Family honors Greek immigrant heritage
By BILL RODGERS Tribune ChronicleArticle Photos
WARREN - The St. Demetrios Church and the Greek community in Warren made the Gianakos family what they are today, they said.
Julie, Larry James and Patricia Gianakos - whose family history in Warren goes back to the opening of the St. Demetrios parish - reflected Tuesday on their family history. The legacy was built upon by immigrant steelworkers who pushed their children to succeed in their new country.
Warren's Greek heritage will be celebrated with the St. Demetrios Grecian Festival, which begins at 4 p.m. today at the community center on Atlantic Avenue N.E. and runs through Sunday. Julie and her late husband, Jimmie, worked with the St. Demetrios Grecian Festival since its beginning in 1969.
The Gianakos story began back before 1910, when Julie Mougianis Gianakos' father, Antonios, came to the United States from the island of Icaria. Antonios was poor, she said, and he followed rumors of American prosperity to Arizona, where he found work on a railroad.
But it was in Warren where Antonios eventually settled. He had a job in the tin mill at Republic Steel and to this day Julie remembers the boots he wore to work, which stretched up past his knees to protect his legs from the caustic chemicals that could burn through his skin if just a splash touched it.
Julie, Antonios and her mother Arhontoula still had very little money, but her father was able to keep his job straight through the Great Depression.
"When we were little, we were poor, but we didn't know we were poor," Julie said about the girls she grew up around in one of Warren's tightly-knit Greek neighborhoods. "We were happy. We played hopscotch, jacks. We walked everywhere."
Larry Gianakos, Julie's son who has written histories of the Demetrios parish and Warren's Greek community, said in his mother's day, Greeks lived near the mills where they worked. He said neighborhoods such as Pine Street were very close. In these neighborhoods where English was seldom spoken, the first-generation immigrants built their own grocery stores, bridal shops, restaurants and Greek newspapers.
Julie said when she was a girl, the outer community was not the most welcoming.
"At first the people didn't like Greeks... They called us 'dirty Greeks,''' she said.
That attitude began to change when she started going to high school with all of Warren's other children at Warren G. Harding, she said.
"Gosh, it was nice to mix with everyone in school,'' she said.
Larry said his mother was one of the first Greek girls to become honor students at the high school.
He said that many of the immigrant families pushed these achievements on their children, believing that education would give them a better life than that of their parents.
For Julie and her children, the guiding rule growing up was the Greek word "Arete," which means "honor."
Julie's husband, Jimmie Gianakos, had that same ideology. His family immigrated from the island of Chios, making Jimmie one of the first Greek youths in the county and one of the oldest members of Saint Demetrios up until his death last year.
At age 22, Jimmie, who was in the Army Corps of Engineers, was storming the beaches of Normandy. When daughter Patricia, now a doctor of psychology, was debating starting her career in social work, her father pulled out an old photo album with pictures from Buchenwald, a German concentration camp Jimmie helped liberate.
"He said, 'Look at what people can do to each other. You can dedicate your life to helping people, or you can be self-centered and live for the moment,'" Patricia said.
A 32-year career in social work followed that conversation, according to Larry.
Larry said his other sister, Irene, has a Ph.D. in psychology and is an associate professor of psychology at Kent State University Trumbull Campus, where she is known for her studies on date-rape, according to Larry.
As for Larry, he wrote an eight-volume reference series titled "Television Drama Series Programming: A Comprehensive Chronicle." He's also a collector of rare first-edition Pulitzer novels, presidential letters and one letter penned by Helen Keller. He hopes to sell the collection to start a foundation recognizing achievements in arts and philanthropy.
He credits the goal to his upbringing, which he believes is nearly inseparable from his heritage as a Greek in Warren.
"My own family is not atypical, as Greeks have stressed excellence from ancient times, and educational and cultural advancement from the time of their arrival to American soil...," he said.
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warrenguy
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07-23-08 11:10 PM
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Love hearing about the Greek history of this city. It is a shame that the greek festival does not reflect any greek history of the area, they don't even have a church tour or anything that reflects the great greek heritage of the area. What do carnival rides have to do with greek heritage? The food prices are outrageous. You can't take your family to dinner without a $100 bill; $2 for a soda, $14 for a dinner, and a dessert of doughnuts $6... for one person! Do the math. It is nice to see the kids dance and the music is outstanding. But that is it. We go to a dozen different greek festivals in three diffrent states every year. This "festival" offers the least greek heritage and has the highest prices. I don't understand how all the other festivals can offer so much for such reasonable prices yet in Warren everything is so expensive! They should be honest and just call it what it is... a food carnival.
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