Article from Eufaula Tribune 10/02/1960 when Grandpa went to Greece for school dedication

July 1955 Reader's Digest

In only two generations, they have made a many-sided contribution to American life

THE GREEKS AMONG US

By Albert Q. Maisel

IN 1907, a 14-year-old Greek orphan wandered, bewildered and broke, into the city of Tampa, Fla. Knowing barely a dozen English words, the only job he could find at first was in a small fruit store. Through the next seven years he waited on tables in restaurants all over the South. Each payday he carefully divided the few dollars he had earned into three equal parts.

One part was for his living expenses, and for the newspapers with which he taught himself to read and write English. Another part helped support four younger brothers and Sisters who were still in Greece. The final fraction was scrupulously deposited in a Postal Savings account.  By the time he was 21, Gregory Pappanicolaus had saved enough to make a down payment on a struggling cafe in the little Alabama town of Eufaula. At first the going was hard.  But his new neighbors soon discovered that his food was good, his prices fair and his smile contagious. They wrestled with his name until the young man obliging­ly shortened it to Pappas. They stood up for him as witnesses when he applied for American citizenship. And, by the time he married Bessie Smith, a local girl, no one any longer thought of Greg as a foreigner. Today, at 62, Gregory Pappas still runs the best-patronized eating place in eastern Alabama. His greatest pride, however, is in the progress of his children, all six of them college graduates. His eldest son, Venizelos, who earned a Distinguished Flying Cross as an Air Force captain in World War II, runs a prospering business of his own in Eufaula. Christie, likewise a veteran., is a successful attorney. Dr. Bill is serving his internship in a Birmingham hospital and Ray is making his way through medical school. His daughters, Zafero and Helen, have college degrees in Home Economics and Education.

A remarkable family? Undoubtedly. Yet their story is not exception. In the thoroughness of their integration into American life, Gregory Pappas and his children mirror the history of 600,000 other Americans of Greek descent. Driven by poverty from the stony fields of Thessaly, the Peloponnesus and the rocky islets of the Aegean, more than 90 percent of all Greek immigrants arrived here during the first two decades of the present century. Thus, unlike other recent arrivals, they could not count upon the help of compatriots who had come here earlier. Nothing in the background of these shepherds and fishermen had prepared them for life in our complex industrial society. Nearly one third were illiterate. Most of the rest had but the scantiest of formal schooling. Of all European immigrants these seemed the least fitted to make their way in bustling, 20th-century America.

Yet, along with their handicaps, they brought invisible but valuable assets: a talent for thrift, the courage to venture into new fields, an urge to achieve economic independence and a passionate desire to earn an education for their children. Armed with these qualities, they were halfway to becoming Americans even before they landed here.

Special ties of respect and affection sprang up long ago between young America and the little land that cradled so much of Western Civilization.  Back in 1806 Nicholas Biddle, a young archeologist fresh out of Princeton, went to explore the ancient structures which even in ruin still attested the genius of Greeks who had died more than 2000 years before. Wherever he went he could not help but see the sufferings of the living Greeks, the misery and poverty to which they had been reduced by three and a half centuries of Turkish misrule. When he returned home and published the ugly truth, indignation and sympathy swept the country as Americans became aware of the persecution of these two million Christian subjects of the sultan.

Biddle had witnessed the first stirrings of the Greek struggle for liberty. By 1821 a desperate open revolt broke out. The newly formed Greek Senate adopted a Declaration of Independence influenced by our own. In young America the rebel cause found a ready response. Greek Relief Committees sprang up in U. S. cities and ship after ship loaded with clothing, food and medical supplies was dispatched to the Guerrillas. Daniel Webster arose in the House of Representatives and made an eloquent appeal for official support of the Greek patriots. Meanwhile, a small band of impetuous young Americans had rushed to Greece to take up arms William G. Washington, a relative of our first President, died heroically at the battle of Palamidi.

Long after Greek independence had been won, America continued to be deeply influenced by the Greeks and their culture. A classical revival affected education, painting, sculpture, the theatre and women's fashion. Architects began to design banks and even breweries in imitation of the Parthenon. Courthouses and state capitols acquired columned porticos and sculptured pediments. The architecture of our national Capitol at Washington also stems from ancient Attica.

All over the land, hundreds of towns-from Spartanburg, S. C., to Olympia, Wash. -adopted Greek names. The founders of a bustling city in Michigan proudly called it Ypsilanti after the Greek commander-in-chief. New college towns in Georgia, Alabama and Ohio were given the name of Athens. And, to this day, postmasters are hard put to decide where to send a letter addressed to Troy—no fewer than 31 American towns adopted that name.

A number of youngsters, orphaned in the Greco-Turkish struggle, were brought to America by returning volunteers. A half century later one of them, Lucas Miltiades Miller, was a distinguished member of the House of Representatives. Marshall Wilder of Boston brought over Alexander Pasptais, one of the few survivors of the massacre that devastated the isle of Chios. He put him through Amherst College, sent him to Europe to study medicine and lived to see him become a distinguished physician.

American missionaries sponsored Evangelinus Apostolides Sophocles who went to Amherst in the 1820's. He grew up to become Harvard's Professor of Ancient and Modern Greek and one of our greatest classical scholars, whose Greek Lexicon is a standard college text to this day.

Alden Partriuge, Headmaster of Vermont's Norwich Academy, provided for the education of George Calvocoresses, another Chios survivor. Later he helped the youngster obtain an appointment to Annapolis. Calvocoresses served with distinction in the Mexican and Civil Wars. His son, George Partridge Calvocoresses, entered the Navy, rose to the rank of rear admiral and served as Commandant of the Naval Academy.

But all through the 19^th century, while more than 20 million immigrants were streaming here from northern and western Europe, Greek immigration was only a trickle. A few scholars -professors of archeology, language and literature-and a handful of wine, olive oil, tobacco and silk importers made up most of our tiny Greek population.

Yet, 20 years later, nearly half a million young Greeks had crossed the Atlantic. This sudden exodus was brought about by a deep and devastating agricultural depression that gripped all Greece during the 1890's. Tens of thousands of peasants found their only hope in the dream of coming to America. Whole families—sometimes entire villages—pooled every drachma they could scrape together to buy steamship tickets for one or two young men, pledged to send passage money back, out of their first earnings, to help another make the ocean crossing. By 1909 one of every five Greek men of working age had left his homeland for America.

Unlike the German, Jewish and Scandinavian immigrants of that period, who came predominantly in family groups, Greek immigration in the early 1900's was 95 percent male. In loneliness they clubbed together, a dozen or 20 in a tiny tenement flat in New York, Philadelphia, Boston.

In Lowell, Mass., where Greeks sought jobs in the textile mills, earlier immigrants from Ireland and French Canada resented their competition and a number of pitched battles occurred around factory gates. Elsewhere, too, the Greeks found factory work hard to get and turned instead to shining shoes or selling fruit or flowers from push­carts. Unfamiliar with our laws and unable to understand the warnings of police, they were repeatedly arrested for violating the peddling statutes or the sanitary codes.

"We are strangers in a strange land," lamented one young Greek in 1900. "There is no work for us here except to push a cart in the dust and heat of the streets. We are shoved aside, disliked and looked upon as criminals."

But within a decade the Greeks had greatly improved their condition. The change came as the newcomers discovered that instead of working for wages they could do better on their own. Eleutherios Pilalas, for example, had worked as a candymaker in Smyrna.  Here he opened a tiny stand and introduced New Yorkers to strange confections like Turkish Delight. Soon he h a thriving little store and was compelled to hire help. But as quickly as each employee saved enough Y buy a few kettles, he would go into  business for himself. That meant more jobs for still other Greeks.

By the same process, Greeks got into other trades. As soon as the cooks and waiters at Greek coffee houses mastered English, they opened lunch stands and small restaurants of their own. Vegetable peddlers used the profits of their pushcarts to purchase horse-drawn wagons, and their earnings with the wagons to buy fruit-stand concessions in railway stations. The boy who bought a shoeshine kit in 1900 owned a shoe-repair and hat-cleaning shop by 1902, and the boys he employed opened similar stores by 1905.

As the Greeks started to go into business for themselves they dispersed all over the land, wherever they could find a likely town in which to open a restaurant, soda fountain fruit shop or similar business.  Thus they were freed from the slums sooner than many other immigrant stocks.  There are about 50,000 Greek-Americans in Chicago today but they live all over town.  New York has 70,000, but they only way to find them in mass is to wait for the  annual parade up Fifth Avenue on Greek Independence Day.

      Thus to Greeks soon lost the “clannishness”—in reality, shyness—for which they had been rebuked. They were proud to be invited to join service clubs and local Chambers of Commerce. Bankers quickly discovered that these hard-working businessmen were excellent credit risks. Social workers noted that Greeks almost never appeared on rent rolls or on police blotters. The old admiration for Greeks, shaken in the first few years of their mass immigration, was restored.

Greeks might have made even faster progress in the business world if a large part of their savings had not been committed, by age-old tradition, to providing dowries for sisters still in Greece. Only after he had fulfilled this obligation did a young man feel free to take a bride of his own. Some sent back for their child­hood sweethearts but many married American girls.

It had been the intention of many Greeks, when they first arrived, to stay here just long enough to payoff family debts and put aside sufficient funds to buy a small farm or fishing boat in the old country. Before World War I more than 100,000 did return to Greece. But most of these, after a few months, decided that they had in fact become Americans, and hastened back across the ocean. In World War I, though most Greeks here were still un-naturalized, 66,000 of them joined the colors, the highest proportion of any ethnic group to serve in our Armed Forces. By virtue of their military service those who applied received citizenship right away.

          In only one American city—the small Florida town of Tarpon Springs—have Greeks come near to forming a majority of the population. Some fishermen chiefly from the Dodecanese Islands settled there about 1905 and made the once sleepy village the bustling and picturesque sponge capital of the world. Today there are some 2000 Greek-Americans of the second and third generation among Tarpon Springs' 5500 people. Greeks still dominate the sponge-fishing industry. Their gaily decorated boats bear such names as Kalliopi, Uncle Sam, Socrates, and George W ashington.

          Thousands of tourists pour into Tarpon Springs every January 6 to witness the ancient ceremony of the blessing of the waters. Religious services begin at dawn at the Greek Orthodox Church. At noon, the Archbishop leads a vast procession down to the waterfront. There he reads the Gospel Story of the Bap­tism, first in Greek and then in English. Then a dove is released and the Archbishop tosses a gilded wooden cross into the water. A moment later a signal is given and as many as 50 young men leap from the sponge boats and dive after the sinking crucifix. The lucky lad who rescues it swims, amid ringing cheers, to the Archbishop, who blesses him and all the crews who follow the dangerous diving trade.

          In the hundreds of other towns where our Greek citizens live, the very idea that there could be a "Greek vote" has been repugnant to them. Years ago, in a small New England town, the first Greek-American to graduate from law school tried to form a "Greek Democratic Club." He called a meeting and all the Greeks in town attended in order to vote the idea down. A few years later another lawyer tried to form a "Greek Republican Club." Again, Democrats, independents and Republicans attended en masse just to express their disapproval.

But, proud as they are to be Americans, the Greeks among us are equally proud of their Hellenic origin. Thus, while they often shorten their family names, they are careful to retain their Greek flavor. A Gerasimopoulos may become a Poulos, but he disdains to become a Smith. Pappadimitracopoulos becomes Pappas rather than Johnson.

As the second generation has reached maturity, Greek-Americans have achieved increasing prominence in numerous fields, including sports. Greek names are prominent in big-league baseball, football, wrestling, college basketball and track. More than a hundred Greek-Americans hold professorial rank in our universities and colleges. The shy unassuming Dr. George N. Papanicolaou, Professor Emeritus of Clinical Anatomy at Cornell Medical School, developed the famed Papanicolaou smear test for vaginal cancer which has. saved the lives of thousands of women. The conductor of New York's Philharmonic Symphony, Dimitri Mitropoulous, was born in Athens.

Greek immigrants and sons of immigrants have been notably successful as movie-theater operators. The late Alexander Pantages put together the vast Pantages Circuit on the West Coast. The Skouras brothers, all three born in Greece, worked as busboys and waiters in St. Louis before they bought one of the early nickelodeons. By 1936 they were operating 37 houses in St. Louis and subsequently they created one of the largest theater chains in the country. Since 1942 Spyros Skouras has been president of 20th Century-Fox.

Any segment of our population, no matter how large, might be proud to have contributed as much to American life and culture as have the Greek-Americans. To have done so despite their small number, and in so short a time, is proof of the surpassing talent and energy of the Greeks among us.

(A link to a copy of the original article can be accessed here.)