Yahoo Autos Lee Iacocca, Snoop Dogg, the Statue of Liberty, and Me
I grew up with Lee Iacocca.
Iacocca was a fixture in my childhood for years, hovering out in the periphery as a larger-than-life icon whose name came up on the local evening news on a regular basis throughout the 1980s. Not for the car stuff. Sure, that was a big deal elsewhere. But in my neighborhood in northern New Jersey in the 1980s, Iacocca was a godfather who was doing for us what we could not do for ourselves.
He was fixing the crumbling Statue of Liberty and rehabbing the broken-down buildings of Ellis Island. That was a big deal in our neck of the woods, because Liberty is a 200-ton copper Jersey girl who claims she lives in New York. She was deteriorating rapidly, and Ellis Island was in a worse state.
Iacocca, the son of Italian immigrants, was busy reshaping Chrysler, begging the government for a $1.5 billion federal loan (the OG automaker bailout, as it were), and birthing the K-car (which later became the minivan) into existence. And on a personal level, his wife died in 1983 from complications from diabetes.
But in 1981, when he had a lot of other things occupying his time, Iacocca took the helm of the Statue of Liberty–Ellis Island Centennial Commission with the goal of raising $200 million from private donors to fix things like Lady Liberty's weakening arm and the iron corsetting that supported Liberty's copper skin.
The fundraising efforts were grassroots, controversial, and very successful. Iacocca publicly implored everyone in the U.S. to chip in, and corporate sponsors were blown away by the number of box tops, can lids, and UPC codes mailed in for the promise of a corporate donation. In my town and in towns around the country, kids held bake sales and car washes and sent the funds via checks written out to The Statue of Liberty in envelopes addressed to Lee Iacocca himself.
The commission eventually raised $230 million. I got to visit the renovated Ellis Island years later with my grandmother, who was visiting from Ireland, and my parents, who immigrated via a couple of 747s that landed at JFK airport in Queens. My grandmother pointed to the names of people she knew on the rosters of ships that landed in New York Harbor in the 1950s and told quick 10-word sorry stories about each person, like, "Ah, Johnny, his mother died of pneumonia the next year." My mom found Ellis Island to be really sad, in a way I didn't then fully understand.
I did my first interview with Iacocca while sitting inside my hot car one summer day in 2005, back when he paired up with Snoop Dogg on some Chrysler commercials. Iacocca got a kick out of Snoop. "He's just a good kid," Iacocca said. "I don't understand half the things he was telling me, but it was fun."
We ended up talking more about life than about the auto industry and his commercial appearance. In addition to being the kids of immigrants, Iacocca and I shared a family history with Type 1 diabetes. He was using the media attention around his commercial appearance to talk about the Iacocca Foundation's efforts to cure Type 1 diabetes. It was something he'd promised his wife Mary: that he would cure the autoimmune disease by the time he died.
There aren't many people who can make a promise like that and actually have a shot at keeping it. Although his promise wasn't fulfilled, clinical trials of the generic tuberculosis drug he'd hoped would work are still underway.
Iacocca and I chatted a few more times in the coming years, until eventually his assistant said he wasn't able to do interviews anymore. Iacocca died on Tuesday.
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