Armenak Saroyan journeyed from the old Armenian city of Bitlis to American ahead of his family in 1905, establishing himself in New York, where he worked to raise the money that would be needed when they joined him. He expected that they would wish to remain in New York, but soon after their arrival he found himself obliged to abandon the beginnings of a career as a preacher and travel on with them to California, a land said to resemble Armenia itself, where many other Armenians (refugees from the Turkish troubles) were settling. His fourth child and second son William (the only one to be born in the New World) was born in Fresno on the last day of August, 1908. Armenak died from peritonitis at San Jose only three years later, at the early age of thirty-six, a failing fruit farmer, far from home in body and spirit. He was to remain in William’s mind as a very dim memory, but also as an enduring source of motivation and encouragement, for Armenak had also been a writer, an unpublished one. The son meant to succeed where the father, in impossible circumstances, had failed.