Ganné arrived at the San Francisco International Airport from Paris, France to start the American phase of his theretofore resolutely French life.

Only a series of fortuitous coincidences and an unexpected romance could ever have arranged his lucky stars in such a way as to have him actually emigrating from France--legally, no less--to live in San Francisco, California.

In order to appreciate the leap that he took on that fateful date, you would have to know a little bit about the "push/pull factors" that influenced his departure from France and his arrival in the United States.

For the 10 years immediately prior to his arrival on San Francisco's foggy doorstep, Jean worked for ROCAMAT, the largest quarrier of limestone, marble, and granite in France, as a technical expert and troubleshooter for the Export Sales Department. He was sent to San Francisco by ROCAMAT in the spring of 1983 to oversee and troubleshoot the installation of both limestone and granite from ROCMAT in a project called The Tishman Building on Stevenson Alley between Market and Mission Streets and 2nd and 3rd Streets.

The project and the trips back and forth between Paris and San Francisco took place between April 1983 and October 1986. During that time, Jean lived for extended periods, between 1 and 3 weeks, of time in a variety of San Francisco Bay area hotels located along the Highway 101 corridor between San Mateo and San Francisco.

The lion's share of his time, in San Francisco, was spent working with the general contractor in charge of building construction in the pre-casting yard troubleshooting technical problems with the stone.

He participated in the reception of container loads of prefabricated stone from the French quarries destined for the construction of The Tishman Building; conducted the inventory; sorted slabs for cladding; re-cut slabs; polished slabs; drilled tens of thousands of holes for setting the anchors that would secure the slabs to stainless steel framing for hanging on the exterior of the edifice; conducted surveys of each container load of stone to determine what, if any, stones had been damaged in transit; prepared the report on damages and calculated what replacement material had to be reordered; submitted the reorders; and acted as the liaison between the French factories and the American clients.

Although ROCAMAT had hired an American in Paris to teach English to some of its international sales representatives, Jean did all of this work, and more, speaking little, or no, serviceable American English. Fortunately for him, circumstances arranged themselves in such a way as to provide Jean with a small, supportive group of French stone industry workers who were already established in and around Southern California and the Bay Area--most notably Gérard Labrousse, Josiane D'Hoop, designer and project coordinator, Pascale, installer in Los Angeles, CA and Marc & Annick Guillaume, owners of Marble & Tile, Inc. (who would later become central to Jean's move to the USA), Michel Bégard, French stone importer, Marc and Jacques Chétrit, installers and Bernard Renaud, French limestone carver in San Francisco.

Throughout The Tishman Building project, Jean also had the support of and collaboration with Didier Bardot and Benoit Chevallier of ROCAMAT's Export Sales Department both of whom made regular trips to San Francisco to meet with clients and confer with Jean about specific stone quarrying and fabrication problems.

By July 1985 he had also made the acquaintance of a female resident of San Francisco who just happened to be working as an administrative assistant at Marble & Tile, Inc. and, interestingly enough, had an enthusiastic and firm command of the French language, which would prove to be very useful at a later date in our immigrant's adventure.