Steven Decker is a lifetime Chicago area resident, a father, grandfather and a veteran of the U.S. Air Force, where he was an air traffic controller assigned to a NATO base in Italy.

“I always loved to write,” he said in a recent interview. “During my career, I wrote training manuals, marketing materials and short stories for fun but I always wanted to create a novel. Now I have the time to write and an important message to share.”

Decker, whose mother’s maiden name was Katerina Tomasello, grew up in a large, thriving Sicilian family on the north side of Chicago. “There were always plenty of cousins around and big family dinners were a way of life. I’ve always felt blessed to be a part of this family.”

His first novel, Cambridge Street, is crafted around many of the events that deeply affected his Sicilian immigrant grandparents, mother, aunts and uncles during the Roaring Twenties.

“For them, every day was a struggle against prejudice, poverty and gangsters,” said Decker. “They were terribly poor and the discrimination against Italians – especially Sicilians – at the time was outrageous. I included many of the real life events that affected them in my novel Cambridge Street, which I named after the street where they lived “

Steve went on to say “I wrote Cambridge Street to honor the memory of the millions of immigrants who came to America at the turn of the last century. The bravery of those people, many who arrived at our shores with only a few dollars and who spoke little English, was enormous.

We must not let their sacrifices be forgotten.”