What I Remember (1) Parents, Childhood

George's parents on their wedding day.

WHAT I
REMEMBER

Transcript of George Soter’s Recorded Memories
As Told to Tom Soter (1996), including 1949 memoirs written by GS

Parents and Family
I don’t know how my parents met. It was probably through an arrangement. They were introduced by somebody in Chicago. My father had been here from the early 1900s. He had been restaurant-cook at various places and had his own restaurant at various times at which he was the cook. That was his specialty.

For a while, he worked in it and he had one or two restaurants, a couple of them, not simultaneously but sequentially. And I don’t remember very, very much about him. All I know is what people have told me. Apparently, he was a very well-liked person who was very benign and kindly. My cousins and people who knew him liked him a lot; they always spoke positively of him.

But for me he was a shadowy figure that I don’t remember much about. I’ll tell you some of the things I remember. My mother who was the oldest of three daughters in Vresthena in Greece, was sent here first of all to check on her brother, George, who had come some years before her and gotten married here. He was the oldest sibling in the family. That was the ostensible reason for her coming. She came some time in 1919 or 1920. The hidden agenda was to get her married, because they had three unmarried daughters in the village and they didn’t have a lot of money. At that time, girls in Greece, to get married had to have significant doweries, whether in property of money.

So, she came to Chicago and went to live with the Tremulises. Her brother, George, was there. And [among] the Tremulises was her third cousin, Andonia, who was from the same village. She took her in and she went to live there, for a year or so, until she met or was introduced to, or offered to my father as a potential bride. 

George's father.

At that time that was the common thing, relatives and friends took an interest in trying to get an eligible bachelor and an eligible maiden together. They didn’t have social events and romantic trysts, and things like that. They met and if they found themselves agreeable, they would agree to get married.

When she came and lived in Chicago, the Tremulises were fairly well off – he was a doctor, and they were very Americanized because Andonia Tremulis had come her from Greece when she was about six. She spoke English perfectly and slangily. And the couple were sort of 1920s jazz age people. They had parties and drank and did things like that.When my mother arrived, they also had two children, Alex and Elliei. Alex was the one who subsequently became the designer of the Tucker automobile, and his name appears in the movie, Tucker when Tucker hires a designer and he says, “My name is Alex Tremulis,” and he designs the car.

And then Ellie was my favorite cousin. When my mother arrived, she must have been 10 or 11. But because at that point my mother didn’t speak any English, for the next 50 years, whenever Ellie addressed my mother, it was always in Greek, even though her Greek was somewhat halting. She just had this thing where she just naturally spoke to her in Greek.

At any rate, she and my father got married. I don’t remember the first four years of my life very well. I don’t remember where we lived or what we did. But at age four, my memories start to come back. My mother decided to take a trip back to Greece to show me off and to see her mother and father and sisters and brothers. She had been gone maybe a decade or less than a decade. And at that point in the twenties, this was in the late twenties when we went back – it must have been in ‘28 – people didn’t fly back and forth to Europe, it was a very considered decision and it took time.

She spent a year. The trip over lasted almost a month, and when you’re there everything moved at a much slower pace. To get to the village would take a day or a day and a half, Vresthina from Athens. That’s where her mother and father still lived, and her sister, Iphigenia, had moved to Athens and was either getting married or had married, and her sister, Koula, was living in Sparta. No, she was still in Vresthina; she wasn’t married yet.

I have fairly clear memories from that year in Greece. When we went to Vresthina for the first time as an adult in ‘62, I hadn’t been there since I was four, but I remembered things. I remembered where my grandfather’s house was and also the town square. It was all very familiar to me, even though I hadn’t seen it for thirty-some years.

When I went there in ‘62, there weren’t too my people left that remembered me from my childhood. There were people who had met me in Athens, or who knew about me. There were no living memories. There were a few people, like the woman who had been my age and we had played together in the village. She now lived in Athens, but she remembered me distinctly, Leila. She died recently.

George, with Effie, Tom, and Nick, returns to his father's village, 1962.

Yesterday, I thought, ‘I know more dead people than I do living people.’ It’s amazing. Every time I think of somebody, they’re dead.

I’ll tell you a few of the things I remember from Greece. Some of them are my memories, and some of them are enhanced memories from having heard people talk about it through all my life.

I remember very clearly Iphigenia, my aunt, giving birth to Elias, my cousin. I wasn’t in the room, but it was happening in the house. There were these horrendous screams. It was frightening. That happened when we were there. So that makes Elias exactly four years younger than me. I was there when he was born.

At that time, they had sort of a nice little house that you could see the Acropolis from, it was in that part of town. This was in the twenties when Elias’s father supposedly, he had come from America and he spoke somewhat broken English, he had lived in America and came back to look for a bride, and the family thing was that he had fooled my grandfather into thinking that he had a fortune. But actually he had no money at all. For most of their life, Costa supported Iphigenia and Elias, and the father did some dopey work — he ran a coffee house – and was a slightly stupid man.

It wasn’t a scandal; it was a disappointment. Iphigenia was very clever, witty, and smart and here was this lump of a person who didn’t even have the money that made her agree to marry him. So it was not a very happy marriage and all her life she was unhappy about that. And it was a problem for Elias, too, because he was loyal to his father but he did recognize that there was a wild mismatch.

I remember things in the village. I don’t remember this distinctly, but I have inklings of it, and I was told it a lot – I remember, little boys used to wear on top of their clothes a kind of apron, with a pocket in front that they put things in. And one day I went out in the hills and collected a lot of goat turds that looked like little chocolate-covered almonds. I sort of knew what they were, but I went home and said, “Look, I found chocolate,” and scared the shit out of everybody because they thought I’d eaten some. I think I was just doing a kind of trick, knowing what they were and thinking, “What’ll happen if I tell them this?” Everybody got very upset.

I remember my grandfather very well. I was the first grandchild in the family, so he had been the mayor of the town and was a distinguished old gentleman, but he would bring a lacoome – a candy square that’s covered with powdered sugar and all jelly inside – every day and put it under my pillow before I woke up, so when I woke up the first thing I would see would be this lacoome. It was nice to wake up and get this piece of candy.

George, 3 months old, and Emily, his mother.

I don’t remember my grandmother too well, although everybody talks of her as a very nice woman. It seems that the female side of a lot of these relationships was more active than the male side. Everybody speaks highly of her and they don't speak too much of my grandfather. He was a little authoritarian.

The other thing, the house always had a lot of people in it because he was the mayor, he would always have visitors from Athens and Sparta. It was like an open house. There were always guests there.

One thing that happened that impressed me was a terrible tragedy that happened while we were in the village. Cupping is used in France and the Mideast. It’s when somebody has a bad chest cold, they lie him of his stomach or his chest. What they do is they wrap a cloth around a coin and make a wick with the cloth sticking up. They light it and they put a glass over this thing. The flame eats up the oxygen and causes the skin to rise momentarily. You pull it off and it makes a “pffft” sound. You do this repeatedly all over. In France, and maybe in Greece, too, they make an incision and also pull up blood. It’s like leeching. It was a common folk remedy; bleeding someone in order to get rid of a disease – taking some of the bad blood out.

There were two visitors from Boston: a woman who was a cousin of my mother's wand her child, about my age. The child got a bad cold. And they decided that they would cup him. You do this all over the back, repeatedly, you make three or four wicks and light them and put cups on it, and let it sits there until the skin rises and makes a little mound within the cup and you pull it off and it goes plop. It’s like a kind of massage, too, except it isn’t hands-on. These women, somewhat ridiculously, first bathed this boy in alcohol. And then they put these things on and one of them fell over and the poor boy burst into flames. But instead of throwing a blanket on him, they tossed him back and forth between them, only increasing the fire. The child died and this woman was completely burned from her shoulders down to her hand.

George, with son, Nick, and cousin, in Vresthina, 2006.

I remember the drama of this in the village and seeing her days later and all her arms bandaged up to her shoulders and dressed in black and always crying. I didn’t see the actual incident; I just heard people talking about it. It was the big event for a long time. For the rest of her life, this was the key incident of her existence – that she had foolishly caused the death of her child. She went back to Boston; I saw her in later life when I was a soldier. Her name was Antigone, of all things.

So we spent the year in Greece. We spent a good three or four months in Vresthina. We also took a trip to my father’s village in Methoni. And Costas, my uncle, came with my mother, my aunt, Iphigenia, and me. We went to see my father’s sisters. The only thing I actually remember from that trip is that Costas was lobbing stones into the sea below that Methoni castle. And somehow, a piece of stone or something flew backwards and hit me just below my left eye. It bled profusely. If you ever look sometime, you’ll see a little scar there. That caused everybody to get pretty hysterical because that’s all we needed was to have me lose an eye. This story is full of blood and guts, isn’t it?

The other thing, comparing Greece then and now, one of the big conversations that everybody had, if you had to go from Athens to Sparta or Vresthina and you would go by car, you would either rent a taxi or car. But the big conversation then, it was still in the twenties, was still kleftas, meaning brigands. They were sort of like road pirates who would assail you and take your luggage. That was one of the big things. Whenever a trip was taken, it had to be before it got dark before the kleftas would get you, and you’d usually travel with two cars because there was still highway brigands. It wasn’t even highways. It was roads at that point. But that was one of the elements of that period. It still wasn’t very civilized.

All through her life, my mother had sickl spells. And most of the voyage across and over, she spent in bed. That meant I was on the boat, kind of on my own, wandering around, and people would take care of me and take me to dinner because my mother suffered from seasickness.

My father had to stay back and work. That was the pattern back in those days. I don’t know about the money arrangements. Probably she was taken care of by her family when she was there. She must have had money. It wasn’t a factor. Her expenses were minimal; she was always living at home, and people would take her out to eat, so she wouldn’t have to spend money. It was a big thing for her to be back in Greece. She hadn’t seen her mother and father and brothers in ten years and she was coming from America. It was in ‘28 to ‘29 and ‘29 was the Depression. My father died when I was nine.

Childhood: George, one year old, and Emily, his mother.

Before going to Greece, I don’t remember what our house was like, or where we lived. It was on the north side of Chicago, northwest side someplace. I have no memories of the house unless it’s entwined with my memories of the house when we came back. My sense is that probably, when people went away like that for a year, which my mother did, they may have given up the house and put everything in storage, and got a new apartment. I remember some things when we came back. I remember something about the apartment we had and going to school. I remember clearly that when we came back from Greece, I couldn’t speak English. At that age, you forget. I was very shy about that.

In this apartment that we had, there was this big plant in the living room, and I used to go pee in it. I guess maybe I was used to peeing on trees and things from Greece, so it seemed to me that it was a normal thing to do. The plant held up pretty well. Then I was discovered once and told not to do it.

My father had a restaurant. The restaurant was called The Sip and Bite. The way they pronounced it was like a Greek word, “Sippandbite.” It was just like one word and it had a Greek article, “To Sippandbite.” It was like Tom’s, a regular American coffee shop/restaurant. What I remember about that place was there was a back door leading to a kind of alley/yard and there were other kids there and I would steal potatoes from the kitchen, whole potatoes, and give them to them to take home. Until I was discovered. I was very nefarious.

One thing I remember about going to school in winter was – and this memory keeps coming back to me – that there would be heavy snowstorms and the snow would be shoveled off to the side, so between the sidewalk and the street there were these hills of snow that it was fun to walk on. They would go up and down and all the kids would walk on them. And they were hilly paths to school. That was great fun. In my memory, it seemed like it was always winter and there was always this little Alpine climb to go to school. But it wasn’t really very Alpine; it was like a foot or so high. I

I remember once my father took me to the first movie I ever went to, a Charlie Chaplin movie. He enjoyed it a lot. He sort of enjoyed watching my reaction. And I enjoyed it. I remember about the same time my mother took me to see a movie called The Sign of the Cross. It was in downtown Chicago, because we went to a big theater. I was eight. That’s where they kill Christians in the arena. Frederic March and Elissa Landi were the hero and heroine, I think. At any rate, I got very excited during the scenes where Christians are fed to the the lions, and at one point I jumped up and ran down the aisles screaming, “Murderers!” I was very taken by it. I think I used a Greek word, “Kakouri! Kakouri!” which I had heard often enough; it means “villains.”

I don’t remember much until after my father died. He was in the hospital. I was taken to the hospital a couple of times to see him. I remember they had thought he had gall stones. I remember a letter I had written to my Aunt Edith in Detroit. I had written that my father had “goldstones” – and that seemed to me paradoxical that something that sounded so good, goldstones, should be serious.

He died suddenly. They had not diagnosed what he had had. He had a rare disease. In later life, I’ve learned from other doctors who know about it, that it seems like it was some kind of intestinal parasite that you get from eating greens that dogs have pissed on. It’s common among Mediterranean people, more than it is in America. He was in the hospital, and my mother was worried about it, and I went to the hospital a couple of times, but I was not very interested. In fact, when my father died – I think he must have died on a Sunday – I looked forward to reading the Sunday comics. But there were a lot of people in the house and a lot of commotion and wailing and so forth, and the thing that most annoyed me was that I couldn’t see the comics. There was also a lot of mourning things. You couldn’t listen to music, or laugh, you always had to be in a somber mood. I still remember that frustration, “God, I’m not going to see the comics today.” It’s still a thing I have, some pattern, like when I can’t do the crossword puzzle.

I did not have a close relationship with my father. He was gone most of the time. He worked. I didn’t see much of him. I really didn’t have a close relationship with anybody at that point. My cousin, Dick, was the closest friend I had. There were neighbors next door that I used to play with. An Italian family. There were a lot of little kids. But I don’t remember too much about that. I don’t remember much about early school, either.

Then my life changed. We lived in a fairly largish apartment. And we moved to a small one, because my father died, and there wasn’t much money. It was the Depression. I was nine in 1933. The Depression was beginning to end. The man who my mother married had been a family friend, a friend of my parents, Theophoulis. He was always around at parties and dinners and things. I think that he and my Uncle George both contributed to the support of my mother. I’m not aware of that exactly, but I think that’s what happened. Because five years later Theophoulis and my mother got married.

In the meanwhile, we had lived in this small apartment for a year or so. Then we moved to Detroit to live with my Uncle George. It was fairly traditional that if you were the older brother and you have a widowed sister and she had no means, you would take her in. The rest of my childhood was in Detroit and that was different from living in Chicago. First of all, we lived in a two-family house, in a more suburban-like neighborhood, rather than in an apartment in the city.

Young George.

Could I Please Blot Your Escutcheon? (1949 memoir)
When I stop to consider what I was like as a child I shudder to think of what my children are going to be if the old adage, "Like father, like son," holds true. Not that I was venomous or ferocious – just a little too energetic. When I was about seven years old my family and I had quite a difficult time contending with "tryouts" of the professions that I might some day honor with my name. My professional choices bad been narrowed down to the point where I had but two left – both appealing, both equally preposterous. These two choices were: (a) being a gangster or (b) being a doctor.

The incident which changed my mind about being a gangster occurred soon after my parents had set me loose on the world to wreak havoc in the external regions. I bad exhausted all the havoc-wreaking possibilities of our little four-room apartment. With my usual finesse and savoir faire I immediately selected as my bosom friend and confident the most disreputable, ferocious, and moronic little individual in the neighborhood. We were still living in the era of gangdom glory and gory, and my little Mephistophelean companion had somehow got the notion into his horned head that destiny had written his name as the one which was to succeed Capone's. So off we set: he, the leader, and I, the mob (also alternating for the moll, which we pronounced mole and without which we considered any gang a dismal failure).

Our first job was to be making the janitor of the apartment building in which we lived pay us protection money a la the example set by George Raft and Edward G. Robinson. If he refused to pay, we would threaten to throw a bomb at his building or at least break a window. The first hitch in the proceedings came when we tried to decide how we would explain to the janitor that we wanted protection money; however, I hit upon the happy idea of breaking a window first and asking for payment later. My partner, Butch (or maybe we had decided to call him Slug, and I was Butch), amended the idea so that the final plan was to be carried out thus: Butch would wait around the corner, on the lookout for "cops." If any came, the signal would be "Cheese it, the cops!" In the meantime I would saunter rapidly around the building, loaded down with enough rock to build a house, and quietly proceed to break every other window in the basement of the building. After the third window, I somehow lost all taste for the undertaking, and more so when I noticed that my boss and, incidentally, look-out had "double-crossed" me and disappeared. The distaste turned to absolute revulsion when I felt the long arm of the law or, at most, the short arm of the janitor clasping my pink neck.

My mother, an exceedingly patient woman, after doling out the necessary money to cover the damages, took me to one side and tried to show me the error of my ways, the inadvisability of my following the path of degradation that would bring shame and a heavy blot on our family's escutcheon. My mother, however, was not entirely the ten-volumes-on-child-psychology type; therefore, she warned me, "You'll go unpunished this time, but if this ever occurs again...," and the tone of her voice and the glint in her eyes told me strongly enough the hell that would await me were I to forget her admonition.

But her warnings were the warnings of a Cassandra, and sadly enough, it happened again, only this time with much more vehemence. Upon finding me "sprung from the pen," Butch convinced me that we had to carry out our plans to their completion, only now we would have to break a few windows in the upper stories as retribution for my public disgrace. The idea appealed to my young and innocent mind to such a degree that I completely forgot to question Butch on the particulars of his invisibility act, or why he said “we” when it was invariably was "I." Onward I went, carried forward by my lofty ambition and retarded somewhat by my weighty rocks. This time, I was no longer the inexperienced novice; I lost not the taste for my work until it was masterfully completed; and I felt somewhat like a Saracen-captured crusader when the janitor led me for a second time before my poor, astonished mother whose astonishment soon turned into a terrific anger. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, and I was in a position to offer valid testimony. That night I slept on an empty stomach with a tear-stained face; and I reached the conclusion that being a gangster was definitely inadvisable for anyone, unless he did not have a mother.

Hollywood gangsters Edward G. Robinson (left) and James Cagney.

I decided that if I could not be a successful gangster and/or a gangster’s “mole,” the next best thing would be to become a successful doctor. To this end, I convinced one of my cousins, who was not Butch’s equal in rugged individualism, that the wisest thing would be for him to become a doctor, too. Together we planned the most expedient plan of procedure. First, we had to be interns and, consequently, we disgraced the medical profession ant number of times by committing harmless atrocities to stray cats and dogs in its name. We tied the bewildered animals down fast to little cots improvised from discarded orange crates; we tried to force medicine (water) and pills (candy) down the “patients’” throats; and, failing, we ate the candy and gave the “naughty patients” baptisms of “medicine.”

After a while, even these diverse activities began to prove boring to us because, while you can tie a cat’s arm up in a sling, you can not very well develop a bedside manner with something that will not talk to you and tried to escape the moment your back is turned. Eventually, we got around to the idea (as what child has not?) of taking turns playing doctor and patient. For part of the time my cousin would seriously study my nude form, and then I would take my turn, asking for "ahs" and poking a pencil into his ribs. Having become reasonably well acquainted with each other’s bodies we began to feel dissatisfied because of the narrowness of our field of research axed and because we both wanted to be doctor all the time.

The answer to our prayers came with the visitation to our home one afternoon of an acquaintance of my mother’s who had brought her little daughter along "to play with the boys.” The little daughter was very evidently in dire need of medical aid, a fact which we hastily conveyed to her to her, also explaining that it would not hurt in the least, and that if she did not accept our very kind offer of free medical treatment something terrible like poisoning or death was bound to overtake her since we both had had much experience and could tell a bad case when we saw one. The little wide-eyed creature did not stop to question why, hers was but to do or die...or be poisoned.

As I think over it now, I cannot help but feel that the experience of all three of us with hospitals and doctors must have been exceedingly limited. Somehow we had the mistaken notion that nurses, doctors, and patients went around performing these respective duties completely nude. The little girl at first seemed to be in a trance, mystified by the eeriness of our physiology, but after she got the idea of how one plays doctor she was very enthusiastic about the whole affair. First, I would be the doctor; my cousin, the patient; and our little feminine playmate, a naked Florence Nightingale; then we would rotate, everyone taking a different role.

Our idyllic venture into the medicinal was put to an end rather abruptly by the angel of mercy's mother, who came into the bedroom to find three pairs of bare feet protruding from beneath the bed. (I forgot to mention that with the mistaken notion of nudity we also had the misconception that all hospital business was transacted in the shadowy regions beneath the bed). The horror-stricken mother quickly put an end to what she considered a Bacchanalian orgy by first wrapping her poor, misguided daughter in a suitably modest drapery and then indignantly summoning my mother to mete out due punishment to the two culprits who stood there terrified and shivering in all their naked glory. My mother, realizing what had happened, was struck by the ludicrousness of the situation and burst out laughing. This was adding insult to injury and was a little too much for Mrs. Nightingale, who, grabbing little Florence by the arm, managed to shout back, "They're boys, but she's a girl; what if the world finds out?"

Although my parents succeeded in transplanting my strange professional obsessions with safer ones, to this day I cannot help but feel pangs of frustration and remorse whenever a flash over the radio announces some data concerning some notorious gangster; or whenever a doctor calmly takes my temperature...dressed. I always sigh and inwardly whisper, "There but for the grace of an escutcheon go I." Still, who knows? Maybe I may yet be allowed to follow my true calling....

Could I blot your escutcheon for you, cheap?

George.

Skiing in Chicago (1996 interview)

Let me go back to Chicago. I had a fairly close relationship with my cousin, Dick. We would play a lot and go to movies, and things like that. We must have moved from Chicago to Detroit in ‘35 or so. Because while we were still in this small apartment, Theophoulis had opened a restaurant near where we were. And this happened at the end of Prohibition. He had the restaurant. I remember clearly how excited everybody was that they would be able to sell beer. And, in fact, I remember him preparing notices to go to all the neighborhood that beer was available. That was a big deal for restaurant people. It would be their salvation.

I also remember near the restaurant that Theofoulis had two things. First of all, there was a movie theater, and during the Depression, they’d stage all kind of schemes to try and promote business. On Saturdays, for instance, they’d have raffles. I remember I was nine or so and I won a pair of skis.I was a nine-year-old kid and I had skis, and I carried them all over. And nobody quite knew what skis were. We put them under my mother’s bed. They stuck out a little bit from under the bed; they were length-wise under the bed but the front stuck out. So you always had to walk over them.

But here's the way we used them, my cousin, Dick, would come over and we’d pull them out and one of us would strap himself into the skis. Then the other one would slowly raise the two front ends of the skis as high as he could get them, and then drop them. We’d take turns doing that. We’d get into the skis, raise them as high as we could, and drop them. It was ridiculous. We were ingenious, I guess, trying to use those skis. I don’t know what happened to them, because we weren’t in a class that would go skiing. But it was always a funny thing that I won these completely useless skis. Nobody in the lower middle-class went skiing. Hell. You hardly knew what it was. What the hell was this? I was proud I had won them.

The other thing I remember, too, from around that time, or maybe it was earlier, was going to my cousin Dick’s house. I liked spending time there because he had an older sister and his mother was very, very lenient, very permissive. They had some heavy furniture in the living room; they had a nice apartment then. I remember the furniture very clearly; there were leather-covered chairs. They had heavy wooden arms, cut with lion’s faces and the feet cut with lion’s paws. We used to take all these chairs – there were like two or three chairs and a sofa – and turn them upside down and throw sheets over the whole thing and make a fort that we would climb in and out of it. It was great fun because it was a terrible mess. My mother was much less permissive about things like that.

So we got to Detroit where my Uncle George was a china salesman to restaurants; he'd sell them china supply, pots and pans and glasses and dishes and silverware. He represented a number of manufacturers, and naturally he had all the Greek clients, and some others. But it wasn’t only in Detroit, it was all over the state of Michigan, and he was very gregarious and a well-liked person. Everyone’s face would light up when he’d arrive. He’d be very friendly and knew everybody’s names and even their children’s names. So a couple of times a year, he’d go on a sales trip throughout the whole state of Michigan. He had a car and, probably in the summer, he took me along for company or as a way to be paternal. I was ten or eleven. He had his whole routine. He would drive to this town and that town. He knew everyone. Saganow, Bay City, Lansing, Trevor City, Pataski. And in each one, there was a Greek restaurant. When he would arrive in all these small towns, he would go to the owners and their wives, and their families. It was sort of an event because here was the man from the big city.

He would go over with them what they needed, if anything, and he always have a half-a-cup of coffee. And if the waiter or waitress brought a full cup, he’d get a little piqued and say, “Bring me an empty cup.” And he’d empty half of it into the empty cup. Because he only just wanted a half-a-cup. At any rate, he made an obsession out of that half-a-cup. I don’t know why he went through that. I guess he didn’t want to drink a lot of coffee. He was going into all these restaurants every day.

In fact, just a couple of years ago, here in New Jersey, when we visited Thelma Adams, a friend of Effie’s from when she lived in Worchester, she had invited another couple that she didn’t know too well that had just moved there. And it turns out that this couple, the man’s mother was from Putaski, Michigan, where she remembered my going there with my Uncle George.

At some point, during that time, I also had severe attacks of hay fever. When I was about ten or eleven. The summers would be difficult. Northern Michigan was known as an allergy-free place. It had that reputation. People would go there for hay fever. For a couple of summers, my Uncle George knew some very nice people in Travers City, Michigan, which is far north near the upper peninsula, who had a fairly successful big restaurant there, the best restaurant in town. He arranged for them to find us a room and we went and spent a month there in the hay fever season. This was a couple of years in a row.

I got quite fat because the restaurant had a soda fountain, too. I was always eating chocolate ice cream and malted milk with whipped cream. You didn’t pay for it and they were always serving this stuff. Of course, I had a sweet tooth, so I liked it all. I remember one year coming back from there and my uncle George’s wife, Edith, was shocked, because I was suddenly this fat kid.

The restaurant was owned by this guy named Pete Pitzakis, who was sort of like Americanized. He didn’t speak broken English, or with an accent. He had come over as a young, young man. He was a little bit like a Spencer Tracy type, sort of stoic, and everybody liked him a lot. He wasn’t a bullshitter. He had a very nice wife, and two adopted children. He was kind of a nobleman in the whole Michigan northern Greek community, Everybody knew Pete Pitzakis and thought very highly of him.

One year, we may have gone there three years, he opened on the lakefront a big dance hall and restaurant. It was called Otaka Beach. I guess that’s some kind of Indian name. They would have live orchestras and people dancing, and that became a full-time activity for Pete Pitzakis. He and his teenage son would go over there and take care of things. I would hang around there a lot. I became conscious at that time that guys and girls were doing things because they would leave the dance floor and go out on the beach, and everybody was aware that something was going on. I was about 11 or 12. I think that you had to pay for each dance. You got dance tickets; your number came on and you had to give your number and dance. It wasn’t just sitting at a place drinking. The dancing was paid for. It was a big, open space, right against the water.