To hear him tell it, Joe Mamo’s move from Ethiopia to North Dakota in 1981 was accidental.
Mamo’s father, Yenberber Mamo, was a public transit mogul who
manufactured buses and ran the first fleet to provide service across
Ethiopia. The operation made his father’s Mamo Kacha bus line a
household name in the East African country. It provided a nice life for
his family. But it rendered him distinctly unpopular with the Marxist
junta that ruled Ethiopia between 1974 and 1991. The elder Mamo was
jailed two or three times by the regime. Some of his property was
confiscated. As his son approached draft age, the patriarch looked for
ways to send him overseas.
That’s how Joe, at the age of 13, found himself attending Catholic boarding school in North Dakota.
“He didn’t know the difference between North Dakota and New York
City. We didn’t know until we got there,” says Joe Mamo, whose given
name is Eyob. But he got used to the cold winters and moved to Chicago
after graduation. While he attended community college there, he got a
job pumping gas.
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