Roma teen bucks tradition to find out what college can offer

Marks started preaching to them too. His reasoning was that youths lack the work ethic of members of his generation, who were forced since very young to work in order to survive. Today’s youths were raised in comfort but kept a traditional lifestyle. They dropped out of school and married in their teens. He believes that their only chance for a good future is through higher education.

That’s easier said than done, two young couples said one evening during dinner.

“That was their deal,” said Teddy Marks, a grandson of Michael Marks. “[The older generation] needed to work to survive, and they made an impact. They got the yards. It’s pretty big for Gypsy people to own something like that. And they didn’t want us to work. Now times are tough. Now they want us to work.”

In Roma culture, they said, boys get married at 16 or 17 because that’s what they think is expected of them; that’s how they become men. They work with other men in their family, dealing cars or metal. Women’s role is even more straightforward: They stay at home and raise children.

Being a Roma wife is still what many girls aspire to. Daisy Marks, 13, wants it for herself. She is home-schooled. Her long black straight hair, deep eyes with curled lashes and thin figure might appeal to boys in the schools, so her uncle, who looks after her, decided to keep her at home. She’s going to be home-schooled for another year or two and looks forward to getting married when she’s about 17.

Costello and his grandfather had very different beginnings in life. While Costello grew up in his grandparents’ house in a gated community on the outskirts of Wichita and never had to work a day in his life, Marks’ was a different story.

His parents, Louie and Swanie Marks, rented a unit on the first floor of a hotel in downtown Wichita. In front of the store, the family told fortunes, sold popcorn and shined shoes. They lived in the back of the room, separated by a curtain. Louie Marks and his brothers would find work cleaning furnaces and stoves or fixing boilers. The family sometimes struggled to make ends meet. Some evenings, Louie Marks would take Michael to the trash bins behind a produce house, where employees threw away vegetables and stale bread. He would help the boy into the bins, and Michael would scavenge the family’s dinner.

The children would play outside — drawing tic-tac-toe on the sidewalk, putting coins on the railroad tracks for trains to flatten, climbing fire escapes.

Michael married Dorothy when he was 12, and she moved in with the family. With his earnings from selling popcorn, flowers and newspapers and from shining shoes, he would buy ice cream floats with two straws to share with Dorothy or pressed-ham sandwiches to share with his friends. (Once he gave a spit shine to a returning soldier, who tipped him $20.)

He went to school until third grade. From then on, his education came from the TV. He watched “The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis,” “Leave It to Beaver,” “Dennis the Menace” and “Father Knows Best.” The shows portraying the suburban life of postwar America enthralled and puzzled him.

He realized most people outside his home had lives like the characters in “Leave It to Beaver,” with nice families and white picket fences.

“I wanted to be like those people,” Marks said. “And I said to myself, you know, how come we’re so different? We’re like the Addams family.”

He started questioning his parents’ decision to have him get married when he was so young. After he had children of his own, he decided he didn’t want to teach them the old Roma ways. He wanted to get away.

“And I say, ‘Hey, Louie Marks, Swanie Marks. I’ll eat your pork chops. I’ll eat your chicken stew. I’ll eat your sarme, your bacro. I’ll eat all of that, but I’m going to start me a little business, and I’m going to start doing the right thing.”

A later realization was that shunning non-Roma society didn’t make much sense. If the gadje made the sodas he was drinking and the sandwiches he was eating, how come the gadje weren’t allowed to enter his house? Working and living with everyone might be beneficial, he thought.

Many Roma are afraid of authority, of being told what to do, said Randy Marks, Michael Marks’ younger brother. “Where other Gypsies, including myself, would run, would say, ‘Oh, no, the gadje. Let’s just go now. It’s their world. Let’s just get what we can from them and go.’ Mike wanted a piece of it, and he got it. And he’s getting it, and he’s working.”

One morning in early spring, Michael and Dorothy Marks drove to southeastern Wichita for a work meeting at a horse farm.

As soon as they parked their car, they could see a miniature horse in an open-air stable. Right by its side, a large metal barn was lacking its roof, which had collapsed under a load of wet, heavy snow. Every time the wind blew, a loose sheet of metal hit one of the walls, causing the miniature horse to flinch. The farm owner wanted to rebuild the barn altogether and needed someone to demolish the current one and carry the metal away.

Michael Marks took his measuring wheel out of the trunk and did the rounds. He looked at the roof and the walls and touched the metal. His estimate: $2,000 to tear it down and carry the metal away. The farm owner was not convinced. She said she had hoped to find someone willing to do the job for just the metal’s value. She said she would do some more looking around. A farmworker told Marks to take down his email address and send an offer as soon as he got back to the office. Marks took out a small square piece of paper, which fit in the palm of his hand, scribbled something on it and put it in his chest pocket.

On the piece of paper, which Marks has held onto, is a row of lines and characters. The first resembles a J, followed by a succession of broken and curved lines. There is nothing to read on that piece of paper because the king never learned how to write. But he eventually got the contract anyway.