“I think things are going really well in Baltimore,” says Parthemos, the first in her family to go to college, who also went on to get a law degree and become the highest serving woman of Greek descent in Maryland. “We have new development that is underway. We have business that is expanding and growing. I think we’re doing good things in Baltimore.”

Part of her mission, she says, is to help get a Hellenic museum underway in Baltimore to archive the life and times and oral histories of the Greek immigrants who came to the city and other cities in America, and to record the history of Greek immigration to America.

My father was one of those pioneers who came to America in the ‘50s, leaving behind a war-ravaged Greece recovering from both a world war and civil war, a civil war in which he fought in the mountains in what should have been the best years of his life. And yet he had the stamina and courage to return and go back to school, apply for a scholarship to the United States, get it to one of the venerable institutions of learning in America, Columbia University, and come here and get both his masters and Ph.D. and go on to serve and transform Greek Canadian and Greek American parochial school education for the next thirty years.

His history is only one, an epic one, in the history of the immigrants who came to America this century, perhaps our greatest generation in modern times, who not only helped save Greece by coming here and never forgetting their obligation to Greece (both politically and monetarily), but also providing the bridge of memories that is our own enduring legacy.

I was born in Greece and lived there briefly; I have some memories. But many of them since I came here, deeper into our history, came from the people who made this history, my mother and father, and since my father was also a spellbinding storyteller, he made this history come alive. As Parthemos herself said, we are losing this generation, with all their memories, and we should make an effort, a concerted effort, as the generations that benefited from the sacrifices of our parents and our papoudes and yiayiades,to pay them homage and pay tribute to their sacrifice by recording and preserving their memories before they’re gone forever. They were the witness to this history, they lived it, and no one can speak of it better. The Hellenic Museum in Chicago was a great first step in this effort, there are smaller archives, but this should be a major effort by all the cities in America, by the generations that benefited, by all of us, before our legacy crumbles with the passing of the heroic men and women who made everything possible for us.

My heart is broken with the passing of my father, but his life and memory, and others of his brave and incomparable generation, should never be forgotten.

Dimitri C. Michalakis