PERSON OF THE YEAR

This issue our 2008 Person of the Year is a man who personifies the very ideals of one of our most venerable institutions, AHEPA. He is eminently civic minded (a tradition he inherited from his father and mother, who were involved with AHEPA for most of their lives). He cares very deeply about the issues that AHEPA has espoused for decades and about our allegiance to Greece.

And yet he is a new generation of leader.

He is American-born and proud of it. He is comfortable walking the corridors of power in Washington and in making the case for the interests of Greek Americans, as well as Greece. He is an attorney, which makes him a particularly-effective advocate for the causes he argues. And yet he is also a charismatic visionary on a large scale: he summoned AHEPA this year to go to Greece for its convention and he rallied his lodge officers to take to the road and spread the word.

Ike Gulas represents the new generation of leader, not only in AHEPA, but also in the Greek American community. He is both loyal to the ideals of the old generation and honors them, and yet a champion of a new vision and a new way of doing things and making thing possible. He is building on the legacy that was his and leaving a new legacy for his own children.

He is a product of a wonderful upbringing in a South that was both gracious in its customs and harsh in its prejudice, of a Greek tradition in that environment and of parents who both survived and flourished in it, and yet he is very much his own man and his chosen branch of the law proves it (taking on huge corporations in civil cases that can stretch for years).

Because Ike Gulas is very much of his own generation, but represents the very best ideals of any generation, he is our Person of the Year in 2008, but a man who will stand out in any generation and in any year.