An epic life from our greatest generation: Dr. C. D. Michalakis

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My father passed away March 2, the day after his birthday, at the age of 91 and an era has passed for our family. An era is also passing for the families in the Greek American community whose parents and grandparents immigrated from Greece and established themselves in America and who we are rapidly losing: the papoudes and yiayiades in their 80s and 90s who are frail now, but who lived truly epic lives, and survived the war and famine of their times to venture to America with practically nothing in their pockets, raise loving families against all odds, and transform the American landscape. We shall never see their like again, we are forever in their debt, they are truly our greatest generation.

by Dimitri C. Michalakis

My father Constantine was born in 1921 (typically the date is disputed because record keeping was left to the mercies of the local villagers who acted as the municipal clerks). He was born on the island of Chios, the island of seafarers, in the northern village of Kourounia, famous in ancient times for producing the fabled ariousios wine that was the nectar of the gods and a favorite of kings and emperors (including Alexander the Great on his campaigns). But a plague struck the grapes in modern times that my father (who knew most everything) said was probably brought over by the immigrants from Asia Minor, and the vines were no longer the glory of Greece (though villagers still harvested the grapes to bottle their table wine).

My father’s father, Dimitrios, lived in the lower village of Kourounia (there was an upper and lower) and was considered a village sage. He kept books and read them and he treasured the written word in the tradition of the family — a relative of his corresponded with Venizelos. My grandmother Calliopi came from the village of Haladra, a good hike or mule ride over the mountain range of Amani, from a family of men famous for their exceptional height and leventia (manliness) and piety--several became priests. My father was one of many children my grandparents had, all but two who died young — he was the second and surviving Constantine. Children had to fend for themselves in those days because the struggle for survival was constant. There is a story, not unusual, of a village woman going into labor while working in the fields, stopping work to have the baby and cut the umbilical cord herself, then going back to work.

My father had a younger brother, Stelio, and unlike the men in my grandmother's family, both were very slight (my uncle never reached five feet tall). One time when my father was little he tried to tug at the family donkey and the donkey tugged him back and a woman nearby called him a Yiaponeso — Japanese — and he ran crying to my grandmother. Both boys were smart, they had the family love of learning, and the family was soon rocked with scandal when my grandfather decided to sell his best fields (he was cash-poor but field-rich) to finance my father’s education beyond the village elementary school. What’s he going to be - a daskalos (a teacher)? the local wise guys cracked to my grandfather. (Boys were expected to work the fields until they were old enough to take over the klironomia — inheritance — and teachers were respected for their learning but certainly not for their means—they usually had to rely on the charity of villagers for their food and lodging in a bed that didn’t have too many fleas.)

My grandfather sold his best fields anyway and the lires provided for my father’s room and board in the medieval village of Volissos (with its Byzantine castle on the hill) but for little else. My grandmother gave him a butcher’s pencil to write with and every morning on his way to school he would smell the hot rolls in the window of the bakery and then dream about the red fountain pen in the window of the stationery store. One morning he passed the bakery and smelled the rolls, and he paused at the stationery store to admire the fountain pen - but it was gone. When he got to school, he saw it in the pocket protector of the son whose father owned the kaikia and already had a clutch of fountain pens in his pocket and was among the worst students in class.

My father was among the best students in class, and after a year in Volissos he transferred to the central high school of the island in Chora by the harbor and saw a whole new world. The local band marched in braided uniforms on holidays, koulouria and roasted pumpkin seeds in cones of newspaper were hawked in the platia (square) just outside the municipal park with its swaying palm trees and tropical plants and statue of Kanaris, and the shops were crammed with everything from burnished-gold bracelets to copper coffee urns to straw boat hats and Italian perfumes in jeweled bottles. The ship from Athens docked practically every day and bellowed in the harbor and everybody ran to collect their arriving relatives, and overseas mail, and perhaps the fancy bedrame they had ordered from Athens. My father was a devoted student, but he couldn’t resist visiting the Melissa sweet shop that was the local hangout and served ice cream with a sugar wafer and a tiny square spoon.

He graduated with honors, as he graduated every school he attended, and now the world was open to him as a morfomenos (educated man). His father’s fields again furnished the lires for him to attend Teacher’s College in Thessaloniki, the crown jewel of the north, a city he loved throughout his life, with its white tower by the sea, and wide boulevards where young men like my father promenaded in their pinstriped blazers with arrow-point lapels and neckties big as ascots and hair luxuriously combed in skales (waves). The world was full of promise then.

Unfortunately, his first commission as a teacher, at the ripe age of 19, was to the backwoods of Drama, in the mountains near Bulgaria, in a village which harbored communist guerillas and where anyone sent by the Athens government was suspect. My father not only had to revive the dormant school, but to board with the local constables (chorofilakes) for his own safety.

And, unfortunately, it was 1940, and only days after my father’s arrival in the village of Polikarpos, the Italians invaded Greece, and made a mess of it, and then the Germans came to clean up the mess, and seizing the opportunity, the Bulgarians. The Bulgarians seized all of Drama, annexed it to Bulgaria, called it Leukothalassis (White Sea), and incarcerated all the “intellectuals” who kept alive the spirit of Greek national identity and faith, like my father, and the members of the clergy, who were put in detention camps to await their fate.

By some desperate miracle of cunning, my father used what German he had learned at Teacher’s College to fool his captors and steal away to Thessaloniki. There he boarded a Chian kaiki loaded to the waterline (and which foundered nearly every day on the ten-day voyage) which miraculously brought him home to the relative safety of Chios—relative, because Chios was also occupied by the Germans, who terrorized and starved the populace, as in most of occupied Greece.

He returned to Kourounia in the mountains, and for four years he was a teacher in his mother’s village of Haladra, trying to teach the glory that was Greece to kids who went to work before dawn, could barely stay awake in class or find interest in grammata (studies), then went back to work till dark in the ceaseless toil of all farmers: in Chios, the changing seasons of collecting almonds and drying them in the sun, gathering olives and bottling the yellow-green oil, harvesting grapes and stomping them and fermenting the wine in wooden casks, molding the wheels of cheese and loaves of bread, with the kids shepherding the menagerie of animals in the stable of every working household: the donkeys and mules that provided transportation, the sheep and goats and cows that provided milk and meat on holidays, the chickens that provided everyday eggs and meat.

The route that my father took every day to get to Haladra from Kourounia did not pass the general store and house of Neamonites, but my father passed it anyway, because Neamonites had an older daughter named Popi, “Popitsa,” who was fiercely proud and had a shock of dark hair. They were married when she was 16 and he was 21 during the infamous famine of Katohi that engulfed Greece during the German occupation. Everyone came to their wedding, not because they were invited, but because it had food, vats of savory rice and chick peas and goat meat and bakaliaro (salted cod), and organopektes (musicians) playing into the night to help everyone forget their misery. And when the food ran out the guests left in long lines over the mountains, leaving no gifts behind but only bones and dirty dishes.

When the Germans themselves left in ’45, the communists moved in and the following year my father received his draft notice to report to the front in of all places, the region of Drama, and to a remote outpost 12 hours by mule near the Bulgarian border called Nevrokopi. My sister Helen was still a baby when he left and for the next four years he saw her only once again when he came home on leave to recuperate from typhus. He fought in the mountains up and down Drama, withstanding nightmarish artillery barrages and raids by an enemy who blended into the populace or fled across the border into Bulgaria and Yugoslavia. He was an officer at 24 leading raw farm boys into battle and writing condolence letters back home to their families. He was decorated and honored with a parade in Alexandroupoli when his unit got ambushed in a train tunnel and he led the surviving members of his unit on a desperate stand until reinforcements came.

He fought side to side with his master sergeant, Dimitri Touloumides, who had a baby at home but had never seen her. My father got him leave, only to see him fall on a mission the night before, and he received a letter from his widow that she had no food for the baby and couldn’t collect her husband’s pension because the clerk at the pension office was flirting with her. When my father got leave, he visited Kilkis and went with the widow to the pension office. She pointed out the clerk to him and my father walked over and put down his service revolver on the desk. “Either you sign the papers now,” he told the clerk matter-of-factly, “or I will blow your brains out. I’ve gotten used to killing people.” The clerk called him a barbarian, but signed the papers quickly—veterans with battle fatigue were dangerous people.

He came home in 1950, traumatized from the war, to a Greece ravaged by the civil war and a Kafkaesque paranoia of every Greek’s loyalty-one of the dozen or so officers from his military class to have survived the conflict. Now, of course, he had to survive the peace and support his wife and two kids. I was born in 1953 and we lived in the Peristeri section of Piraeus (next to the lumber mill) when my father enrolled at the University of Athens and tried to earn extra money by walking miles to tutor. The neighborhood had endless taverns (with huge wine casks built into the walls), and like every neighborhood in Greece in those days, a neighborhood stone oven where you bought your bread steaming hot and crunched most of it before you got home.

My father applied for one of the five scholarships being offered by the government to study abroad and got accepted to Columbia University in New York. In 1954 (leaving me behind with my grandparents because in part the government wanted a guarantee he would return to serve), he boarded the Queen Elizabeth, then the largest ship in the world, and he left war-ravaged Europe behind and came to the fat prosperity of Eisenhower-era America. My mother and sister came shortly afterwards on the Queen Frederica (I went to live with my paternal grandparents in Chios) and the family moved to an apartment in Sunset Park in Brooklyn just above the fruit store of John Kontos. My sister wore bells on her skirt and watched Roy Rogers on television, my mother worked at a sweatshop making dolls near the Navy Yard, and my father studied at Columbia for his master’s and PhD and typed his thesis on a borrowed typewriter where the keys stuck, on a borrowed table with gimpy legs, and with an English dictionary and Divry Greek English dictionary beside him. Of course, he graduated with honors: his transcript is a miracle of perfect grades under imperfect circumstances. And then a Greek shipowner knocked on the door of the apartment and introduced himself as Papachristides. He said he was a friend of Karamanlis and the bureaucrats in Greece could wait because he wanted my father to become the principal of the Greek parochial school of Socrates in Montreal. My father went to visit Montreal and saw snow, and bitter cold, and a school run out of the rectory of the local Protestant church. The kids played in the yard and had to dodge the wet clothes hanging on the line. There was widespread poverty and students came to school with bread dipped in oil as their lunch. “I said to myself,” my father remembers, “what did I get myself into?”

But he stayed for two years, which is when I joined the family and saw snow—white mountains of it—for the first time. Then he was recruited to be the principal of Plato School in Chicago, the crown jewel of the archdiocese school system, built by the hard-headed Greeks who had made their fortune selling peanuts and shining shoes downtown, and then moved uptown to build a church (the Assumption) out of beautiful cut stone and take over the leafy neighborhood near Columbus Park and make it a suburban Greektown. I remember leaving the school with my father and walking down streets full of Greek stores, from Mouhelious' grocery store with the cheese and olives in brine and lamb hanging on hooks, to the barber shop of the Spartiati who ate garlic and whistled (my nemesis because I never asked for but he always gave me a buzz cut), to the Greek gas stations that anchored the block (one of them a Sinclair with the inflatable dinosaur flapping in the wind), to the Greek funeral home where everyone was dispatched and the steakhouse where everyone gathered to assuage their grief with American beef. My father welcomed Patriarch Athenagoras to the school (he remembers being hugged and smelling his incense-scented beard) and every March he joined the kids dressed as evzones and amalias on the school bus that took them to the Greek parade down the windblown stretches of State Street. It was a wonderful world until, inevitably,the Greeks fled uptown as the neighborhood changed and one day my father had to confront Jesse Jackson leading a rally outside the school and demanding from my father why the school was only for Greeks. “Because the Greeks built it with their sweat,” my father told him, in a confrontation captured on the local news.

We moved back to New York, my father served as principal in Brooklyn of the A. Fantis School of SS Constantine and Helen and later became the founding principal of the Kaloidis Parochial School of the Holy Cross parish. His portrait still hangs in the lobby of that school and his grandchildren, Nicholas, Eva, Costa, Kalliopi, were his students.

He retired in 1987 after a lifetime of service to Greek education both in Greece and in North America and he left a lifetime of memories with the legion of his students, including Eleni Bakopanos, a Justice Secretary and Attorney General of Canada, who wrote him a letter nearly fifty years after graduating from the old rectory that was the Greek school in Montreal: “Your encouragement when I was your student helped me immeasurably in the development of my career.
I am the first woman of Greek descent elected to the Canadian House of Commons. Thank you for the inspiration you provided in helping me ‘grow up right’ and in becoming a good citizen of our wonderful new country, Canada.

”My father’s life shaped the lives of so many others. As his son I can still marvel at where he started his journey and how far he came, at the man he became (who was also the most wonderful storyteller), and at the legacy he left behind, in common with all his generation, a legacy of what one person can achieve against all odds, without abandoning the faith and values of the world that had sustained him, and through him, sustains us all.

©2012 NEOCORP MEDIA





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