Old World Fatherhood
Grandpa Speropulos arrived at Ellis Island in 1906 from Greece with a firm belief in old-world rules and traditions for a patriarchal family. The wife submits to your demands, and your children are your employees, workers, and servants, period! No wiggle room.
As a teen, my father resisted his father’s old-country beliefs, and Grandpa declared him incorrigible and banished him from their family’s Chicago home, shipping him off to live with his maternal uncle in rural Oregon for a year. Grandmother, saddened by Grandpa’s dictate, quietly gave him ten dollars for his train trip and told him to keep it in his shoe in case he was arrested or mugged. (The money-in-the-shoe ruse is a Greek thing. I can’t say why; it just is.)
Returning from his banishment, he was ordered to quit high school and work at his father’s bootblack (shoeshine) parlor. Over the course of a year shining shoes full-time, he saved seventy-five dollars in tip money, enough to buy a car. When his father learned of this, he took it from him to gamble, lost it, and never repaid him. At twenty-one, with World War II brewing, he was no longer legally under his father’s thumb, and he escaped by joining the US Navy in June of 1941.
Reflecting on my own relationship with my father, I remember he always worked hard to bond with me and find manly man father-son things for us to do together. Despite his efforts, I was standoffish much of the time. I was more of a recluse than he was, preferring to stay in my room building model planes, reading comic books, and playing with my army men. Learning years later what a stinker his dad was, I realized why he continually tried to bond with me.
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Once, when I was eight, my mother took part in his efforts by making me join the local Cub Scout troop under the pretext of learning how to start a campfire and whittle a piece of wood into something useful. All of this at the urging of one of her friends whose son was in the Cub Scouts. My joining was the trigger for him to get involved by accompanying me to my first scout meeting. Arriving at the meeting, held in our school’s cafeteria, he turned to me and said, “I’ll race you to the door.” Puzzled, I watched as he took off running at full speed in his suit, tie, and wing-tip shoes. “You win,” I thought.
My short-lived time with the Cub Scouts had an abrupt ending when one of my tasks to advance to the rank of Webelos was learning how to properly tie a necktie. My dad gave it his best effort to teach me, but I just was not getting it. Moreover, I had no interest in “getting it.” I decided then that I was done with the Cub Scouts. I think he was more relieved than I was.
When I was ten, he’d bought us each deer-hunting rifles, a bolt action 30.06, with a scope for him, and a smaller 30–30 Winchester lever-action for me. Along with a fancy bone-handled hunting knife for each of us, we were off to the hinterland to bag some game. I was told the knives were for us to skin the deer after we shot it. I was pretty certain he had never skinned a deer before or ever considered how we would get it home if we did shoot one. The entire trip, I was apprehensive about what to expect if we did “bag” one. Luckily, at least in my ten-year-old mind, we never saw a deer during our three-day outing.
When I was eleven, he continued his efforts to be a good dad and took me to work during “Bring Your Son to Work Day.” I got to skip school, so I was all in for that. We ate lunch at a classy restaurant, and I got a slice of coconut cream pie for dessert. With my model-building obsession, he took me to his old Navy buddy’s wholesale toy outlet to pick out a half dozen model planes and cars to build.
At sixteen, teaching me how to drive a stick shift in the 1933 Ford pickup truck he bought for me tested his patience and motivation to bond. Lurching along the rutted back roads of South Phoenix, trying to master the clutch, shifting, and avoiding the ruts, he commented on what a good job I did by not missing any of the potholes as we bounced along. “You hit them all,” he proclaimed. I sensed some sarcasm there, but I took it in stride.
When I was in my twenties, trying to be a good son to my good father, I agreed to join the *AHEPA (American Hellenic Philanthropic Association) and attend their monthly meetings with him. Starting their meetings, they always gathered in a circle and began with a secret handshake around the circle and then whispered a secret word (s) to the person next to them: Free Cyprus. As the meeting droned on, my dad could tell I was getting bored during the president’s talk. Seeing this, he winked at me and pulled a quarter from his pocket, held it up like a trophy he had just won bowling, and stuck it onto his forehead. I laughed and smiled. He smiled back at me, realizing he had finally accomplished his goal…we had bonded.
*AHEPA — The Order of AHEPA (American Hellenic Educational Progressive Association) was founded on July 26, 1922, in Atlanta, Georgia, by eight Greek immigrants to combat bigotry, racism, and the discrimination of the Ku Klux Klan. It aimed to promote American citizenship, education, and the assimilation of Greek immigrants.
