Dear Grandma,

My mother, your daughter Artemis, told me that both you and Grandpa came from Astros, but that you first met each other in San Francisco.

In 1871, in the Platanos village of Thirea Municipality, where Astros was then located, the electoral list has one “Kyriakos Pagonis, son of Ioannis, aged twenty-four, shepherd.” I like to think of my grandfather’s grandfather as “Johnny Peacock, the Shepherd.”

Kyriakos married Panagiota Tsengos who later gave birth to George in 1884 and, possibly later, another son named Panagiotis.

Grandpa came to the United States on the SS La Lorraine, owned by Compagnie Générale Transatlantique. Its home port was Le Havre, France. Others who traveled similarly on this ship were transported by train from their homes to the port of Le Havre, where they were examined by company doctors, given an antiseptic bath and short haircut, and were vaccinated and quarantined several days before being allowed on board.

The Atlantic crossing took around nine days. Grandpa was probably booked into the less expensive steerage class, in the lowest decks along with the ships steering controls and engines. The sleeping bunks were typically stacked two high and two side by side, hundreds in a compartment.

After docking in Hoboken, New Jersey, steerage passengers were transferred to a crowded ferryboat, which carried them to Ellis Island. Ellis processed thousands of immigrants each day, with medical inspections and then interviews. They were asked if they had money and a job.

George Kyriakos Pagonis arrived at Ellis Island on June 24, 1905. He was twenty-one years old, a confectioner intending to travel to the home of his brother-in-law, “A. Protopapa (sic), 358 Milwaukee Ave., Chicago.” This was Antonios Protopapas, the husband of his sister Efthalia, or Ethel. They had married in Greece, had three children there, then moved with them to the United States one month before George arrived.

By or before 1910, the Protopapas family and George Pagonis had moved to San Francisco. That year’s census shows George living in a San Francisco boarding house. In San Francisco, Ethel gave birth to three more children.

This is where you come into the picture, Grandma, or at least the only picture of you I can conjure with the few facts I have.

If you didn’t meet your future husband in Astros, you certainly met him by late 1910 or very early 1911, because Uncle Harry was born on November 17, 1911. I can find no record of your arrival to anywhere in the United States, nor a record of your marriage to George Pagonis.

Did you meet in Chicago and keep in contact with each other until he may have invited you to San Francisco? Did you arrive in North America via Canada, then migrate to Chicago? Why did Uncle Harry tell me to “let sleeping dogs lie?”

Was there something illegal or shameful in your circumstances? I am prepared to accept, without judgment, any information regarding your birth, your emigration to the United States, and the manner in which you connected with George Pagonis. Without your liaison with my grandfather, I would not be writing these words, trying to imagine you with all my strength. Nor would there have been the four, loving people in my life whom you and Grandpa produced, leaving aside the yearning I have often felt for knowledge about my unknown aunt “Florence.”

Then came some wonderful years, as I imagine, notwithstanding you were pregnant or nursing, and caring for infants and children and the household, continuously. By March 28, 1918, there were three more children in the family: Beatrice, Angelina, and my mother Artemis, newly born on this date. Grandpa must have been successful as a confectioner in San Francisco because he was able to move the family, later in 1918, from Church Street in San Francisco eighty-five miles east to Stockton where he managed his own confectionery. I wonder if his brother-in-law, Anton Post, as he now called himself, was a financial partner in this business. I suspect so.

When George registered for the military draft in 1918, you and he were living on Church Street in San Francisco; he was a candy maker at the Athens Confectionery. However, in 1918 George Pagonis is listed in a directory as a confectioner at 11 N. Sutter, Stockton, with his residence at 919 S. Hunter. In 1919, George Pagonis is still listed in the Stockton newspaper business section under “Confectionery and Fruits” at 11 N. Sutter but shown to have his residence at 943 Channel in Stockton. The 1920 census shows George as a candy store manager in San Francisco with wife Helen and children Harry, Beatrice, Angelina, and Artemis.

This may be the period during which the candy store in Stockton burned down, according to unwritten family history, resulting in unplanned and unwanted movements between Stockton and San Francisco. Family legend has it that Grandpa gave money for fire insurance payments to a friend or relative who failed to forward it to the insurance company, and all was lost.

In 1921 George was shown to be “boarding at 233 S Sutter” in Stockton, but it seems that later in this year the family moved to be with George because “Froscine” was born, November 16, 1921, at San Joaquin General Hospital in French Camp, the County Hospital for Stockton, the county seat. The newborn Froscine was welcomed into the bosom of her family in an unknown residence in Stockton.

But you were ill with tuberculosis. You were readmitted to the hospital three months later, February 22, 1922. According to my cousin Anna, one of Uncle Harry’s two daughters, Harry said you were in the hospital because you had been in a car accident, and that Harry was with you when it happened. Whatever happened, you died six weeks later of “tuberculosis of the lung.”

How frantic it must have been for your children and husband during this time. Aunt Bee, at age nine, had become the substitute mother for her younger sisters at or before the car accident, or whatever took you to the hospital. I don’t know if you were alive when the decision was made to offer Froscine for adoption but, if you were, I feel the horror of it could not have but hastened your demise. Many years later, Aunt Angie told me that “the doctor adopted” Froscine. Perhaps this is what was told to the children to mask a less pleasant event. Only you know the truth, dear Grandma.

Just three lines in an official record of ninety-five years ago give scant evidence of the misery and pain of three motherless children for twenty-three months, having been separated by the authorities from their widowed father and older brother.

The most vivid memory I have of what was told to me about the experience is that Aunt Angie suffered ignominy and torture from her being sometimes unable to control her bladder. She was put into a closet where there were, or were imagined to be, rats and other vermin; and, she was beaten with a stick, as were other “misbehaving” children. As a result, she suffered kidney and other health problems all her life.

The girls were eligible for placement in a foster home, but they refused to be separated and it was unlikely anyone would take all three together. But then… an angel appeared.

—

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Next: Recovery, Growth, and Transition

Dear Grandma,

Until everyone began living at Arguello Boulevard in 1941, we moved around in San Francisco, separately and together, for four years. Sometimes Aunt Bee would live with Mom and Dad, especially when Mom was pregnant with me and shortly after my birth. Aunt Angie was boarded at least part of the time for around three years at Mount Zion Hospital in San Francisco, where she was in training to be a registered nurse. I think Grandpa and Uncle Harry always lived together, but I don’t know where.

At around age one or two, I contracted pertussis, the whooping cough, so Mom and Dad moved us away from the family to an unincorporated area slightly south of San Francisco named Brisbane, on the eastern slopes of San Bruno Mountain facing San Francisco Bay. The three of us stayed there for a year until I was no longer coughing. I had my first pet there–Brownie, a mostly dachshund dog.

The 1940 census showed “Constantine H. Pavellas (25), Chattanooga St., SF, printer, wife Artemis (22), son Ronald (3), and wife’s siblings: Harry G. (28), sheet metal worker, and Beatrice (26), waitress in sandwich shop.” “Harry G.” was Uncle Harry, with his father’s given name as his own middle name. I don’t know why Grandpa wasn’t present for the census. Later in 1940, all the Pagonises and Pavellases came to live together at 433 Arguello Boulevard, in the upper flat of two, in a Victorian house, still standing.

I enjoyed the love and companionship of all the adults in the household, when they were not working or looking for work, or going to school like Aunt Angie. Mom stayed home with me.

Uncle Harry had duties with the US Army and had a bed in the corner of the family room for when he was home.

Aunts Angie and Bee shared a bedroom, as did Mom, Dad, and I. Perhaps it was the same room with a partition.

Aunt Bee worked as a waitress. She sometimes came home crying because the men would try to “take liberties” with her.

Grandpa had his own, small room. He worked in a Greek restaurant and came home at any time in the early morning hours after his card games. Although Grandpa spoke mostly Greek and poor English, all the others spoke perfect West Coast American English. Aunt Bee and Dad were the acknowledged experts in the English language, although Uncle Harry would put his two cents worth in occasionally. He was, generally, a quiet person.

I loved it when Uncle Harry would sometimes greet me as he came home. He threw me up in the air and asked if I’d been a “stick-in-the mud” for reasons that escaped me, but I liked it. He also would tell me to finish my morning oatmeal because “it sticks to your ribs.” He seemed stronger than Dad, who didn’t throw me up in the air or wrestle with me like Uncle Harry did.

The family often gathered in the living room to listen to the radio. I delighted in crawling into anyone’s arms as we listened to “Inner Sanctum Mysteries” which had a spooky creaking door as its signature sign-on and sign-off.

I had no playmates my age, but I did have an imaginary playmate: Jik.

Uncle Harry, Aunt Angie and Mom were left-handed. The little finger on Harry’s left hand had no cartilage at the middle knuckle. He sometimes entertained me by bending this finger around in ways no one else could. He had smashed his hand against the wall of a handball court when he was lived with Grandpa in Portland. Uncle Harry was “a champion handball player” until he smashed his hand. He then took up the violin. He sometimes would play it, but it sounded awful.

Aunt Bee played the accordion, and I loved it. Dad hated it and would get in a terrible temper when Bee played it too much for him to bear. He once threw dishes against the wall in anger and frustration, having learned this behavior from his mother, according to Mom.

Aunt Angie played her phonograph records, which everyone liked. She had Bing Crosby, the Andrews Sisters, the Ink Spots, Rudy Vallee and other singers and bands. It was thrilling to Mom and her sisters that the three Andrews Sisters had Greek ancestry.  They tried to sing in harmony with each other to emulate the trio, but it didn’t quite work, it seemed to me.

Aunt Angie also had Tchaikovsky and Chopin. Tchaikovsky sometimes made me feel sad, but in a way that I liked. Chopin gave me yearning feelings, except when Angie played his polonaises which made me march through the rooms of the house. Mom’s favorite music included “Air on the G String” by Bach.

Dad had his Beethoven and Brahms. Dad often said that Beethoven got him through the Great Depression. Having learned them from Dad, we all could sing, in German, some words of the choral movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony: “Freude, schöner Götterfunken, Tochter aus Elysium…”

When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, I was one month away from my fifth birthday. The people who lived in the lower flat of our apartment building were a Japanese-American family, including a boy somewhat younger than I. Sometime after the news of the attack I spit a mouthful of oyster crackers at the boy, as we were together in the common backyard. My mother either saw this or learned of it from our neighbors and she went into a fury. She chased me all over our flat with a broom. I hid under the high-legged stove in the kitchen where she could barely reach me, while Uncle Harry followed, trying to calm her. He stopped her from beating me: “Now Art, now Art.” The downstairs family disappeared not long after, undoubtedly to a relocation camp. I have always felt a sense of guilt from this.

President Roosevelt occasionally presented an evening Fireside Chat on the radio, about issues of national importance and, after Pearl Harbor, about the course of the War. Anyone currently at home would gather in the living room to listen. There were two rocking chairs. Dad had a favorite chair which he shared with the cat. Dad’s ties became shredded by the cat clawing them as he purred loudly in contentment on Dad’s chest. Dad never objected, although I remember Mom getting annoyed by this destruction.

I don’t recall that all of us ever sat together for a meal. Looking back, everything seemed democratic with no recognized or self-appointed leader. I later learned there were tensions between Aunt Bee and Dad over correctness in the intellectual realm. They were the same in age, and both were natural educators. I think also there was sexual tension between them. Bee was pretty, buxom, and smart. When dad first met the three sisters in Oregon, it was expected he would be attracted to her, at least in her being the oldest and most mature. Listening, in our later years, to my sister in whom Dad and others confided on such matters, I learned that Dad preferred Mom because she was not yet fully formed, and Dad wanted to be in control. In addition, Mom had made up her mind about getting Dad, immediately upon him appearing in her life. She was dazzled by his looks and his polished “college man” manner.

Around six months after the War began for the United States, Dad got a job in the Kaiser-Richmond Shipyard as a ship-fitter and rat-proofer. We were able to move away from the Arguello house into our own newly-built government housing, Sunnydale, in San Francisco’s Visitación Valley near the Cow Palace. Mom finally had a place of her own, which was timely because Diane was about to be born.

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Next: Memories of Great-aunt Efthalia Protopapas and her Family

Dear Grandma,

I loved going to the home of Grandpa’s sister, Thea Efthalia (Aunt Ethel), on Duboce Street in San Francisco. I loved being around her loud sons. I saw them, but I felt they didn’t see me. Only Thea saw me. I felt she liked me, but she was so busy with all the others in her house she didn’t have time for me except for an occasional smile and comment in Greek, sometimes a pat on my cheek. She smelled like her kitchen: coffee, honey, sesame, walnut, oregano, powdered sugar, roast lamb, anise, lemon, all combining to make a palpable cloud around her.

Papou, Thea’s wizened, much older husband, just grinned toothlessly at everyone who passed by, sitting on a small wooden chair by a small wooden table in the kitchen, opposite to where Thea seemed always to be working at the black iron stove, shouting in Greek to the others in the dining room around the corner.

533 Duboce Street, Home of the Protopapas/Post family (GoogleEarth)

I was fascinated with the big noses and ears of the men. They had smells and skin tones different from my father. But Grandpa George was like them in these ways. In addition, Grandpa smelled like tobacco. I knew I was connected to these people and wondered if I would look like them when I was older. I felt small and unformed, insignificant among them.

We rode a bus from wherever we lived to the “N Judah” streetcar, then took this to just before the tracks disappeared into the Sunset Tunnel, where Duboce Street rises steeply up toward Buena Vista Park at the summit. It was a great adventure for me, especially to imagine what might be in the tunnel and what it looked like at the other end.

The family lived in the upper flat of a Victorian house. I was allowed to ring the bell, then to stand close by the door as it slowly opened, exposing a long staircase going up toward where Thea was pushing the big lever that opened the door through a cable hidden in the wall. It was like a movie or a radio program mystery.

The 1940 Census shows that living at 533 Duboce, in addition to Thea and Papou, were their children Thelma Post, William Post, John Post, and Beatrice Apostle, and their grandchildren Dorothy Apostle and John Apostle, Jr. They had two other children, Milton Post and Harry Post. Milton became a dentist in Los Angeles, and Harry was in the military. He later settled in San Diego.

The dominant personality, when he was in the room, was John Post. He was loud, teasing and seemingly good-natured. My memory of him at work in a bar/restaurant on Market Street tells me that this possibly was originally Papou’s business which John took over as manager. He seemed happy and showing off as I visited the restaurant with Mom and one of my aunts.

I was born on January 7, St. John’s day of the Eastern Orthodox calendar. It was expected my parents would name me John, but she said there were too many Johns in the family, so she named me after her movie actor crush of the time, Ronald Coleman. I’ve never cared for the name, feeling it doesn’t mesh well with my family name. I often have wished I had been named Alexander, my middle name and a family name on my father’s side.

The name Apostle was originally Apostolas. This family, as with the Post family, wanted to be American, not Greek, yet everyone was still Greek in certain attitudes and customs, even if they spoke proper and unaccented English just as my immediate family did. Only Thea and her daughter Thelma spoke Greek by default. Thea’s children would respond in kind, then lapse back into English. (I don’t recall hearing Papou speak).

It feels a bit eccentric and illogical but good that I have always felt American, yet still somewhat Greek. It is my clan, even if I have non-Greek ancestors from my paternal grandmother, Clara Lucille Pavellas, née Harpending—and even if Dad had a prejudice against Greeks, generally, with special exceptions for his father and uncle, both dead before I was born, but often mentioned. I heard Mom once say angrily to Dad that he should remember that she and her father were Greek.

Although Mom was around ten years older than Dorothy Apostle, they liked each other and were friends. Her nickname was Becky, and we always called her that with affection. Later in life, she married a dentist and had four beautiful daughters and a son: Alexis, Denise, Celeste, Roxanne, and Victor.

Thelma Post was a hairdresser who seemed always tired and unhappy. She married a man named John Giannopoulos, and had two children, Georgia and John, Jr. Georgia was the acknowledged and celebrated beauty of the family. Georgia also had two children with her husband George Stratos: Grace Louise and Georgette, the former having bright blue eyes.

Aunt Bee had light, if not exactly bright blue eyes as well, and it seemed important to me in connection with you, Grandma, who, I was told, also had light eyes. I do consider it remarkable that both my daughters and my sister Diane have or had greenish/hazel eyes and my three sons have dark brown eyes. I wonder if this indicates a sex-linked characteristic for eye color in our family.

The Pavellas family later became close for a while with William “Bill” Post when we lived in Brooklyn. Bill had served in the Army as a captain and was billeted at Camp Kilmer New Jersey awaiting final discharge from service. He had married a German woman and was awaiting her arrival from Germany. A thief broke into his living quarters while he was asleep, and in the ruckus, Bill was stabbed. He never recovered fully from a damaged nerve in his face which always caused him pain. We visited with him during his stay in New Jersey, and later in California after our return from Brooklyn.

I don’t remember Beatrice Post Apostle, but. I heard her mentioned often, in connection with her absent husband and her health problems. I thought it wonderfully anomalous that despite these impressions of a troubled life for Beatrice Apostle, her children, John and Dorothy, seemed such lovely people.

When the small Pavellas family returned to San Francisco from what Mom considered our exile in Brooklyn, we visited many of the Post family and their children, all of them our cousins. While at the home of Dorothy (now Mrs. Alex Milton) I met another girl cousin or friend of the family who was my age. We hit it off and were innocently talking in the backyard, arms on the back fence looking at the sunset when Aunt Bee came out to “break it up.” It was one my great disappointments because I had never, up to that point, had a serious conversation with a girl my age. I was fourteen.

Later, Mom and Dad were occasionally social with cousin John Giannopoulos and his wife, Elizabeth, a non-Greek. We all had an interest in fine music.

After Mom and Dad bought their first owned-home, in Daly City in 1959, they hosted small family gatherings. John Apostle sometimes visited.

I met John Apostle a few times on the campus of the University at Berkeley when he was taking graduate courses in criminology. He was working in security at San Quentin Prison in Marin County, North of San Francisco.

In 1984, I was working in the East Bay area of San Francisco where Dorothy and her dentist husband, Alex, lived. Their children were grown and no longer living at home. My second wife and our children (including son Greg from my first marriage) were in Alaska awaiting a house sale before moving to be with me. Dorothy and Alex offered their hospitality to me during this time.

The last time I saw any of the extended Post family was in 2002. I was preparing to move to Stockholm, Sweden, to be with my future wife, Eva. I wanted to visit the Post family one more time, before I left. I arranged with Dorothy, now widowed, to host a reunion for my mother and me at her new home, in Walnut Creek, east of Oakland. It was wonderful.

I always wished I had noses like my once-removed cousins John Giannopolous and John Apostle, first cousins to each other.

I hadn’t fully realized, Grandma, until I started writing this letter to you, how important the Protopapas family was to the Pagonis family and to me. If Antonios Protopapas hadn’t married Efthalia Pagonis in Greece; and, if Antonios hadn’t arranged to take his wife and his (then) three children to the United States; and, if he hadn’t invited his brother-in-law George to join him; and, if Antonios and Efthalia, as I imagine, hadn’t arranged a wife for George; and, if they hadn’t provided moral and probably financial support to the bachelor George and sometimes the married George; well, then…

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Next: George K. Pagonis

Dear Grandma,

Upon your death, Harry stayed with George while the three girls were taken to the orphanage in Stockton for two years, then to the foster home in Portland with Mrs. Vrooman. George and Harry moved to be near them. Eventually, the girls moved from foster care to be united with them. They lived in Portland for ten years before moving back to San Francisco upon the marriage of Artemis to Conrad.

I remember Grandpa was either working or playing poker at the “coffee shop.” He sometimes made candy or pastries in the early morning at the restaurant where he worked. I remember pasteli, thick sheets of sesame and honey, still warm and pungent from the oven. Grandpa and Uncle Harry would arrive early in the morning, and Aunt Bee and Mom rushed to prepare the kitchen: cut the hardening candy into strips, and wrap them in waxed paper, twisting the ends tightly. I wanted as many as I could get, but they were for selling or giving to others. My favorites cookies were koulourakia, butter cookies. The family had to hide these from me, so they could be used as a visiting gift.

Sometimes Grandpa would be in his room, smoking and playing Greek music on a small phonograph or radio.

I don’t remember being held by Grandpa, although it was clear he cherished me. I was “Rrrroonny,” and everyone would chuckle at his earthy pronunciation. He probably resisted touching me because of his tuberculosis, for which he seemed often under treatment at the hospital. Aunt Angie, the nurse-in-training, was particularly strict about matters of disease and infection. Nonetheless, as of my last PPD skin test, I was positive for TB antibodies. I haven’t had such a test for many years now, and I have never had symptoms of TB.

Grandpa was cherished by his children, always treated with respect. From around age fifty-five or sixty, he was unable to earn much money for himself or the family. But by the time we all lived together at the Arguello apartment, others were earning money to support us: Harry, Dad, and Beatrice, at least. He still had the pleasure of his cigarettes, despite his weak lungs, and that of his occasional gambling. Where did I get the idea, at such a young age, that he played poker with “Nick the Greek,” the famous high-stakes poker player? Maybe Uncle Harry was pulling my leg.

I didn’t see much of Grandpa after Mom and Dad and I moved to Sunnydale Avenue after World War II started, but I remember a few visits to see him. One was to the restaurant where he worked, at the Minute Sandwich Shop, 2407 Mission Street. I think this was to show off the new infant, Diane, to Grandpa’s co-workers.  I felt special in having him announce “Rrroonny” loudly as we entered the long and narrow restaurant. As Mom and Aunt Bee carried Diane to a booth, I hurried to a stool at the counter and called out to him, “Papa,” like everyone else in the family called him, and he laughed his raspy laugh.

The other memorable time was when Aunt Angie was bathing and caring for his feet at the house on Guerrero Street where she, Aunt Bee, Uncle Harry, and Grandpa lived, after moving from the Arguello house.

I hid on the floor of the portable wardrobe in the bedroom Grandpa and Uncle Harry shared. It smelled of mothballs and old leather, not like the sweet, powdery smells where Aunts Angie and Bee slept.

Angie was still in her nurse’s whites but had taken off the bird-like cap and had laid it next to the smelly ashtray on the table next to the wardrobe. She lifted one of Grandpa’s feet and let it slide gently into the bowl of water as she talked to him. He was too tired to talk, except for a few grunts in response.

She told him of the young student nurses and doctors she worked with, stories of their backgrounds—where they came from and where they wanted to go after completing their education. He listened with his eyes closed, the corners of his mouth relaxing upward. The big alarm clock on the nearby table ticked off the seconds and minutes.

Grandpa’s toes and toenails fascinated me. They were ugly and clumpy, some of them twisted. When Angie was done attending to Grandpa’s feet, he took her head in his cigarette-stained fingers, kissed her forehead and said, simply, “Angelina,” in his melodious Mediterranean accent.

Either this visit or another, the family was talking politics and about the old country. I had never seen Grandpa emotionally exercised about anything, just mostly being tired and slow. But when the subject of Turkey, or “The Turks” arose, it seemed like fire came out of his eyes.

It was around 1944 when Grandpa went to the California Sanitarium for tubercular patients in Belmont, twenty-five miles south of San Francisco. This may have been his second stay, the prior one before my memories begin. When I accompanied the family during a visit to him there by automobile, everyone seemed familiar with the way. We stopped at roadside stands to buy fruits and nuts for him and us. My one memory is of seeing him in a glass-enclosed patio, with a porthole in the glass through which, when opened from the inside, we could talk with him. He seemed happy and, remarkably, not tired. I was allowed only this brief visit, then was told to wait in a nearby area where trees and flowering plants grew.

Later, when back home, Grandpa taught me to play the card game Casino and, with a book Aunt Bee gave me, began to teach me Demotic Greek.

This is my last memory of Grandpa. The Pavellas family—Dad, Mom, Diane, and I—moved to Brooklyn, arriving New Year’s Day, 1946. The war was over, and Dad had gotten a job with his cousin George Pavellas who owned a printing company. Dad was a typographer and linotypist, learned as a young man from the days when his father owned the Prometheus, the Greek-American newspaper in San Francisco.

Grandpa died of pneumonia three years after we arrived in Brooklyn. Aunt Angie later said he had only half a lung left when he died. We were too poor to afford any of us to attend the funeral, a heavy thing for Mom.

It was known or believed that upon George’s death each of the surviving children would receive one thousand dollars from his estate. This never appeared for us, much to Dad’s disappointment and anger. I remember him blaming Harry for this failure, although I never heard from anyone else about it in the ensuing years when I was again intimate with my aunts and uncle. I speculate that whatever monies were available went to buy the burial plot and headstone in the Greek cemetery in Colma, just south of San Francisco. I visited the plot many years later with one of my children and learned from a caretaker that there was a trust which assured the grave would be tended to in perpetuity.

As to the non-appearing money, Mom was triply disappointed. We were poor enough for her to occasionally worry about having enough food for us children. Our neighborhood was a dirty and dangerous place. The money could have advanced our return to California, and Mom missed her siblings terribly.

But the story of Artemis waits until after I tell you more about Kyriakos, then Angelina, both of whom died before Artemis

—

Next: Kyriakos (Harry) Pagonis

Dear Grandma,

He was eleven years old when you died. He became his father’s main emotional support and partner in generating income.

He completed ten grades, then dropped out at age sixteen to help support the family. He delivered newspapers and worked in businesses involving George’s cousins and other Greeks. At some point he learned to be a worker in metal crafts; he became a sheet metal worker later in life.

He “learned the value of a dollar.”  Dad thought of him as a tightwad. I never felt this and thought, even if it were so, he was entitled.

He was handsome. I thought he looked like the dancer and movie actor, Gene Kelly, who played roles showing him as pleasant, friendly, and playful. This is how I thought of Uncle Harry.

I didn’t know Uncle Harry’s given name was Kyriakos until I started genealogical research. “Harry” was always spoken with affection by his three sisters. I felt comfortable around him, treasuring every word, few as they were. He was a quiet, gentle, man, as I imagined Grandpa was when younger.

He was a physical man, as distinct from my father who was an “intellectual,” recognized as such by the rest of the family.

Yet Harry was also intellectual when he chose to enter a conversation. He read books, he gave deep thought to things, he had opinions. But he never challenged others with them as Dad did.

My first memories of him were, of course, when we lived together at the Arguello apartment. When the War started, during which we had air-raid drills, I sometimes saw him wearing a Civil Defense helmet. I learned later that he had been, and still was at this time, associated with the military in some capacity.

He enlisted in the Army on March 14, 1941, almost nine months before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Harry went from Active Army to Reserve around one month before the attack, but he continued to serve as a civilian employee of the Army, working in Hawaii for a few years, probably for some cleanup and repair work after the bombing. His daughter Anna told me, “He didn’t want to talk about it.”

When Mom, her sisters, Uncle Harry, and I had breakfast together in the Arguello apartment (Dad and Grandpa were not present for these), we often had soft-boiled eggs which were put in a double cup: small side up first, in which the bottom half of the egg sat perfectly, in order to crack it open sideways with a table knife. The opposite side was large, into which the contents of the cracked egg were put, along with salt and pepper and butter. We always waited for Uncle Harry to crack his egg first because he would sometimes crack it too hard and the top half would fall onto his pants, much to everyone’s loud enjoyment.

I remember Uncle Harry smoking a pipe. He always wore a sleeveless pullover vest, light brown, with green horizontal, patterned stripes across the chest.

I don’t remember seeing Uncle Harry after we moved away from Arguello Boulevard. The next time he appeared in my life was one summer when we lived in Brooklyn. It was 1947 or 1948. He stayed with us for a few days before he traveled to Greece to marry Sofia Malanos whom he met through correspondence. I speculate the portrait at the start of this chapter was taken to show Sofia and her family.

While he was with us on the first leg of his trip, we had a wonderful reunion. He and Mom stayed up all night talking about the family. While Dad was at work, the rest of us went to Brighton Beach to have a picnic and take pictures. This was Diane’s first memory of Harry, and she fell instantly in love with him.

Upon their trip back from Greece both Harry and Sophie (as she is called in America) stayed for a short visit. She spoke no English, but was friendly and excited, as we all were. She was around twenty years younger than Uncle Harry, no taller than any of the Pagonis women (the tallest around five feet, three inches), big brown eyes, and an easy laugh. Mom was sad for a long time after her brother and Sophie returned to their new house in San Francisco.

In the summer of 1951, we were finally able to leave Brooklyn to return home. Harry allowed us to stay with him and Sophie at his home at 620 Silver Avenue until we could afford to rent our own place. We stayed with them for six months, then moved to a house on Moultrie Street on Bernal Heights, not far as the crow flies, north across the valley that Alemany Boulevard lies in.

At the Silver Avenue house, Diane and I shared a room as we did during cold winters in Brooklyn when the room furthest from the kitchen heater was closed. There was a baby in the house, with your name, our new cousin Helen Pagonis. She slept in a high-barred crib on legs in Harry and Sophie’s room.

The front room, with the curved wall and windows facing the street in the picture, was off-limits to Diane and me. It was for visitors only and had plastic coverings protecting the cushions of the couches and chairs. I stole cigarettes from the humidor on the coffee table, but they were stale.

The garage was empty of a car, Harry having never owned one. That’s where Dad parked the 1946 Oldsmobile panel truck in which the four of us traveled from Brooklyn to San Francisco with all our belongings. Uncle Harry helped Dad to paint the truck so Dad could sell it.

On a landing between the floor of the garage and the door to the kitchen, Harry had a large storage closet full of hundreds of paperback novels, the kind I had recently discovered before we left Brooklyn, like Mickey Spillane’s I the Jury. I devoured them all when no one was around. I imagined they were forbidden to me.

For the next two years, while I attended high school in San Francisco and, finally, Berkeley, there were many family reunions and celebrations. Uncle Harry was sometimes there. At one event in the Sunset District home of Venus Mandas, one of Aunt Bee’s sisters-in-law, Harry had the attention of around five teenage boys, telling about times in the Great Depression when he was a boy. He told us, with some emotion, of how a man cheated him out of fifty cents. It didn’t seem to be interesting to the others, but it revealed to me the desperation of those times and how they had affected my dear uncle.

Anna Pagonis was born a few years after Helen. By his mid-forties, Harry had achieved what he had no doubt dreamed about as an impoverished and struggling youth: financial security, a house of his own, a loving wife, and children. But he, like Dad, both similar in age, worried about another economic depression. Whether this contributed to Harry’s high blood pressure I don’t know, but I much later learned he had taken medication for this condition for many years.

I joined the U.S. Navy in the summer of 1954. In 1955 I was assigned to the aircraft carrier Bon Homme Richard which was undergoing modernization at Hunter’s Point Naval Shipyard in San Francisco. Uncle Harry worked there in the sheet metal shop. I enjoyed seeing him, with overalls and a metal hat. He seemed to be in charge of something there and had a status that made me feel proud to be associated with him. Of course, I always felt close to him at family occasions, where status was not a question.

Many years passed. He and I occasionally were together at family gatherings. When I was living in Southern California and married for the second time, my wife Mary and I, along with Mom and Dad, visited Harry and Sophie so they could meet the new family member.

Sophie laid out an enormous meal of Greek and American food, including the kind of pastries Grandpa used to make. I speculated that Uncle Harry may have made these. Mary was mainly of Irish ancestry. She was slim and ate little, much to Sophie’s annoyance. I ate extra to make up for it. When others were focused elsewhere, Sophie took me aside in the kitchen and asked, “Why you always marry American girls?”

Sometime before life took me further away from the Pagonises, I learned of at least one reason for Sophie to want to leave Greece: the civil war.

The Greek Civil War was fought from 1946 to 1949 between the Greek government army, backed by the United Kingdom and the United States, and the Democratic Army of Greece (DSE), the military branch of the Greek Communist Party (KKE), backed by Yugoslavia and Albania as well as Bulgaria. The Civil War left Greece in ruins and in even greater economic distress than it had been following the end of German occupation. Additionally, it divided the Greek people for ensuing decades, with both sides vilifying their opponents.

The war was bloody in the extreme. In an unguarded moment, Sophie recounted the horror of seeing barrels full of human parts.

Mom and Dad bought their own house in 1959, to accommodate my first marriage, to Patricia. The house was in Daly City, just over the border of San Francisco. It had an in-law apartment we lived for two years as we attended local colleges: San Francisco State for her, and SF City College for me.

The house gave a place for my parents to entertain friends and, especially, relatives. Uncle Harry, Aunt Sophie, and their daughters Anna and Helen would join Dad’s only living relatives at such occasions: his aunt Genevieve and her son, his cousin, Nestor and his wife Evelyn. At Christmas, my cousin Helen Pagonis would entertain us (and the cat) with a violin recital.

I continued to see Uncle Harry at family occasions even after Patricia and I moved to Berkeley. We entertained Uncle Harry’s family at least once around the time our first child, Andrea, was born—coincident with my graduation from Berkeley with a BS in public health.

Then time passed too quickly for me to keep track of when I was with Uncle Harry and Aunt Sophie. We all were busy with our careers and families. I traveled much, taking work in Central California, then Alaska, then Oakland, then Southern California again, then Alaska again in 1992.

By this time Anna and Helen were adults. Both became teachers of school children and both married and settled in Modesto, California, where I was chief executive of the County Hospital from 1975 to 1979.

Helen and her husband adopted a boy, then she gave birth, sequentially, to two more boys. Anna married a man with a son whom she helped to raise. She is now a step-grandmother.

I feel close to my cousins. I was with them often as they grew up. But, our lives continued to diverge. We lost the habit of being in touch with each other. I carry a deep regret I was unable to reunite with them at the time of Uncle Harry’s death. I was working in Homer, Alaska, living alone, and couldn’t break away to attend his funeral at a Greek church in San Francisco. My son Gregory attended for me.

I married again in 2002, in Los Gatos, California. Of Uncle Harry’s family, Sophie, Anna, and Anna’s husband Brad were able to attend. I didn’t marry “an American girl.” Eva is Swedish, but I heard no comment on this from Sophie. I have since then lived in Sweden with Eva.

I heard from Anna upon the death of my sister Diane in 2011, and we have been in touch by email over the last year.

Your only son was a rock for the family you left behind. He was steady, faithful, supportive, and kind. I never saw him angry.

Κυριακος, Kyriakos, means “of the lord” in Greek. He was your first-born, a gift of the Lord, to you and Grandpa, as well as to all his future family members and descendants.

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Next: Three Sisters

Dear Grandma,

Now come the stories of the three of your four daughters whom I knew: Beatrice, Angelina, Artemis.

Their stories are so interconnected I sometimes feel it is a single story with their three life-threads intertwined. At least three events welded them together: your death, their placement in an orphanage, and their rescue by Mrs. Vrooman of Portland, Oregon.

Beatrice became a surrogate mother by default, at age nine, until their foster mother took over the role. The mother role initially forced on Beatrice shaped her automatic responses to her younger sisters for the rest of her life. She was, by nature, a teacher. She married and had one child, a son, now dead. Beatrice gained a grandson from her son.

Angelina was weak in health and self-confidence, yet she became a professional nurse and, later, a competent research assistant to a talented physician-scientist in a Los Angeles children’s hospital. She married, divorced, and had no children.

Artemis, the youngest, was full of spunk and spirit. She bolted from her family at age seventeen to marry, after having known her future husband for only two weeks. He was an intellectual and idealist who became a practical man to support his family. Artemis was widowed at age eighty-two in the sixty-fifth year of their marriage. She had two children, first me, then my younger sister who is now dead. From these two children, Artemis has six grandchildren, six great-grandchildren, and five great-great-grandchildren.

I tell the sisters’ individual stories in the order of their deaths: Angelina at age eighty-five, Artemis at age ninety, and Beatrice at age ninety-five.

Froscine, or Florence, if she is alive today, would be ninety-seven. Perhaps she has some descendants as well. I hope I may discover them.

Love,

Your grandson,

Ron Pavellas

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Next: Angelina Pagonis

 

 

 

My first memories of Aunt Angie include her many twelve-inch vinyl records which lay on a low, slanted shelf next to the side of the bed she shared with Aunt Bee. By the time we were all together at the Arguello address, she was full of hope and optimism, studying and training to be a registered nurse—but what a terrible beginning she had.

In my younger years, I tried to imagine what it was like for the girls, especially Angie, to lose their mother at such tender ages and to be taken, shortly afterward, to a prison-like orphanage, away from their father and brother. I heard but have forgotten many stories about their experiences in the Children’s Home of Stockton, but one thing is clear to me: Angie suffered terribly. She wet the bed and was put in a dark closet as a punishment, or questionable inducement to improve. Throughout her life, she complained of kidney problems. Whatever other things may have happened to her, they advanced her propensity toward hypochondria. It was a dilemma for the family: was she as ill as she said? As far as I remember, we accepted her complaints as real for her.

Angie was our family’s first professional person. The younger among us, now, cannot know the determination and resolve this took, during a time of great economic adversity in the nation and in our family. Aunt Angie taught me the value of having a goal and persevering.

I was sickly as a child and occasionally quite ill. I had the usual childhood diseases of the times: whooping cough, mumps, chicken pox, and respiratory infections. But, after these, I also had more serious ailments which required appendectomy, tonsillectomy, and the one that almost finished me off—a double mastoidectomy for badly infected ears during wartime when I was not eligible for the few available antibiotics.

Aunt Angie was always there for me. My mother was too, of course, but we all looked to Angie as the knowledgeable professional and the ministering angel. When issues regarding health and disease became worrisome it was Angie who took over. She taught us all about how to deal with illness and recovery.

When our small family moved to Brooklyn in 1946, Mom hung a picture of Angie in her nurse’s uniform and cap, prominently displaying it on the living room wall, visible immediately upon entry to our railroad flat.

This picture has been lost through time and movements but will remain vivid forever in my memory. She had a look of confidence, a friendly smile with eyes to match, their dark irises contrasting with her pale, somewhat gaunt face. Her nose was regal, aquiline, as such noses were called in our family. I was later surprised, even distressed, to learn that she suffered all her life from bearing a nose which others teased her about.

She once had a boyfriend, or a friend she wished was closer to her, named Dutch. I remember anguish in her voice as she discussed him with Mom and Aunt Bee. Aunt Bee had to push unwanted men away from her, but Auntie Angie didn’t attract men this way. I could see that it hurt her.

Nonetheless, it was Angie who laughed loudest and was the most mischievous in conversations when the three sisters were together. When I was around age five or six they were in the kitchen of mom’s new home in the housing project near the Cow Palace. I was lying on the small couch in the living room watching through a portal in the concrete wall as they prepared a meal.  The smells of food were not as important to me as the sounds: the three-part canon of female voices, occasionally erupting in geysers of laughter and electrifying shrieks.  I couldn’t understand the stories being told, but the sheer joy and deliciousness of their telling warmed my body and spirit.  I wished they could always be together in the kitchen so I could listen.

Then, Dad moved our small family to Brooklyn, away from Angie and Bee at the end of 1945. For the first time in their lives, Angie, at age thirty years, was separated from her little sister. Bee had married “Tommy” Thomas and had moved to Newport Beach in Southern California a year or two earlier.

Angie moved to Southern California to be near her older sister. She found work as a “private duty nurse,” performing her skills in care for individuals with the means to afford this. One of her clients needed her during a trip to New York, and Angie was able to have some free time there to visit us, in the fall of 1947 or 1948.

This was just in time for me because I had developed another ailment. A large lump had appeared in my left cheek, making me look like I had the mumps again. Local doctors were of no help. When Angie appeared, she took charge and I was soon admitted to Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan for excision of a benign tumor.

We had a grand visit with Angie, touring Prospect Park in Brooklyn and the tall buildings in Manhattan. We went to the top of the Chrysler Building to see all of Manhattan Island, including the Empire State Building several blocks away. We felt bereaved when she left.

Back in Hollywood, she worked as a hospital nurse and, later for the remainder of her career, as a medical laboratory research assistant to an important hospital-based pediatrician.

She started to play the guitar, taking lessons from a man, twenty years her senior, Eben George Smith. His day job was as a sound mixer for movie studios. They married. Angie had finally found a man, but he was domineering and sometimes cruel in his public remarks to her. It was clear he felt she was beneath him in social status, or wanted to appear superior to her and, by implication, her relatives. He was not Greek.

In 1951 the Pavellas family moved back to San Francisco, and there was a grand reunion of the sisters at Bee’s home in Newport Beach.

By 1954 I had joined the U.S. Navy, and on a return trip from San Diego where I was being trained for sea duty to my duty station near San Francisco, I traveled through both Newport Beach and Hollywood to visit my aunts. During a day when Angie was at work, Eben led me around Hollywood to show off where he sometimes worked as a sound mixer, then to some of the clothing stores he frequented. At one high-priced store, he grandly bought two cashmere sweaters. He put them on his, or Angie’s, charge account.

Later, at home, I could see that Angie was distressed at what he had done. I surmised that Angie would end up paying for them. I did not like Mr. Eben George Smith, who insisted on all three names to identify himself. I felt deeply sorry and helpless in seeing Angie so abused.

While overseas on my ship for two six-month “cruises” in years 1956 and 1957, I kept in touch with all my relatives by mail, both on Dad’s side and Mom’s. Aunt Angie was among the most faithful correspondents, always sending along with the letter a gift of knitted socks, books, or Greek cookies that she had baked.

Letters from other relatives mentioned Angie’s troubles with Eben. When the ship was in home port in Alameda, across the Bay from San Francisco, I visited my Pavellas relatives. Mom gave me more information about how Angie and Eben had separated but then reunited. Angie had stayed with Bee and her husband, Tommy Thomas, in Newport Beach during the separation. Tommy gave Angie support and advice like a big brother which Angie appreciated but she took a long time in heeding it.

Time passed rapidly for me after I left the Navy. Beginning in February 1958, I entered community college, met and married Patricia, a local San Francisco girl (she was 18 and I was 22), and matriculated to the University of California. I became a father at the same time I received my BS from the School of Public Health in 1963. After three more years of academic study and traineeships in two hospitals, I began my career at Kaiser Foundation Health Plan working for the associated Permanent Medical Group. After three years I jumped to a hospital project in Palo Alto, but that failed because it didn’t get the necessary zoning variances from the city.

At the beginning of 1971, I was out of a job and my marriage had foundered. After a brief stint as the business manager for the Fresno County Department of Mental Health, I got a job as No. 2 with my former boss in Palo Alto who was now chief executive of a hospital in a city near the Los Angeles Airport.

My estranged wife and my two young children remained in Northern California as I moved in with the now-divorced Aunt Angie in Hollywood. It was a good time for us to be together, both separated from our former mates and catching up on things of mutual interest, especially music.

Angie loved beautiful things: music, art, and, now that she could afford it, high-quality furniture and appointments. Her hands were always busy. When at home or otherwise with family and friends, she knitted, embroidered, created works of handicraft art. They would be presents for someone—family, children of friends and colleagues. Angie was not satisfied unless her work met her high standards.

I stayed with Angie for three months, then found an apartment close to work. I subsequently visited with her mostly at Aunt Bee’s and Uncle Tommy’s house.

Angie had already become close to Uncle Tommy’s family and she became closer after Eben left. She was especially fond of Tommy’s niece, Christine, a professional ballerina in New York, who visited her family in Long Beach.

Then Uncle Tommy had a severe stroke in 1972 and died within a year. Angie was more often at Bee’s house after this and, upon retirement several years later moved in with her.

Angie was now in slow but certain decline. Her complaints were more frequent and severe. She had radiation therapy for a reason unknown to me, and she said it had damaged her kidneys which caused her incessant pain.

From 1975 through 1989 my career took me away from Southern California. I stayed in touch mostly by correspondence. In 1990 I took jobs in Ventura County for a few years, thus made more frequent and longer visits with her.

We became frank about matters of life and death.  She once told me she was getting tired of the pain and of hanging on.  We held each other briefly and cried a bit. There was nothing for me to say except I love you and support you in any decision.  I was in awe of the immensity and simplicity of her pending decision, which seemed now to have been made.

However, as her pattern unfolded, she kept living through pain, but ultimately became so debilitated that she had to go to a nursing care home near Bee’s house. This is when she became occasionally delusional.

She created a world for herself where she could live with famous musicians as lovers, associating with people who shared her love of the arts and music. I was happy to accept these visions, but Bee was annoyed. I thought it cruel that Bee would criticize Angie for her dreams as she faded from us. But I later surmised that the horror of shame upon the family was ever under the surface from their early years. I felt that Bee’s response to Angie’s delusions, especially in front of others, was an involuntary response arising from shame.

In 1992, I took a job in Alaska and continued to correspond with Angie. At one point she called me on the telephone to say she told her doctor she wished to go home and wait for death.  She had run out of tolerance for pain and out of hope for improvement in her long-standing illness. It seems she was asking me permission to die. With both of us weeping, I granted her the permission if that’s what she wanted.

I returned to Northern California in 1995. Angie was still living, still in the care home, deeper into her delusions. She died in 2001, with Beatrice present.

I learned much from Aunt Angie, your angel daughter. I learned compassion and acceptance; I learned about persistence and endurance; I gained a greater appreciation for beauty in crafts and works of art.

Before I left for Alaska in 1992, she told me I was the son she never had.

I am blessed to have had two loving mothers, whom you created.

---

June 3, 2021: I just found this in the archives:

Next: Artemis Pagonis

 

Dear Grandma,

When I was small, Artemis and Conrad were “Mama” and “Daddy” to me. By the time we moved to Brooklyn and I was just turning age nine, they were “Mom” and “Dad.” My younger sister, Diane, retained “Mama” and “Daddy” throughout her life.

For the last eight of her ninety years, Mom was under Diane’s care, after Dad died in 2000. During this time Mom told Diane family stories which I had not heard, and which Diane passed on to me. Combined with these, and with memories of what Mom told me over the years, I can tell you a little more of her early life.

Perhaps you were present when Mom and Dad first met; she was less than a year old. Dad’s father, Alexander K. Pavellas, visited the family to discuss the details of little Artemis’s baptism, and he brought along his young son, Constantine (Dad’s original name). Alexander was godfather to many of the children born to Greek immigrants in and around San Francisco. He had been the Greek Consul General of San Francisco, was active in the city’s Greek Orthodox Church, and also in the American Hellenic Educational Progressive Association (AHEPA), a national fraternal organization. So, Mom’s godfather was the father of her future husband.

Artemis was baptized at Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church on January 26, 1919. Mom was told that when Alexander and his son visited her family to discuss the arrangements, Mom sat, or was placed, on the lap of young Constantine.

Then Froscine was born, and you died a few months later. The girls were in the Children’s Home of Stockton for two years, after which they found succor with Mrs. Vrooman in Portland.

I remember little of what was told to me about Mom’s life during the ten years the Pagonis family lived in Portland. From Mom’s school address-transfer form, which she retained until her death, I know she attended Vernon Elementary School, 2044 NE Killingsworth St. At the time she enrolled, she was living at 961 NE 26th Avenue. This must have been where Mrs. Vrooman’s house was. She was still in elementary school when she left the care of Mrs. Vrooman, along with her sisters, to rejoin George and Harry at 3615 65th Avenue.

One story Mom told several times stays with me. When living with her family in Portland, she was assigned to go to a butcher shop to buy an inexpensive piece of meat, something some people would give to their pet animals, according to Mom. The butcher would humiliate Mom who asked for the meat as if it were indeed for an animal. He mocked her and her family as immigrants who ate like animals. She forever after felt compassion for immigrants and other people who did not fit into mainstream society. She never felt part of this society, and forever felt diminished by this experience.

Mom and Dad met again after sixteen years when he arrived at the home of George Pagonis to collect money for his subscription to the Greek-American newspaper, Prometheus, which Dad inherited upon Alexander’s death.

Dad stayed in Portland for around two weeks. The three sisters and Dad went to the movies. He and Mom talked all the way through the movie and then became engaged. It had been expected that if he had connected with any of the sisters, it would have been Beatrice, the oldest and “prettiest,” by contemporary American standards. But mom fell “head over heels in love,” and, so did he, according to Diane. He found Mom to be real, without guile, and free-spirited, plus, Diane believed, very sexy. He was smitten. He was in need of love and companionship; he had just lost his mother, father, and uncle, and was burdened with the care of his aunt Genevieve and her son, Nestor.

Dad had to continue his journey from Portland to Washington State and Canada to sell and collect on more subscriptions, with only twenty-five cents in his pocket. Mom told him he couldn’t go without her because he wouldn’t come back, so she went with him to Washington and Canada in Dad’s Model T Ford.

After traveling ninety miles north to Vancouver, Washington, they stopped to get a marriage certificate at the Clark County Courthouse, December 18, 1935. Mom was seventeen years old and Dad had just turned twenty-two.

Canadian officials at the border were not going to let them pass through, as one had to have a certain amount of money to enter the country. They told the Border Patrol they were honeymooning in Canada, so the officials relented, but Dad had to leave his watch as security. He collected on a sufficient number of subscriptions in Canada to get them back to San Francisco.

Upon arriving at Dad’s home, Mom joined his family: his maternal aunt Genevieve Harpending Palladius and his cousin Nestor H. Palladius, eleven years old. Genevieve was a widow whose sister, Dad’s mother, also recently died. Dad, Genevieve, and Nestor were all that was left of a colorful San Francisco family which had precipitously plunged into the Great Depression.

This was an exciting time for Mom, the former orphan and baby of the family. She was a married woman, and soon pregnant. She had returned to the city of her birth, of which she had no memory but about which she had heard many stories. She could now experience and create her own San Francisco stories.

She became acquainted with her Aunt Ethel, and Ethel’s many children and grandchildren—her new cousins. She hiked the hills of Marin County with Dad and her sisters, where Dad had spent much of his youth.

Artemis gave birth to me on January 7, 1937. At the time, Beatrice lived with Mom and Dad on Cherry Street, a place I remember being mentioned often.

When I was one or two years old, the three Pavellases moved away from the Pagonis family to protect them from the noise of my whooping cough. We lived for a year in the unincorporated town of Brisbane, just south of San Francisco. By this time the Prometheus had failed, and Dad was working for a movie film processing company in San Francisco, earning twenty-five dollars per week.

After my recovery, we all moved to the Arguello address. Then the United States entered the War, and Dad became employed in a military shipyard. The Pavellas family left the Arguello address to live in newly built government housing in Visitación Valley of San Francisco. Mom was pregnant with Diane and was now shouldering greater responsibilities, alone for the most part, except for visits from her sisters. Not only was Dad working in Richmond, a long commute from home, but he was also active in the Socialist Labor Party of San Francisco. And, Dad was still responsible for the welfare of his aunt Genevieve and her son, living elsewhere in San Francisco.

After Diane was born in 1942, I contracted a series of illnesses in the following few years. Angelina was often present during my recovery periods, and Beatrice sometimes accompanied her. Nonetheless, I was well enough between illnesses to take piano lessons and do well in school.

The War ended, and so did Dad’s job. In anticipation of this, he had secured a job with his cousin George Pavellas who owned and managed a printing company in Manhattan. Dad preceded the rest of the family to New York to find a place to live.

Mom was 27 years old, smart but uneducated, and always feeling intellectually inferior to others. She was now responsible for two children, three-and-a-half and almost nine, on a trip beyond any of her previous experience. We had to change trains in Chicago, and the connection was frantic. Mom seemed worried all the time. Diane must have behaved compliantly because I don’t remember her on the train. I was focused toward all the new impressions.

We arrived at Grand Central Station in New York, January 1, 1946. Mom had instructions from Dad to take a subway train to a place where he would meet us. When we got off the subway train the suitcase Mom was carrying broke open and all her sewing equipment scattered, buttons flying everywhere. I attempted to pick up the buttons, but mom was too worried about meeting Dad and pulled me away from the train platform while keeping Diane under control, simultaneously trying to close the suitcase.

The next thing I remember is that we were “home.” It was a cold and snowy arrival to a decrepit tenement in a residential block mixed with light industry. The streets were cobblestone, the gutters filthy with horse dung. The rent was twenty-five dollars per month. It was on the “wrong” side of the elevated expressway a few blocks from the shipping docks. The local neighborhood was controlled by the Clementi Family. It was like a descent into hell.

Dad felt he had been promised a partnership in George’s printing company if he performed well, but discovered he had become George’s slave, with no hope for advancement. He was trapped, and it occasionally drove him mad. He couldn’t get another job as a printer because he didn’t have a union card. He couldn’t get a union card unless he had had a certain number of years employed as a printer. So, he had to stay on as George’s employee until he had accumulated the required number of years of experience. The union card was the only way Dad could see as providing the means to return to San Francisco.

At one point, Dad was in a rage, declaring he was going to kill George and reached for a hatchet he had in his toolbox. Diane and I tried to control him. Mom resolved the problem by fainting, something we had never seen her do before or since.

Mom was trapped, as well. She was a continent away from her family, with no means to see them except when they visited, only three times in five years, during their travels. Her home was infested with cockroaches and mice. She had ancient kitchen appliances and, in the beginning, a real “icebox.” Her first kitchen stove was fueled by coal.

We controlled the mice by getting a cat, and Dad would spray the house with insecticide every few months. The cockroaches would flee the walls to die on the kitchen floor, which we all swept up and discarded.

The “master bedroom” was the largest room at the front of the apartment, overlooking the intersection of Third Avenue and 48th Street, and the elevated automobile expressway over the avenue. Mom and Dad couldn’t use this as their bedroom during winter because the heat from the coal stove, and later the oil-fueled heater in the kitchen, couldn’t reach that far. Everyone moved one room toward the kitchen, Mom and Dad taking the room Diane and I usually shared. We took the living room.

As I entered puberty, Mom remarked that the former nice little boys I played with on the street had turned into savages. She worried constantly about my safety, and for good reason. She never forbade me to leave the house, however, knowing I had to learn to survive in the real world.

Diane, as a child throughout our stay in Brooklyn, was happy and gay, an entertainer to the local neighborhood. She seemed immune to the terrors of the street.

There were times when Dad was not mad, and we had family outings to the movies and sometimes parks and the beaches, especially Brighton Beach. Diane took ballet lessons from Ephraim Geersh, a Russian refugee who served the Brighton Beach community. Conrad and Mr. Geersh became friends, perhaps his only friend in Brooklyn.

But none of this pleasure could overcome the sadness Mom carried from being separated from her family and her worry over the welfare of her children. In addition, there were times when there was little money for nourishing food. Dad had to pawn Mom’s small wedding ring several times—but he always redeemed it.

In 1949, George Pagonis died. Mom was deeply saddened and felt increasingly isolated by being unable to attend his funeral.

Diane put some of her memories of this time into writing:

Mom tried to protect children who were abused. She even abducted two children in our apartment building who were left alone and crying because their teenage parents were gone a lot. The grandmother for these children finally came and took them with her.

Mom also had to protect us from the mentally ill and deranged building superintendent’s son, because he was always trying to kill me and my friend Barbara Suczynski. Mom also protected Barbara’s mother from her husband by hiding her at our house. She and Dad tried to keep us off the streets by giving Ron piano lessons and me ballet. Mom went to work at Norwegian Hospital as a nurse’s aide to bring in money.

I remember her as kind but timid in this strange and dangerous world. Her happiness was her children. She was a devoted mother and tried to protect us from the streets.

Dad left George Pavellas’s print shop after four years to take a job with a Spanish language newspaper. After another year, Conrad was able to get his union card and began planning our return to San Francisco. He bought a 1946 Oldsmobile panel truck, in which we and all our belongings would travel. A month before our scheduled departure during the summer of 1951, after the school semester was over, bloody struggles between the locals and immigrants arriving from Puerto Rico erupted in the neighborhood. Mom urged Dad to get us out of the neighborhood immediately, so he rented a cottage near Brighton Beach for the month before our departure.

The trip cross-country on old US Highway 40 took two weeks, with half that time waiting in Salt Lake City while the car was under repair. We were all happily anticipating arrival to our hometown. Dad even relented from his usual grim determination to survive and instead enjoyed leading us on side trips as tourists. But Mom was impatient with all this. She was in telephone contact with the family, mostly with Harry, whose family we would all stay with for a while until we could find our own place.

We finally arrived at the Oakland end of the San Francisco Bay Bridge, our hearts thumping as Dad drove the car toward home. We strained our necks to get our first glimpse of home and, finally, there were the glorious Twin Peaks in the middle of the city.

We exited onto Mission Street and drove directly to Silver Avenue, then left to number 620 where Harry, Sophie, and baby Helen lived. It was, in fact, a dream come true for Mom. Never again would she leave California.

As soon as we settled in with Harry’s family, Dad began looking for work. Mom took Diane and me by train to Newport Beach to reunite with her beloved sisters and to meet two new family members: Angelina’s husband, Eben George Smith, and Beatrice’s son, Tom.

In San Francisco, we became acquainted with our new cousins, the John and Beatrice Sarry family, the latter a sister of Beatrice’s husband Tommy. They lived in Daly City, which abuts San Francisco to the south. Of course, we had confusion in identifying which “Bee” we were talking about in conversations. Beatrice and John had three children: Donald, Lawrence, and Christine. Soon after we had met them, they moved to Long Beach, and we missed them.

Now began a series of moves within the Bay Area, always initiated by Dad. Naturally, we needed to find housing apart from the Pagonis household on Silver Avenue. After six months, we moved to a rented house on the border of the Mission District.

Dad quickly found a job as a linotypist at the San Francisco Examiner newspaper and immediately engaged in the politics of the local Typographical Union chapter. I enrolled at the magnet high school, Lowell, upon our arrival, and remained in this school during this first change of address.

Dad had graduated from Berkeley High School in 1931 and had fond memories of this school—and of Berkeley in general. He determined that I, in my last year of high school, should also attend Berkeley. So, we moved to Berkeley in 1952, first one place, then another, just one year after having arrived from Brooklyn. This was the fourth high school I would attend. It was not a wonderful experience for me; I was strange to others, disaffected, and rebellious. Mom, again, had more worries: my failing in school, my associating with teenagers on the margin of society, and the emotional clashes between Dad and me. I graduated at age sixteen, took a few short-term entry-level jobs, but still associated with youths who were getting on the radar of local police.

Dad steered me toward the Navy, and I was compliant because I wanted to escape my friends. I was seventeen; Mom was relieved, but still worried about my ability to survive a military life. After I completed basic training, I was assigned to a specialty school on Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay. I visited the family often and could reassure Mom I was on a positive track. While I was serving aboard a ship, overseas, Dad once again moved the family, back to San Francisco to be nearer his work.

Dad was earning enough so that Mom could stay home to raise Diane, in her remaining years of childhood. Diane was fourteen years old by the time they moved back to the City.

By January 1958, at age twenty-one, I had completed my military service and had moved back with my family in San Francisco, so I could attend the local community college while working part-time and collecting my G.I. Bill stipend. Mom had little to worry about over me now, but Diane was sixteen, into her own rebellion. After a series of adventures and misadventures, Diane would marry a strange and occasionally violent young man whom she would divorce, remarry, have a child with, then divorce again.

At this point, in her early forties, Mom was played out. She had moved so many times that she had never been able to make and retain local friendships, and her sisters were hundreds of miles to the south. She felt ignored by her husband and generally tired of the stressful life she had lived. She began to have paranoid delusions, ultimately to become dependent on medication to keep them at a tolerable level. During this period, she would ask me, “Is it really you, Ronnie?” I seemed able to reassure her.

During the first year of my living again with Mom and Dad, I met and then married a local girl, eighteen at the time, which stimulated Dad to buy a home in Daly City with an in-law apartment at the ground level. Both Patricia and I attended local colleges, so this accommodation was vital to our ability to continue our studies. Mom finally had a house and home of her own.

She could now invite relatives and a few new friends, to visit. She first hosted a reception for me and my bride Patricia: the Harry Pagonis family, Conrad’s relatives, some of Artemis’s cousins from the extended Protopapas family. It was a good start for Mom, and she began to develop more enthusiasm for life.

Patricia and I moved away to Berkeley in 1961. Mom and Dad continued to live in Daly City, for almost twenty-five years, until they moved to San Jose in 1984. During these years, Mom occasionally cared for Diane’s daughter, from whom Diane became occasionally estranged. Otherwise, Mom was host to occasional gatherings of family and to Dad’s political friends. He led a community action against the city, which was attempting to develop their neighborhood out of existence, and he became active and influential in the local Democrat Party precinct, especially after he retired in 1978.

By this time Diane was a successful real estate agent in San Jose who helped our parents find a comfortable home in a sunny and quiet area of San Jose. They lived there sixteen years until Dad’s death in 2000. During this time Artemis was once again a surrogate mother, for Diane’s two granddaughters whose mother was unable to care for them.

In 1995, I needed temporary housing, having divorced for the second time, with few assets, and my income directed mostly toward my former wife and minor children.  Although I could have moved away after a while, I decided to stay because it was pleasant being with Mom and Dad near the end of their lives. And, the rental income I gave them was useful, as they, in turn, supported their two great-granddaughters living occasionally with them. Mom and I had always enjoyed each other’s company, not needing to talk much, listening to music. I accompanied Dad on his self-appointed chores at home and in the neighborhood and was helpful to him during a heart operation which revitalized him.

Despite the occasional family crisis, Mom’s life in her later years was soulful and gratifying. After Dad died in 2000, she lived with Diane in San Jose, then to Paradise, California, where Diane later moved her home and business.

Artemis, with her kittens, living with Diane in San Jose, 2001Mom had lived with Dad for sixty-five years. She mourned, but not terribly. She now had a bit of the freedom she had yearned for. Diane treated her like a queen: facials, nails, and hair and clothes; and she loved it.

After a year of on-and-off stays at various levels of institutional care for a hip replacement and some illnesses, Mom suffered a stroke, larger than the small ones that had slightly crippled her dominant left hand. Her cognitive functions continued to diminish. She wasn’t able to walk two years before her death.

Diane’s finances failed precipitously, so she bought a residence in Mexico, near San Diego, California, intending that Mom would be with her there. But, Mom was feeble and needed professional care. Your grandson, Tom Thomas, Jr., then lived in California near Mexico. His mother, Beatrice, was in a nursing care home into which he arranged to have Mom placed, with Diane’s support and participation. Artemis and Beatrice were side by side in the same room until Mom died, a few months before Beatrice passed away.

Diane and I conducted a memorial for Mom at my oldest daughter’s house in San Jose, where fourteen of her sixteen widely dispersed descendants were gathered on Christmas Eve day, 2008. Other family members were present, as well.

Within the last few years, Mom said she wanted to be with her family and friends “on the other side.” She is now there, and we can be grateful that she left here, peacefully in her sleep, beside her dear sister Beatrice.

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Next: Beatrice Pagonis