Family History
I’ve always been interested in where I come from in a “how did all of this lead to me standing here?” kind of way. The more I’ve dug into my family history, the more I’ve found threads that are hard to ignore. Entrepreneurship, service, technology, stubbornness, and a strange gravitational pull toward the same stretch of the Massachusetts coast.
Here’s what I know.
The Garbarino Side: Framingham, MA
My dad’s side of the family is Italian and Irish. My grandfather, Charles Garbarino, came from a family that immigrated to the US from Genoa, Italy and settled in Framingham, Massachusetts, where his father, he and his brothers built a patchwork of small businesses — ranging from a fruit company, a package store, to vending machines. The family joke is that the vice businesses did better than the fruit business. The Garbarinos were all over Framingham for decades: Garbarino Sand & Gravel, Garbarino’s Package Store on Waverly Street, a tobacco products company. It was a classic immigrant entrepreneurial story — work hard, build something, take care of your family.
My grandmother was Marie (McGrath) Garbarino. She and my grandfather raised their family in Framingham, and the McGrath roots connect to the Irish side of MetroWest — another immigrant story woven into the same town.
My dad, John Garbarino, took the entrepreneurial instinct and made the most of the opportunity his parents provided him. He went to Boston College, then got his MBA at Tuck at Dartmouth. He started as a CPA, moved into venture capital at GE’s venture arm, co-founded a firm called Fairfield Venture Partners, and then crossed over to the operating side — which is where he found his groove. He founded a company called Occupational Health + Rehabilitation, built it into one of the larger national occupational healthcare providers, took it public, and eventually sold it. He later ran a few other healthcare companies, including Epic Health Services, which focused on home health care for medically fragile children that had a great outomce when Bain bought it.
He’s now a Senior Partner at Webster Equity Partners, a healthcare-focused private equity firm in Waltham. Over his career, he’s been involved in dozens of acquisitions, joint ventures, and a couple of public offerings. But the thing that shaped me most wasn’t the wins — it was watching him go through the hard stuff. He IPO’d a furniture company in the ‘80s that had a single manufacturer go bankrupt during the savings and loan crisis. As a kid I got to see firsthand how brutally hard he worked to build things, which set me up in ways I didn’t fully appreciate until much later.
My mom, Laurie (Mitchell) Garbarino, grew up in Pittsford, New York. My mother also went to BC and was an MBA graduate from the University of Rochester back before many women were getting MBAs. She served as a CFO of a hospital and helped put my Dad through his MBA program. She went on to be a lot of different things while she was my Mom but always had a focus on teaching and volunteering her time to those less fortunate. She is the daughter of two people who shaped me more than they probably knew. My sister, Leslie Garbarino, is named after our grandfather and teaches at Babson College. Leslie went to Harvard, did a brief stint in social work, got her law degree from Northwestern, did a longer stint in Big Law, did a brief stint at AmericanInno and now has found her calling as an educator where she is truly world-class.
Leslie Parker Mitchell: My Grandfather, the Cold War Engineer
My maternal grandfather, Leslie Parker Mitchell (1924–2012), was a Yale-educated mechanical engineer who served in the Navy during World War II and the Korean War. After the military, he went to work at Eastman Kodak in Rochester, New York, where he spent his entire career.
What we didn’t know — what nobody knew — was what he was actually doing there.
For decades, Kodak had a classified division building the camera systems, lenses, and film-handling mechanisms for America’s spy satellites. Over a thousand Kodak employees worked on these programs under one of the highest secrecy designations in the U.S. government. My grandfather was one of them. He was a project manager on the GAMBIT (KH-7), GAMBIT 3 (KH-8), and HEXAGON (KH-9) reconnaissance satellite programs, traveling constantly between Rochester and Vandenberg Air Force Base for launches.
The GAMBIT program was the country’s first high-resolution “close-look” space reconnaissance system. It flew 38 missions in the 1960s, carrying a Kodak-built camera with a 77-inch focal length that could photograph Soviet and Chinese nuclear installations from orbit with resolution under three feet — sharp enough to count individual missile launchers. Each mission’s film was loaded into a re-entry capsule, dropped through the atmosphere under parachute, and snagged midair by Air Force C-130s near Hawaii. The film was then rushed back to Kodak’s classified processing facility in Rochester.
The intelligence mattered. After the programs were finally declassified in 2011, my grandfather explained it this way: the satellites proved exactly where our missile capabilities were against those of the Soviet Union. During the Cold War, everyone was terrified — people were building basement bomb shelters, convinced Soviet ballistic missiles were going to rain down. The satellite imagery allowed the U.S. to count exactly how many missiles and launch pads the Soviets actually had, and it turned out we were ok. That changed the entire dynamic of how we negotiated with the Russians.
The secrecy lasted fifty years. My grandfather couldn’t tell anyone — not his friends, not his family, not my grandmother. It wasn’t until September 2011, at the NRO’s 50th Anniversary Gala at the Smithsonian, that the GAMBIT and HEXAGON satellites were publicly displayed and the programs formally declassified. My grandfather was recognized with a Pioneer in Space award from the CIA which is my most prized possesion sitting in my office. He was 87.
But the part of the story that stays with me is this: my grandmother Lillian had passed away about four years before the declassification. My grandfather never got to tell her what he’d been doing all those years. He said publicly that the guys who worked on the project could finally tell their spouses and families, and they were all proud. But for him personally, it was too late.
After he retired from Kodak in 1986, my grandfather spent his time volunteering to help small businesses with their finances. He thought there was no better cause in America than starting a business. He passed away on August 9, 2012, at 88. His obituary noted that just the year before, the government had declassified information revealing Kodak’s role in spy satellite programs that may have prevented a third world war.
I think about him a lot. The technology side of what I do, the service side, the belief that building things matters — a lot of that traces back to him.
Lillian Ferris Mitchell and the Lebanese Connection
My grandmother, Lillian (Ferris) Mitchell, was married to my grandfather for 58 years. The detail about her family that’s always fascinated me is that her mother came over from Lebanon.
The surname Ferris is a common anglicization of the Arabic name Faris (فارس), meaning “knight” or “horseman.” Lebanese families arriving in the U.S. in the late 1800s and early 1900s frequently had their names changed at ports of entry or adopted English spellings shortly after arrival. Many of these families were Maronite Catholics fleeing overcrowding, economic collapse, and persecution under Ottoman rule. Massachusetts was a major destination — Boston had the second-largest Syrian community in the country after New York, and Lebanese communities grew in Lawrence, Worcester, Lowell, and other towns across the state.
I don’t know as much as I’d like about that side of the family, and it’s something I want to keep digging into. But the broader picture is one I find pretty remarkable: my ancestry braids together Italian immigrants, Lebanese immigrants, Irish immigrants, and English Pilgrims — all meeting in one family. That’s a very American story.
Experience Mitchell: The Pilgrim Ancestor
This is where it gets strange — in the best way.
The deepest root in my family tree reaches back almost four hundred years to Experience Mitchell (c. 1603–1689), my grandfather Leslie’s ancestor and one of the founding settlers of Duxbury, Massachusetts.
Duxbury is where I live now. I didn’t know about Experience when we moved here.
Experience arrived at Plymouth Colony on the ship Anne in the summer of 1623, three years after the Mayflower. He came as a young single man with his sister Constant, likely born in Leiden, Holland, to a family connected to the Separatist movement. Though he wasn’t a Mayflower passenger, those who arrived on the Anne and Little James are still considered Pilgrims by the Duxbury Rural and Historical Society.
In the 1627 Division of Cattle, Experience was grouped with the household of Francis Cooke, a Mayflower passenger. Around 1628, he married Cooke’s daughter Jane Cooke, who had also been born in Leiden. In 1637, when Duxbury was formally incorporated as the second town in Plymouth Colony, Experience was among its first settlers. He acquired land on the north side of what is now Harrison Street, on the Blue Fish River. He served as the town’s Highway Surveyor, appeared on the 1643 muster roll of men able to bear arms, and was listed as a freeman.
The oldest document in the Duxbury Rural and Historical Society’s archives is a letter dated July 24, 1662, from Thomas Mitchell in Amsterdam, addressed to “his very loving Uncle Mr. Experience Mitchell dwelling in Duxbury Town in New England.” It informed Experience of his sister’s death and discussed family matters — a small, human artifact of the bonds these people maintained across an ocean.
Experience died around 1689 and is buried at the Old Graveyard in East Bridgewater. The Mitchell family continued in the Duxbury-Bridgewater area for generations, eventually producing my grandfather Leslie Parker Mitchell in Pittsford, New York — and through his daughter Laurie, me.
I didn’t plan to end up in Duxbury. But here I am, in the same town my ancestor helped settle nearly four centuries ago. And his name happened to be Experience which is the business I am in and career path I’ve chosen. Strange in the best way.
My Immediate Family
Jessica (Cascio) Garbarino is my wife. Jess went to Syracuse (Newhouse) and has built a great career in brand communications — she worked at a few PR agencies, founded a performance apparel company called Brunswick Park that she launched on Kickstarter and took to Outdoor Retailer, appeared on Project Runway: Fashion Startup, worked at Reebok, and currently leads communications for Primark in the U.S. She also played a quiet but pivotal role in HqO’s founding story — she brought me to a Reebok work event where I met the asset manager for Jamestown, which became our first client. I wouldn’t be here without her in more ways than I can count.
Jess’s parents are Joe Cascio, who works at NetApp in the enterprise technology space, and Patty Cascio, a former teacher in Lexington, Massachusetts. They raised Jess and her sister in the Melrose area.
My parents are John Garbarino and Laurie (Mitchell) Garbarino. My sister is Leslie Garbarino, who teaches at Babson.
Jess and I have two boys and a girl — Dash, Gray, and Frankie — and we live in Duxbury.
The Thread
I didn’t set out to find a narrative in my family history. But the more I’ve learned, the harder it is to ignore.
In 1637, a man named Experience helped settle the town where I now live. Nearly four hundred years later, I’ve dedicated my career to bringing the Experience Economy to commercial real estate. His name was Experience. My company’s mission is experience. We live in the same town. I didn’t plan any of that.
My grandfather Leslie spent his career at the frontier of technology and national service — building camera systems that photographed the world from orbit and helped keep the peace. When he retired, he spent his time helping entrepreneurs, because he believed there was no greater cause than starting a business.
My grandfather Charles came over from Italy and started every kind of small business he could think of in Framingham. My dad took that energy and built companies in healthcare. My grandmother Lillian’s family came from Lebanon looking for a better life.
All of these people — immigrants, Pilgrims, engineers, entrepreneurs, teachers, soldiers — made choices that eventually led to me standing in Duxbury, trying to build something that matters. I’m not sure I believe everything happens for a reason, but I do think the patterns are worth paying attention to.
Funny how life works.