Wealth, community and an “island neighborhood”

C. Dean Metropoulos is one of the richest men in America, and yet from what he says the greatest joy of his long and illustrious career right now seems to be working with his sons and watching them broker deals almost as well as their old man did. “They push me hard,” he says, and he loves it.

Manhasset, New York is one of the richest communities in the United States, an “island neighborhood” with a Miracle Mile of stores too rich to even venture in the parking lot. And yet the affluent Greeks who have settled there and made it their own say almost to a man that what they liked about the area was its community feel and sense of neighborhood.

“I got such tremendous support from the Greeks in the community,” says Nikos Katopodis, who opened his upscale gourmet store in Port Washington and was soon visited by his fellow AHEPA brothers toting shopping baskets and offering both support and counsel.

The heartening example of the Metropoulos family and the Greeks of Manhasset is that to Greeks everywhere family is paramount and community is an extension of family and the most vital part of any neighborhood, no matter how ritzy. Metropoulos takes obvious relish in working with his sons and credits his wife with their moral fibre. Money isn’t everything, he implies. The affluent Manhasset Greeks don’t talk much about their bank rolls, but they do talk much about running into each other often on the common grounds and how well their last AHEPA meeting went.

Greeks put down roots everywhere and do well everywhere, but it is encouraging to see that they never forget their values or inherent need to be with each other. As Plato once said about the Greeks living on the islands that ring the Mediterranean: We gather like frogs around a pond.

As Manhasset shows, expatriate Greeks will do that wherever they are and whatever their circumstance, and even the most privileged among us remember our common bond of family.