My Detroit: Growing Up Greek and American in Motor City

Preface

WHENEVER anyone revisits the past, especially if he or she posits an unfashionable or revisionist account of ethnic and industrial America as I do here, there is a danger that the memory of that past time has been contaminated by knowledge of subsequent events. Such a recalled past can be a virtual invention of the present. Memory, in any case, is subjective and selective by its very nature. Elapsed time further warps that inescapable subjectivity. We genuinely remember some past moments as we would have preferred them to have transpired. Crucial events may be forgotten while others are invented, all in good faith. The faults of others inevitably are recalled more clearly than our own shortcomings. Bearing these realities in mind, whenever possible, I have checked my memories against contemporary accounts and the recollections of others. I have consciously invented nothing, but I trust no one will be so foolish as to think everything I have written is completely free of the distorting mists of memory.

Being a story of America, my narrative is one of changes, changes desired and changes not desired, changes anticipated and changes unforeseen. We Detroiters of various origins lived in a city that in our time was the hub of an auto industry that produced half of the automobiles on planet earth. We assumed that percentage would surely change, but not our dominance. We thought we would always be the spiritual and industrial arsenal of democracy. That was not to be. I try to understand how our hopes were thwarted.

In like manner, the Greeks who emigrated to America thought their citizenship would change, but not their basic culture. Somehow they would remain Greek, and their children and their children’s children would be Greek to the nth generation. The established Americans who encountered them had other agendas in mind, agendas that are notable not because they were hostile or friendly, but because they were different. Also different were the agendas of other immigrants with whom we engaged. Different in still other ways, and often in conflict with each other, were the agendas of white migrants from Appalachia and black migrants from all areas of the South. What transpired between us was greatly affected by our specific time and place, but it is an experience that is not bound by that time, that place, or my specific ethnicity.

I began writing this account of Detroit as I knew it at mid-century with a desire to take issue with certain myths and clichés about Greek Americans. The more I wrote, however, the more other ethnic and non-ethnic Americans insisted on their presence, taking my narrative into areas I had not anticipated. The Detroit we shared is not the one found in standard social histories. Nor is the Greek America and the other ethnic Americas that I write about found in either laments about cultural victimization or conventional rags-to-riches sagas. I don’t claim that my story is the true account of Detroit at mid-century, only that it is the one I experienced.

I was born in 1938 at the Deaconess Hospital near Greektown and for the first twenty-six years of my life, I was a resident of Detroit’s far east side. I lived with my parents, and until my college years, their immediate social circle was the one with which I was most intimate. Even as I became involved with the broader life of the city, I remained in constant contact with Greeks. The urban and ethnic aspects of my life remained in symbiosis, each defining and enriching the other, even though one or the other might be more dominant at any given moment.

The first day I attended kindergarten I was dumbfounded that the teacher did not speak Greek. What was so strange about that perception was that I had never thought of myself as being anything other than an American. I did not live in an ethnic or language ghetto. Most of my neighbors were not Greek, and English was my family’s everyday language. I just expected the school teacher to be able to speak the same two languages that I did. I got over my dismay quickly, but I had begun the process of understanding how I was like and how I was unlike other Americans. For me there was never a hyphen in Greek American. Nor did I ever think of myself as a Greek living in America, an American Greek. I was simultaneously Greek and American. That was not negotiable. Exactly what kind of Greek American I might be has taken a lifetime to process and remains a work in progress.

In 1956 as president of the departing senior class of Southeastern High School, in a symbolic gesture of institutional continuity, I handed over the trowel that had been used to lay the very first brick in the school’s foundation to my successor. I was not greatly moved by this ceremony. Somehow it seemed silly, if not meaningless, to so solemnly ritualize the completion of three years of high school. I was physically present but emotionally disconnected, observing the event in which I was taking part with a disembodied ethnic third eye.

As I proceeded through college, I found myself drawn to individuals and organizations highly critical of many American norms. Even in literary matters I was usually attracted to writers who were out of favor. My cultural third eye was finding a body in the broad traditions of American dissent. The political and cultural rebels that I knew best believed that their troubled and always troubling city was the mother lode of the best in America. They were anxious to join with the many Detroiters who wanted to begin the healing of the city’s racial wounds. The scale, variety, and vitality of the ensuing social movements suggest that the collapse of Detroit was not inevitable.

Greek immigrants often describe their lives as an odyssey; but unlike Ulysses, whose saga was a return voyage to his birth land, their journeys involved a departure from their birth land. No faithful spouse, honorable offspring, or loyal dog awaited them. Their very survival required adaptation to the new rather than a reclamation of traditional rights. As the decades passed, the immigrants would paint conflicting images of their homeland to their children. That terrain was so hopeless, so corrupt, and so inefficient that it had to be abandoned. Simultaneously, it was capable of generating enormous affection and loyalty. Those of us who heard their stories firsthand were often bewildered by this emotional jigsaw puzzle of seemingly incompatible pieces. Ultimately, we understood that we could never comprehend who our parents truly were until we finally saw their birthplaces firsthand. Putting our fingers on those missing homeland pieces, feeling their textures and edges, was no more an odyssey than their voyage had been. We, too, were going to a new place. Nonetheless, it felt as if we were somehow going to a motherland where we could reclaim a part of our selves that we always had sensed but had never actually touched. My exploration of Detroit at mid-century begins with such a journey.

Native Lands

I have many memories of that trip,

but the most important one

was my encounter with my cousin,

. . . and the recognition I had

that this man,

almost precisely my age,

was the self I would have been

if I’d not been brought to America

by my father.

—Elia Kazan, My Life

WHEN Greek meets Greek, they ask one another: Where are you from? I often reply: Anatolia. Less often, I answer: the Peloponnesus. That I was born and raised in Detroit, Michigan, does not matter. To Greeks I am never a Michigander or a Detroiter. What is relevant to them is the region from which my parents originated. Thus, although I had never set foot in either Anatolia or the Peloponnesus, from my earliest childhood, I habitually identified myself as Anatolian or Peloponnesian. No psychological distress was involved. That kind of identification was simply an aspect of being Greek.

My father often spoke with me about making a father-and-son journey to his Peloponnesian village of Sidirokastro. His death in 1952 had made that pledge unredeemable, but the village that I had never seen was omnipresent in my life. The Karras and Georgakas clans had lived side by side in Sidirokastro. In Detroit, our families always lived within walking distance of each other. On the day before his fatal heart attack, my father had danced merrily and consumed his share of wine celebrating the wedding of Toula Karras, the oldest child of our koumbari. Adding to my father’s joy that Sunday was that his aged aunt from Sidirokastro, who was related to the Karras clan through marriage, had made her first trip to America to see her nephews and to attend the wedding.

The income of Greeks in our social circle had been too marginal to finance pre-war visits to Greece. They also would have felt disgraced to return nearly as empty-handed as when they had departed. The sort of situation described by Nicholas Gage in Eleni, a father who had a threadbare existence in New England but periodically went back to be with his wife in Greece where his income seemed bountiful, undoubtedly had Detroit counterparts. I do not happen to know of any. In our parish, the dominant pattern was that immigrants had created English-language families with face-to-face relationships, not trans-ocean Greek-language families ruled by absentee bilingual fathers.

Greeks like my father mainly stayed in contact with their villages through letters and fraternal organizations. During the war years they had been generous contributors to Greek war relief efforts. Our region had been the site of Nazi atrocities and then a fierce battle zone during the civil war that followed World War II. Given that reality, no one spoke of retiring to Greece or taking a conventional vacation there. Post-war travelers mainly were concerned with the fate of relatives and sought to establish avenues of assistance not corrupted by government bureaucracies. We sent shipments of clothing regularly and used travelers to get cash into the hands of relatives. Shortly after the war, we hosted a female second cousin for several months after her arrival in America.

American-born Greeks slightly older than myself began to make trips to the village in the mid-1950s. They told tales of smelly outhouses and endless rounds of relatives, of value systems and behavior that seemed at least a century out of date. They were embarrassed by the constant attempts at matchmaking, annoyed at being told they were too skinny, and appalled by the general poverty. But at some point in the telling, they would get a look in their eye, pause, and facing me directly, would say that I must definitely go myself, the sooner the better.

Bill Karras, whom my mother had baptized, making us koumbari with the Karras family, had made such a visit. Although shaken by the deprivations he encountered and not amused at being offered clipped newspaper pages for use as toilet paper, Bill was impressed by how our relatives had managed to survive the carnages of the war years. He spoke of business deals that involved illegal currency conversion and corrupt officials. With considerable pride, he talked about an uncle based in Athens who had arranged to ship half-a-million elastic balloons to New York. The uncle had given Bill a shipping manifest and challenged him to spot the tax subterfuge. Bill was stumped. There are really a million balloons, the uncle said, laughing. Who’s going to count?

By the onset of the 1960s, I had completed a Masters Degree and was already into my second year as a high school teacher. I thought the time had come to venture to a homeland that was not precisely a homeland, a return of the native by one who was not truly returning and not truly native. I wanted to honor my father’s memory by taking this trip, but I also sensed that I would be emotionally incomplete until I had slept in that village just a few kilometers outside Kyparissia where the Peloponnesus forms the eastern shore of the Ionian Sea.

My mother, who tended to be overly protective of me at all times, was not enthusiastic about my proposed trip. She feared that some calamity surely would befall me in Greece. Bill’s mother had been to Greece just the summer before and had gotten ill from drinking the village water. My mother reasoned that if the virtually indestructible Koumbara Karras, who had been born in Sidirokastro, had become sick there, her Danny would surely be risking his life. Koumbara thought otherwise. She said I would not have any problems as long as I only drank bottled water and alcoholic beverages. She was overjoyed that I wanted to see the village where she, her husband, and my father had been born.

Another powerful force was impelling me toward Europe. Like many in my generation, I had been out of sync with Eisenhower’s America. I envied the expatriate generation of Ernest Hemingway and enjoyed reading about the Parisian antics of the bawdy Henry Miller, most of whose books were then still banned in America. I was delighted by his highly romanticized but joyous evocation of modern Greece in The Colossus of Maroussi, and I was fascinated by the cultures I had read about in Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandrian Quartet. Far more powerful, however, were the words and images I found in the poetry of C. P. Cavafy. I identified so closely with him that I pasted photographs and newspaper accounts of myself, my friends, and my city on various pages of my copy of The Complete Poems.

Putting aside my mother’s misgivings, I booked a low-cost flight that would leave Detroit a few days after the end of our school year in June and return just a few days before Labor Day in September. Armed with Arthur Frommer’s Europe on Five Dollars a Day (then all the rage due to its lists of cheap hotels and restaurants), I was ready to proceed first to the Europe of the literati and then to the Greece of Xenophon Georgakas.

I GOT my first whiff of Greece as soon as I stepped off the Rome-Brindisi railway link and proceeded down a street leading to an Adriatic port that had been a smuggler’s haven for Greeks, Albanians, and Italians since antiquity. As I approached the first cluster of shops I began to hear Greek being spoken. I changed some American dollars with a Greek who gave me several drachmas above the official rate. I would change money two more times before leaving Brindisi, increasingly getting more drachs per dollar. If I had been more experienced, I would have done much better but for me, the transactions were a lark rather than serious business. My drachs may well have been counterfeit.

The ferry to Piraeus was not due until morning. I thought I was stuck with getting a room for the night until I noticed a Greek freighter at dockside. Inquiries turned up the possibility of riding steerage. I thought that sleeping on an open deck under an Adriatic-Ionian moon might actually be more comfortable than the crowded quarters of a ferry. I found about twenty others in steerage, almost all of them Greek nationals. I soon struck up a conversation with a family. I had had the presence of mind to buy some wine and a loaf of bread, but I had not brought anything else to eat. The family, however, was well-provisioned with cheese and fruit. Our pooled resources made for a pleasant evening meal.

Coming to Greece by sea is ideal. I have since arrived by small propeller aircraft, auto, jetliner, and ferryboat. Each has something to recommend it, but the regal movements of a real ship are a special experience. The Greek headlands ease over the horizon with a calming effect that is strangely dramatic. The most memorable part of that particular voyage, however, was passing through the Straits of Corinth. Henry Miller had written marvelously about moving through those narrows. The actual experience, as is often not the case, was even better. The ship’s deck was level with the surrounding land, giving me the impression of gliding on earth, pleasantly surreal rather than hallucinatory, like being on a magical carpet floating through air.

Approaching the harbor of Piraeus some hours later was a return to industrial reality, and beyond the port, we could see Athens. I told my new Greek friends that I wanted to visit Plaka, the historical area adjacent to the Acropolis. They were amazed that I even knew Plaka existed and used my binoculars to point it out to me. We parted at dockside without pretending we were ever going to meet again. They were headed for the outskirts of Piraeus while in half an hour I would be in a hotel room overlooking Omonia Square in Athens.

My first days in Greece were intense. Although I was eager to see the legendary sites of antiquity, I was overwhelmed at being in a totally Greek environment. What had always been my second culture was now supreme. I wandered about, reassured by things that felt familiar even though many were actually new to me as first hand experiences. Initial impressions are always happenstance by definition, highly subjective, and often silly. Among mine was the feeling that I was truly on the cusp of Europe. Walking amidst the chaotic Athenian throngs, I could feel the direct link with Rome and other European cities I had just seen, but I also felt a gentle tug toward Asia Minor.

I was surprised by the large number of men selling lottery tickets in the streets. I thought the coupons displayed on long poles were surely a sign of under-development, the lure of a one-in-a-million chance that a poor soul will become an instant plutocrat. I had always associated lotteries with Latin America. I would have scoffed at the notion that state lotteries would become ubiquitous in the United States by the end of the century.

The wonderful flavors of the gyro sandwiches sold at the fast food stands around Omonia were captivating. I realized at once that if someone had the sense to replicate them in America that pizzas and hamburgers would have a worthy competitor. Of course, that is exactly what happened eventually, but I am under the impression that the Omonia gyro of the 1960s was of a higher quality than that found in contemporary Athens, much less the fare offered in America. That is probably false nostalgia, like remembering the hot dogs and sodas of childhood as being tastier than those of present times. But perhaps not. The ingredients in American hot dogs and sodas have indeed altered. The same may be true for Greek gyro.

My prime tourist must-see was the Acropolis. I made a late afternoon visit and was so impressed that I remained until the light began to fade and the whistles of tourist police announced that visitors must leave. The Acropolis was not then as thoroughly sealed off at night as it is now, and I found easy access to the neighboring Areopagus, where I was amazed to see grazing sheep. That practice is now banned, but at the time, I was exhilarated by their presence. The sheep reminded me of nineteenth-century drawings showing travelers amid the ruins of Athens surrounded by farm animals. I sat thinking about ancient myths long after the sun had fallen over the ancient agora immediately below me.

Plaka, then just in its first throes as a tourist attraction, was still a rundown area mainly inhabited by the poor. I had the good fortune to find a taverna that was geared to the needs of local residents. I was eating at an outdoor table when a group of local men came in to drink retsina, eat fried sardines, and sing. They were not singing for others, but only to enjoy the sound of their own voices. I was reminded of the New Year’s Day singing at my Koumbaro Karras’s house.

Visiting Byzantine collections two days later, I felt intellectually curious but emotionally detached. The real shock of recognition did not come until that afternoon when I wandered into a midtown museum dedicated to the heroes of the wars of independence. Greeks have always had a penchant for honoring the kapitanos who leads a local force more than generals of large armies. Intellectually I was aware that this could be corrupted into a decentralized authoritarianism, but as I gazed at the familiar faces, their presence radiated an intense sense of personal as well as national liberation. Novelist Harry Mark Petrakis has written that coming into that place he’d felt as if the heroes had been waiting to welcome him home. My feelings were similar. I loved their long droopy mustaches and the fierce pride aglow in their eyes. Feeling their turbulent spirit I realized the time had come to set out for Sidirokastro. The next morning I boarded a train for Kyparissia.

DUE to my not so perfect Greek, instead of booking an express, I found myself traveling on a local that stopped every twenty minutes. That grueling ride through a Peloponnesus aboil from a merciless August sun proved to be a fortunate error. I was forced into intimate contact with farmers taking short jaunts to work at temporary harvest jobs. Unaccustomed to motorized travel, quite a few were ill from motion sickness and belched into the small paper bags the railroad provided in great abundance. They peppered me with questions. There was some initial confusion as my Greek and theirs groped for common ground, but after everyone slowed down their pace of speaking, we communicated fairly well.

They were enormously pleased that I had come to see my father’s village, taking my trek as a communal compliment. They seemed to know quite a bit about America, but they had no sense of its vastness. Even after I told them I lived in Detroit, they wanted to know if I could take a letter to their aunt in Los Angeles. Much as I enjoyed their banter, by the time we arrived in Kyparissia, I was weary from speaking in Greek and desperate for fresh air and a shower.

Kyparissia seemed modern enough at the depot, but after a few streets, the paved roadway became a dirt road. I began to wonder if I might not be a bit daffy. After all, I only had the name of the village to guide me. Negotiating my ticket in Athens I had almost been put on a train to Macedonia which has its own village of Sidirokastro. I had imagined I could easily arrange for some kind of private transportation inland, but perhaps it was more remote than I had thought.

Aware of how poorly I had planned, I was a bit disheartened as I proceeded to a shabby building with a hotel sign. I had to pull a bell cord several times before a blackclad woman appeared. Rather than being pleased to have a customer, she seemed annoyed at having been disturbed. She informed me that I could sign the registry in the morning and led me to an upstairs room. She pointed out the toilet facilities in the hallway and putting an end to my thoughts of a shower, poured water into a basin located on the room’s small end table. She said she would bring fresh water in the morning but emphasized that the water was not suitable for drinking.

After washing up, I stepped out to the room’s mini-balcony. At a small restaurant across the street, a man was spreading chairs and tables into the road. To the right of the restaurant was a barber shop that was still open. I decided a shave and haircut would make me more presentable when I began to ask questions in the morning. I thought the barbers might also have suggestions about where it would be best to begin my queries.

Upon entering the barber shop, I was startled to see that one of the barbers, although regularly proportioned, was only about five feet tall. He had placed three small crates around his chair and moved from one to another as he worked on his customer. A second barber of normal size was cleaning up. I asked if they could take one more customer, and the midget nodded affirmatively to his partner. I felt as if I were in one of the Twilight Zone stories then so popular on television. Everything was so ordinary except for that short man moving agilely from one box to another. Perhaps embarrassed by my presence, he and his customer ceased their conversation.

I tried to put them at ease by glancing at the magazines on the surrounding wicker chairs. I leafed through pages featuring soccer players and beauty queens with relatively little accompanying text. On the wall there was a calendar with a woman clad in a bikini bathing suit and a newspaper photo of an Olympic wrestler. When it was my turn in the chair, after a respectful pause, the barber began to probe for the purpose of my presence in Kyparissia.

I told him I had come to see my father’s village. He responded with the approval I had come to anticipate. When I told him the name of the village, he almost cut me with his scissors. I began to fear I had stepped into the middle of a vendetta. He then asked if I was a high school teacher. When I responded positively, he asked if I might be the son of Xenophon Georgakas. Seeing my astonishment, he quickly added that Kyria Karamessinis had written to him that I was coming. I am Niko, he explained. I am married to your first cousin.

My fears that I would not find the village suddenly seemed very foolish. In America, Karamessinis had become Karras. The woman he was referring to was my koumbara! The village had found me, for this was Greece, where the improbable often becomes the ordinary. Niko told me that they had been awaiting my arrival all summer. He wanted to know where my luggage was so that he could send someone to bring it to his home, where, of course, I must spend the night. I told him that I was already lodged in the hotel across the street and suggested that given the late hour, it might be best for all if I stayed there.

While silently pondering his alternatives, Niko proceeded to give me the best professional shave I’ve ever had and trimmed my hair in the prevailing Kyparissian fashion. As he brushed away the fallen hair, he said that his wife Despina and their two oldest children would come in the morning to bring me to his house for breakfast. He would call the taverna in Sidirokastro tonight to inform our cousins of my arrival. He would also arrange for a car to take us up to the village.

A few minutes later, as I again stood on the hotel balcony, I could see Niko locking up his shop and beginning to ascend the road leading up the mountain. I imagined all the real and self-imposed tasks on those small but capable shoulders, tasks made somewhat lighter by the fact that he would have the honor of announcing my arrival, and of being my first host. For better or worse, tomorrow I would sleep in Sidirokastro.

AT 7 A.M., Despina was at the door. Although we had never seen each other before, we embraced like long-separated siblings. She expressed amazement at my physical size and joy that I had actually crossed the oceans to find them. I swept up her son Yiorgos and put my arm around her daughter Chrysoula. The children bore little resemblance to either parent. Unlike their father, they were of normal height; and unlike their dark-haired and tawny mother, they had blonde hair and fair skin. My father also had been blonde. Greek chauvinists like to ascribe such coloring to genetic links with the supposedly blonde ancients, but I think it’s safer to assume our pure Grecian line had been crossed more than once by Slavic invaders.

The hotel keeper had waited in the hallway, pleased at being linked to a family reunion. Her tranquility was cut short when Despina began to scold her for not telling Niko that his cousin had arrived. The hotel keeper protested that as I had never signed her registry, she hadn’t known my last name. An argument then ensued about the sixty drachma room fee posted on the door. Despina was outraged that the sum was so large. Despite my protest that it didn’t matter, they argued until Despina got a twenty drachma rebate. That was my first direct experience of the Greek clan protecting its own and of a poverty so intense that saving sixty-seven cents on a bill was meaningful.

Little Yiorgos insisted on carrying one of my bags, and we proceeded up the hill to their home. The paved road quickly gave way to gravel and was soon filled with boulders and deep ruts that Despina blamed on a recent rain. Twenty minutes later, we arrived at the summit where Niko, arrayed in his Sunday best, was waiting on the porch of a modest three-room wooden house. In the rear was a vegetable garden, an outhouse, and a goat tethered to a tree. However poor by American standards, I understood the dwelling was several social notches above the houses awaiting me in the village. As we enjoyed a breakfast of coffee, bread, honey, and butter, I was told that Kouli, my other first cousin, was walking down the mountain to join us.

Their home had a magnificent view of the sea that I noted with genuine appreciation. Niko responded in a manner I would hear often in the next days, saying that Greece was beautiful but poor. He put his reflection in images he thought his children might understand. Greece, he said, was like a bewitched princess in a fairy tale, but her Prince Charming had not yet appeared.

Toward noon, a man in work clothes came into view in the road leading to the house. He was about a foot shorter than I, but quite muscular in a sinewy way. He embraced me even more heartily than Despina had and was visibly relieved that he could fathom my Greek. As Despina served us a lunch of tasty omelets and fried potatoes, Niko reminded Kouli that I must not drink the village water. Kyparissia’s water was probably all right, but to be on the safe side, I should limit myself to coffee or tea most of the time and drink wine, beer, or ouzo with my meals. Kouli was not offended. Other visitors had experienced the same stomach maladies as my koumbara had endured. He didn’t want my stay ruined by such an illness.

Through a communications system that remained a mystery to me, our transportation to the village, a twenty-year old Packard driven by a middle-aged man, arrived a few minutes after Kouli had concluded an overview of the relatives I would meet. Despina brought out a final coffee to speed our journey, including one for the driver. When we were ready to go, Despina, Kouli, and the kids took places in the rear seat. Niko said he would come up the following day. I felt spoiled sitting alone in the huge front seat and persuaded Chrysoula to join me. The driver, wanting to add something to the occasion, began to give a short history of the castle from which our village took its name.

After a paved kilometer or so, we hit gravel that sent up a magnificent fantail of dust. Pebbles pinged on the undercarriage as we wound around hills garlanded by large trees. The children, who apparently didn’t get many chances to ride in automobiles, laughed as if they were on a carnival ride. I wondered how the tires could hold up under these conditions and grew fearful that my big adventure might end with a blowout that would send us careening over a mountain ledge. The wooden bridges didn’t appear very sturdy either. No one else seemed to share my concerns. When we came upon clumps of people, Kouli would poke his hand out of the window and shout, My cousin from America, as if it were an unimaginable coup for his honor.

The driver began to talk politics, stating that the Marshall Plan funds had been stolen and the Karamanlis crowd was a den of thieves. I egged him on