The Grandfather I Never Knew: An Excerpt from a Family Memoir

by Zeese Papanikolas

The Grandfather I Never Knew is part of a longer memoir about three generations of my Greek American family in Utah based on the stories my parents told and my mother, Hellen Zeese Papanikolas, wrote about in her histories and fictions.

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It was 1950 or ’51. We were in a car moving across the high desert of western Colorado. My father was driving, my mother next to him in the front seat. In the back seat my sister and I sat fidgeting. I was eight or nine, my sister Thalia three years younger. Through the windows of the car the landscape repeated itself: mesa, plateau, the cut of a dry gully, a sagging barbwire fence or line of telephone poles. Tortured by boredom, I picked out a fence post far ahead, watched it slowly come toward us, then speed up and flash by outside the window. The car pulled its shadow beside it on the asphalt and the painted line down the middle of the highway disappeared into the mirror. Every fence post was a different here and a different now.

The first sign always caught us unaware. It was the beginning of a poem. The road dipped and the words were lost. But before long the landscape parted to show the next sign. Then it closed around the words as we passed. We squinted our eyes, waiting for the next line. Each sign gave a center to the marginless landscape. We were driving toward the poem, and the poem was rushing up to meet us.

After a while a final sign popped out of the sagebrush: BURMASHAVE and the poem dropped off into a rhyme-less abyss. But because I wanted the poem to go on, because I wanted it to fill the landscape inside me, I sat in the car playing that truncated phrase against the echo that was still inside my mind, trying to make something out of the insufficiency. I don’t remember the actual jingles of the Burma Shave signs. None of the ones in The Verse By The Side of The Road had the particular grip on me that finding a lost photograph or book you once loved has. Only the clip-clopping of the verse is familiar, the sounds of the dumb jokes, the final irresolution. Like everything else in memory, the sounds contain the remnants of other memories, rising toward us with their uncompleted messages.

I think these long car trips were really my parents’ best times. They loved to drive through the country in which they’d grown up, the farms and ranches with their weathered barns and solitary hay derricks, cattle and horses in the fields and the pastures greening along the ditch banks, the little towns sheltered by the line of Lombardy poplars or the cottonwoods along the creek, then the sagebrush deserts punctuated by bluffs that floated out of the landscape like great ships, and the long strings of coal cars that sometimes appeared when the railroad tracks paralleled the roads. They thought of themselves as Greeks, and Americans, but maybe even more they thought of themselves as Westerners.

As we drove something might get my father talking. It might be one of the great draft horses that farmers sometimes still used in those days pulling a hay wagon that reminded my father of sitting beside his Uncle Bill on the wagon box delivering ice; it might be something my mother said, or just a silent thought passing through his mind like the stray clouds drifting overhead. When he started to talk about the town of his childhood, it all appeared. The lumberyard, the sheds for coal and ice, the teams of horses, the house with its chicken coop and the loft for the pigeons and pen for the rabbits he used to raise, then the town itself, Main Street with the J. C. Penny store and the auto dealership, the bank, Sam Matz’s Fair Store, the saloons and rising over everything the chimney of the mill. He remembered his uncles coming in after the day’s rounds delivering coal or ice and emptying the coins out of their overalls and stacking them up in piles on the kitchen table. He remembered how the Indians came in from the desert in their jalopies and old wagons and camped in the lumberyard on their way to Salt Lake in the fall. He that they would always take something, a frayed bit of rope, a rusted-out bucket, something that seemed useless. He remembered a dark, strange man sitting on the steps of his father’s lumberyard eating grapes who people said was a gypsy, and how once as a child he was sent to take the carcass of the Christmas pig to the bakery to be roasted and that the pig kept slipping off the sled and how in the cold he kept trying to put it on—was that the Christmas he got coal in his stocking?—the family had plenty of that. He remembered opening the door of a barn and seeing men squatting on the floor with bloody faces, castrating lambs. My father had a remarkable ability to suggest the voices that peopled his reminiscences. So if he was telling you about Big Nose Pete, the Greek pimp who sat in the coffeehouse pontificating on the behavior of Magna’s youth, or Aunt Polexene lecturing his mother on how things were done in the dusty provincial capital she called The City, or a straw boss at the mill huffing and farting at the bar of one of the saloons waiting for someone whose kid needed a job to buy him a cigar, Big Nose Pete or Aunt Polexene or the straw boss sprang up before you.

My father’s stories meandered like a river through its delta and sometimes they were all middle with no end, but they were stories just the same, because they were all part of one story which was the town on the edge of the Great Salt Lake in which he was born and grew up.

Now and then my mother would interrupt him: “Oh Nick, it couldn’t have happened then. Barba Yiannis didn’t come to Utah until nineteen eleven,” or something like that, and a new story would begin. Like my father my mother was a vast repository of anecdotes about the first Greek immigrants to Utah and the two of them could play a sort of duet, filling in parts of a story, commenting on it, enlarging it. Their talk was studded with Greek words for which there was no real equivalent in English, words that contained in them whole histories and intense, pungent flavors. They used these Greek words that had come with their families from their villages in the first years of the twentieth century, all their lives, and they passed some of them on to me and my sister and they became part of our lives as well. Striggla, yaidouri, the racist Yiftos and Vlachos. (Witch, donkey. Gypsy, Vlach—for a man or woman or family that were careless and had no sense of honor.) The words were charmed artifacts that evoked a world. Once my father sent me to a hardware store to get something to make a repair in the house I asked him what sort. “Ask Sherm,” he said. “He’ll explain the mystiko) of the sink trap. My children will never use these words and for them their flavor and the words themselves have disappeared. My mother’s stories were different. In the fictions she had been writing since college days and the histories she would later begin to publish in the 1950s, she wanted to get it right. She had listened carefully to her father and his friends around the table and to the women gossiping in their yards in Greek Town and looked into archives and old newspapers. All this she kept in her mind, sorted, evaluated, crystalized by time.

Sometimes dusk overtook us as we traveled through the desert and the forms of mesas and ravines outside the windows of the car gradually faded to muted grays and violets while high above the immense sky still held the last of the day and the first pale star appeared, poignant and alone in the fading light. Then it might happen that my parents would start to sing.

My father loved to sing. He had a good baritone voice, roughened by cigarettes and shouting against the wind and the noise of his construction jobs.

You are my sunshine
My only sunshine.
You make me happy
When skies are gray

He sang comic songs from his childhood to amuse my sister and me, like his version of Good Morning to You that ended up with everyone in their places with egg on their faces and you could make whole narratives in your mind about how the Old Beer Bottle ever came to be floating on the stream with that letter inside that said the beer was all gone. My mother had her own favorite songs, the valley songs. Down in the Valley, The Red River Valley, so wistful and sad that you too wanted to hang your head over and hear the wind blow. She chanted more than sang, but she loved those songs that called up memories of the whistles of the trains running through the coal town she grew up in, the harmonicas that all the boys played in those days, the nights she would hear some lone man coming home late, a switchman or locomotive engineer, or some drunk coming out of a bar.

Show me the way to go home
I’m tired and I want to go to bed.
I had a little drink about an hour ago
And it went right to my head.

Once they sang together. My mother couldn’t carry a tune and sometimes my father didn’t want to. But it was comforting, in the back seat, to hear them singing the old song they remembered, even if their voices couldn’t find each other as we drove through the dusk.

Then the darkness began to pool up in the hollows of the bluffs outside the window, and soon swallowed the bluffs themselves and the sage-covered plains and entered the car and my father switched on the headlights and beyond the windshield the world contracted until there was only the line that separated the narrow lanes of the highway spooling out in front of the car and the naked forms of fence posts and sagebrush illuminated in the cone of light. Now and then a sign flashed into sulfurous the light and quickly disappeared and once, I remember, a mine or power plant, with its lurid smoke flaring upward out of the darkness as we drove through the high desert after the war.

The grandfather I never knew was born in the village of Piana in the Greek province of Arcadia in the Peloponnesus in 1883. He was christened Emmanuel, Manolis for short. In 1901 he came to the United States. He was nineteen. For a time, he worked a pushcart in New York for his second cousin, Constantino Papanikolas, called Tsambasis—horse trader—a handsome boy running upstairs to tenement houses with vegetables for the housewives. After that he went to Chicago with Tsambasi and worked in his cousin’s shoeshine parlor. It was terrible work. Lewis Hine made a photograph in 1908 of Greek shoeshine boys in Indianapolis standing in the sun outside the basement shop. The hands of one of the boys are a blur, as if even then he couldn’t keep them still. Manolis quit because he didn’t get paid: “Here’s a nickel,” Tsambasis said when he complained, “go get yourself an ice cream cone.” In Chicago Manolis fell in with a crew of iron workers and followed steel, after that. He was a short, lithe young man. His job was turning the cranking the bellows of a portable forge and tossing up the red-hot rivets to the straddling the steel beams who caught them in a metal cone, placed them into holes in the beams and pounded the ends flat with a hammer. In those days it was something to see the fiery red rivets arced like little sparks as they flew up the steel skeleton of a building the twilight. Frenchy traveled all over the west anywhere there was a new mill or smelter to be built—Anaconda and Butte, Montana, Globe Arizona. One year he found himself in Bisbee, where he almost died from a spider bite. It may have been in 1904 when Phelps-Dodge was dismantling its smelter and moving it to Douglas. A cousin claims he did some amateur boxing there under the name of “Frenchy the Greek.” Somewhere in Cochise County there might be an old newspaper stuffed in a crack in the wall of abandoned mining shack keep out the draft announcing a Fourth of July boxing card announcing one of the matches as the lightweight Frenchy the Greek pitted against the Morenci Scrapper. Frenchy the Greek—where might the name have come from? The men he worked with needed something to distinguish him from all the other Greek Mike’s flooding the industrial United States. But Frenchy: family story has it that when he went to apply for the job erecting steel they asked where he had learned the trade. In France, he said. It is not improbable. There was a sizeable Greek colony in Marseille, the city from which he sailed to New York. Another story says he spoke some French.

In 1905 Mike Papanikolas, or Frenchy the Greek or whatever he was called then showed up in the huddle of tents and shacks called Rag Town on the flats leading to the Great Salt Lake where a horde of Greek, Slav, Swedish and Italian immigrants was building smelters to process the ore from Bingham Canyon. Tsambasis, prosperous and now called Kost Nichols, had preceded Mike to Magna and had a distributorship for Fisher beer. The rebuilding of San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake and the subsequent fire had absorbed so much steel that slowed the building of the Magna Mill, so it’s likely that this accounts for Mike Papanikolas’s claim to have left Garfield to have left Garfield for San Francisco and to have worked rebuilding the Palace Hotel and the Emporium. But Mike returned. He began driving a beer wagon to Magna’s Snake Town and outlying districts. He owned a lot in Magna where he grained and watered Ryker Construction’s teams for a fee, and on trips to Salt Lake bringing feed for the horses he began to bring grain to sell in Magna. According to the family soon after this Mike Papanikolas established The Rock Springs Coal and Ice Company. He built a coal shed and icehouse on the lot, bought a couple of wagons and teams and enlisted his brothers Bill and George to drive around town delivering ice and coal and began bringing building material for people from Salt Lake.

Mike Papanikolas and his soon-to-be brother-in-law Gus Paulos had grown up together in the village of Piana in the Greek province of Arcadia. They had heard the same heroic songs. More than fifty years had gone by since the Greek revolt against the Turks, but the blackened wall of the Church of the Little Virgin of the Many Fires stood as a monument to that terrible time. Theodoros Kolokotronis, the bandit chief and mercenary who had become the leader of the revolutionary army in the Peloponnesos in the south, had been baptized in Piana in 1770 and old people still remembered when the mills along the Ellasos ground the meal for the bread that his. They sang of the crow that fed on the heads of the Turks that were massacred at Valtetsi and they remembered the how Ibrahim Pasha and his Egyptians ranged through the Peloponnesos burning fields and olive groves and sending women and children to the slave markets of Cairo and Istanbul. But by the time Mike Papanikolas and Gus Paulos were born the Turks were gone but the old ways still remained. The khodjabashis—the local notable—political boss, merchant and money lender, the man who the mill and the olive press, remained. The rocky fields, the poverty had never changed. The only safety in such a place was in the family; the only power was to align yourself with power, with the powerful man. The man, as the Greeks said, with to meso—the means. In Utah in 1912 the man with the means was Leonidas Skliris.

On November 24^th, 1912, Mike Papanikolas married the Petropoulis brothers’ sister Yoryia. He remembered her faintly as a young girl in the village. When Yoryia Petropolis got off the train in Salt Lake, she could neither read nor write but among her few possessions was the village in which she had been born. Her school was the Church fasts, its icons and stories of the saints, its superstitions and its proverbs. Piana was the world. She was seventeen years old. In a photograph of this time—perhaps the one that was given to Mike Papanikolas in the United States by her brothers when they were arranging her marriage—Yoryia is a village maiden in her best blouse, looking into the camera at the future beyond it with what I can only imagine is a kind of longing.

I do not know who met her in New York or traveled with her across three fourths the breadth of the United States in a railroad car with black porters moving back and forth and conductors punching tickets while outside the windows lay the endless land, small towns, emptiness, sagebrush, sorrow, and perhaps hope. When her brothers put her into the automobile in Salt Lake they drove past the Hotel Utah. “This is our home,” they said. It was only the first of the lies imposing on her ignorance that the new country left her with. I think a large part America, as she first knew it, could only seem as a cruel and incomprehensible joke.

The house they brought her to wasn’t that great hotel with flags flying from two turrets, but a frame house under the smokestack of Magna mill. Still, it was better than the stone houses of Piana with their broken roof tiles and unpainted doors. One year later, she was driven to Salt Lake to marry my grandfather.

A village is a hive of envy, intrigue, peasant cunning and aggression. The villagers guard their plots, their goats and sheep. They close the doors of the fortresses which are their homes behind them, lock and bolt them. The family is the center of everything, always hoarding its prerogatives, always suspecting the family next door, the family who tills the adjacent plot. They mock their neighbors, this one’s squint, another one’s poverty—and even their own relatives behind their backs and try to find out their secrets. Whatever roils inside that little house, its walls are impregnable to the outside world, a world that is always trying to peep in, to pry, to destroy. If you don’t praise your house the walls will fall in, Yoryia said.

Piana had never seen the beautiful smiles of Athens in the fifth century before Christ. The Arcadians of Piana bore no resemblance to those dreamed up by Theocritus or Virgil or Sir Philip Sydney. Piana had never read Theocritus. No nymphs and swains here. No Mopsas and Misos dropping the tunics from their slender bodies to bathe in the stream. Always in Piana was the dark clutch of fate. Bowing before the icon screens of the dark churches the women bargained with the Saints who had once been the gods and prayed to the all-holy Virgin for a sick child, for mercy from the court, for the army not to take away a son. At midnight on Great Saturday the village waited for the light to shine out in the sanctuary and the miracle of the resurrection to be proclaimed in a mystery that began when gods lived and died on the earth. Beyond the doors of the church the woods and fields were haunted by the supernatural. At noon, while the cicadas rasped in the fields, a Nereid might touch a shepherd sleeping in the shade of a tree, or capture him drinking from a spring. At night Striggles roamed the lanes and the Kalikantzaroi were poised to waylay the careless traveler. On the slopes of Panvouna—Pan’s Mountain—above the village, the goat-hoofed god played his pipes among the pines.

Her life as a married woman began with a public humiliation. In Salt Lake Mike Papanikolas’s best man—was it Tsambasis?—would not permit the wedding to begin. There was a dispute about seven hundred dollars of the dowry and before she entered the church one of her brothers had to kneel down on its steps to write a check. She must have watched this full of shame. But Piana was the real dowry my grandmother Yoryia Petropoulis brought to my grandfather.

Married now, she moved into Mike Papanikolas’s house in Magna. Yoryia’s first home as a married woman still existed when cousins who lived in Magna as children saw it, nothing more than a glorified toolshed in the backyard of another house. Here she settled down to life not only with her husband, but two boarders.

When I imagine her first years in Magna, I imagine her house surrounded by a dark, viscous silence shared with the Petropoulis’s. They had worked for Skliris. They had worked for Utah Copper. Long after the 1912, the Papanikolas and the Petropoulis—now Paulos’s kept on the Company’s side.

On the twenty eighth of June 1913, Emmanuel Papanikolas signed his Declaration of Intention to become a citizen of the United States. In the Declaration he called himself Mike Papanikolas. He listed his age as twenty-nine. He was five feet five inches tall and weighed a hundred fifty-five pounds. His complexion and hair were dark. His eyes were blue. He had a scar on his left cheek. He said his home was in Garfield and his occupation was structural iron worker. He was, in his own eyes, and that of the United States Immigration authority, not yet the merchant he was to become. On September 13^th, ten and a half months after his marriage, Yoryia gave birth to the family’s first child, a boy baptized as Spiro.

I have a photograph of my grandmother that shows her as she was a few years after she married. Significantly, it is taken at a funeral. The mourners stand outside Salt Lake’s first church surrounding the open coffin in which lies the Tsambasi’s sister. In the crowd my grandmother stands with her head down, pensive, her broad nose the only feature I recognize. She has given up the kerchief of the village for the hat women wore in America, and it sits atop her head, tall, slightly absurd, as she might have secretly felt when she looked at herself in the mirror. Perhaps her sister-in-law, Polexene, Gus’s wife, chose it for her.

John, Yoryia’s second child was born in 1914. By then along with coal and Ice Mike was selling hardware and had built a long shed for lumber. My father was the third child, born in 1915. Mike wrote the date in the family bible, but it was lost and whatever papers were signed, whatever notices of his birth or his baptism were given are gone too. Yoryia only remembered that he was born when they were taking the potatoes out of the ground, and so, when he went off to the army and needed a birth certificate, he chose a date in November, November sixth. Yoryia said he was her most beautiful baby and she went to Magerou, the midwife to ward off the afflictions the envious Eye might bring him. Soon after his birth my father’s legs were encased in plaster casts to straighten a curvature due to rickets. Yoryia couldn’t stand to hear him crying and took a hatchet and broke off the casts. She bound his legs in muslin every night. John, his older brother stole the bottle out of his mouth and Yoryia would find him hiding under the crib, sucking on it.

Looking down at the straggling town of Magna and its one main street under a cloud of smelter smoke in 1915 an outsider might have thought the Town’s name pretentious. But in that year the Guggenheims began to leverage their twenty-five percent investment in Utah Copper into virtual control. In 1916, John D. Rockefeller Junior visited the Bingham pit and called it “The greatest industrial spectacle in the world” and Magna would become part of a chain of towns built around copper mines, mills and smelters that would extend from Alaska to the Chilean Andes, from diamond mines in Angola and the Belgian Congo to gold mines in the Yukon and tin mines in Bolivia.

For all intents and purposes, Magna was a company town. If you wanted to get out the word, all you had to do was tell the man on the crusher at the head of the mill, my father said, and by five o’ clock thirty-five hundred men knew Papanikolas had a ’37 Dodge to sell. Like an unloved father, the Company was necessary and pulsed in the life of the town with an enforced respect. Instead of democracy Daniel Jackling gave Magna a Company Union and amenities—circuses, you might say, without the ability to bargain for the bread.

In Magna the Papanikolas’s and the Paulos’s remained company men. My father remembered as a child hearing his mother screaming at her husband and her brothers “Don’t go! They’ll kill you!” But they did go, in order to rescue a bunch of straw bosses whom Greeks from Gortinia had surrounded in the car shop at the Boston Con mine. They courted the straw bosses and managers at the mill and passed around their banalities as if they were oracles.

Like Dante’s Mount Purgatory, the higher you got on the outcrop where the Magna Mill sat, the closer you were to the Earthly Paradise. For overlooking Snaketown and Japtown down in the flats was The Row. The Row, with its tennis courts and bungalows was where the executives and engineers of the mill lived. On name days some middle manager might descend from The Row like a minor god for a visit the Papanikolas’s and Paulos’s. Twice one of the wives, who just loved Eyetalian food, but wasn’t used to the home-made wine, repaid Yoryia’s hospitality by pissing on her floor. I imagine the Greek women clucking to each other: “That floozispeed on my floor too!”

For Greek women like Yoryia the village continued to endure in this new world among the cackle of strange languages coming from the stores and the saloons on Main Street and from the shameless American womenwith their marcelled hair and Cupie Doll lips. The women made the bread for the communion antidhoro. They fed their families lentils and rice for the forty days before Easter, keened the moiraloghia, the songs of black fate at a death, made the memorial wheat and made matches, read the coffee grounds in the bottom of a cup, practiced folk cures, gathered dandelions in the spring, when they were not bitter and worried about the Eye. When Tom Heleotes, future husband of my father’s sister Diamanda, was born he was so beautiful the women called him “the miracle” and pretended to spit three times over their shoulders so the Eye wouldn’t destroy him. The men laughed at their wives’ superstitions. There were no Vrykolakes, no Nereids or Kalikantzaroi here in America. Do you think the Vrykolakes crossed the water to come to Magna? The women kept the oil light burning before the family icon—it was never in the bedroom where the Virgin would have to witness unseemly things.

Sometimes the Arabs, as they called the Syrian and Lebanese peddlers, came to town on the seven A.M. interurban from Salt Lake. After canvassing Magna they’d hitch a ride on the ice wagon and go to Garfield. They left on the last train at ten. The women examined their cheap jewelry and blouses and tapestries. They knew what poverty was. Now in America they had their own little hordes of coins. They might buy a religious artifact, a cross, the icon of a saint. They might buy a bit of machine lace just because they liked it, or a brooch. Aunt Aristea had grown up in Egypt and could speak with the peddlers in their own language. When they came by, she took them into the house and locked the door so that no one could interrupt the visit. Perhaps she was just homesick.

Fear for their children was a living presence for the women of Magna. They guarded the children with a wolf-like intensity so powerful that it might not even seem to come from love, and anointed them with their superstitions and prohibitions, and giving them warnings with terrible imprecations and stories of the consequences of their misdeeds. Their daughters’ modesty was as much a part of their dowries as the linens their mothers painstakingly cut and sewed. The women kept to their houses in Greek Town. They would live through their sons. They prayed for them.

March 08, 2025

Zeese Papanikolas is the son of Nick Papanikolas and Helen Zeese Papanikolas, whose writing on the Greeks in the Intermountain West will be familiar to readers of Ergon. Zeese Papanikolas is a writer and teacher whose books include Buried Unsung, his biography of Louis Tikas, the Greek immigrant labor organizer killed in the Colorado Coal strike of 1913-14, and three studies of American culture, Trickster in the Land of Dreams, American Silence and An American Cakewalk.