E pluribus unum is Latin for "Out of many, one." Oh, those old Latinos, they wrote in fractured, Germanesque phrases, such as "Up the street the soldiers came marching down." Now let me segue from Latin and German to a bit of my personal history.

I am a first generation American and I have the long form Birth Certificate to prove it. OOOPs, I got off track there, forgive me. When my mother and father came to America they were just young children, arriving with their parents. Families emigrating here, around 1910, did not just get off the boat and move in. No, they had to have a sponsor, money to hold them over until they got settled, they had to have a job offer in hand and had to be healthy. It was like an invitation with strings. That my parents ultimately met, married and had me is evidence that my grandparents qualified.  Times have changed, haven't they?  Now people come here looking to take jobs, get medical care free, enjoy the entitlements others have paid taxes to establish, get college tuition and on and on, all without the botherssome and annoying legalities.  Sorry, there I go again, digressing.I must focus. 

What I wanted to get to is assimilation. My mother's side is Dutch, my father comes from German and Austrian stock. Do I speak Dutch or German? No! My grandparents came here to be Americans and Americans spoke English and they did so as soon as they could. The only time I heard anything but English when my brothers and I grew up was when what was being said was not for our ears.

My mother told me a story about how as a very small child in Hoboken, she went to pick up a pair of  her father's trousers from the cleaners. She did not know the word "trousers" and so she asked the clerk for her dad's "pantaloons", the only Dutch word she knew that was close. The clerk nearly laughed her out of the store for not just saying "pants" and my mother ran all the way home ashamed and crying. That never happened to her again. She learned her English even faster.

Theodore Roosevelt said, "There can be no fifty-fifty Americanism in this country. There is room here for only 100 % Americanism, only for those who are Americans and nothing else."    Much more recently, Chancellor Angela Merkel, said on multiculturalism in Germany, "This multicultural approach, saying that we simply live side by side and live happily with each other has failed. Utterly failed."  

Her words have been echoed in Great Britain, and I subscribe to them fully. France just banned the burka! America has always been a pot of stew, where people are the ingredients and who blend and merge into an American Dish, not float around like a bunch of separate corks.Being an American was a thing of pride, not the second part of a hyphenated word. What is happening to our national being?

E pluribus unum,  "Out of many, one." That should be in our hearts, not just our currency.

       We are a distributor of a wide variety of construction products. Gamka's business is in equipment sales and rentals, construction chemicals, thermal and moisture protection, diamond cutting, hardware, concrete accessories and safety equipment.  We are family run and our World Headquarters is located in Edison, NJ. Gamka's truck fleet delivers all over New Jersey, Metropolitan New York and Philadelphia. To serve our outside customers, we have field account managers who call on contractors on jobs and in their offices. Inside our 60,000 square foot building we have a 2,000 sq. ft. show room where our sales counter handles walk-in customers and telephone calls. Our inventory lists more than 43,000 line items. We rent over 1,700 pieces of machinery. There are 12,000 parts in stock and our service department repairs our customers' equipment and what we sell and rent. Information on all of this and much more can be found on our website, www.gamka.com . We offer our customers application-engineered solutions to their problems.  We have established ourselves in the concrete market niche and are known by our customers as the concrete experts. If you have anything to do with concrete, from placing it to restoring it and every stage in between, Gamka can help. We have the answers.This year marks our 25th anniversary!

     As the construction industry and our customers evolve, so do we.