Intro: Cokinos Was Greek to Me

Hopa !

When I began researching the family history, I took up the torch that my maternal grandmother left behind. She was the historian of the family who wanted to explore her roots. I became interested in our past slowly over the years, but the internet transformed research from writing away for documents to a click of a mouse.

My own memories of my grandparents were limited. On my father’s side of the family, I was nine years old when Peter Cokinos, my papou, died in 1968.  My memories have him mostly confined to a chair, or walking with a good deal of help. I never saw him dance like he did in the torn photo I found in an old album. I didn’t know him very well at all, but I remember thinking he was a tiny bit scary.  At the time no one ever explained that he had had a stroke in the early 1960s while traveling in Greece. Just recently, my older sister told me that he had a heavy Greek accent and gruff manner, and that she was a bit afraid of him as well. I couldn’t understand a word he was saying, and it never occurred to me that English was not his first language. I knew Papou had a sense of humor because he loved to trip unsuspecting grandkids with his cane and laugh at the result.

Aug 15, 1962

I asked my sister what she remembered. but when put on the spot, she could only come up with two things.

1. He smoked.

2. My grandmother would rub his head with coal oil while he had a cigarette, and she would fuss at him for smoking.

The coal oil was not a punishment but a cure-all when olive oil was short on supply.

I do know from my father’s stories that Pete loved to drive. He and my father shared a love for cars from the first Model T to the last Cadillac. 

Pete's last home was a duplex on Upton Street which came with not one or two, but eight little garages which lined the back of the property. My grandmother rented most of the spaces for "egg money." Pete's garage was hung with old tires used to protect both the car and the building when he backed out into the alley.

When Pete was in his late eighties, the Department of Motor Vehicles imposed a written driving test. I get the impression it was taken in a big room, and that my father sat waiting for him on the sidelines. I am not sure how they planned this caper, but between frequent trips to the bathroom and distracting the supervisor, the test was successfully completed by my father, and my grandfather “passed.” 

The next step was a parallel parking test outside with cones. Pete hit every one of them. Fortunately,  the man who gave the test was a former customer from Churchill’s, the family restaurant, and Dad promised the man that Pete would only be driving to church on Sundays and to visit his daughter in Chevy Chase. Aunt Catherine was probably not thrilled with the decision as Pete had a habit of running up and over the curb when he arrived causing her to yell at him from her kitchen window.  

Pete Cokinos died in 1968. He was about ninety years old, but no one really knew because he fibbed about his age all his life. I have found official documents with his birth date listed between 1875 and 1887. In the census of 1910, he claimed he was 33 years old, and ten years later in 1920, he claimed to be 36. I decided to go by an early document- an 1898 military paper from when Pete was in the Greek army. It stated he was19 years old, and that made his birth date 1877 so we will stick with that.

We never did know how old his wife Pota was either. Greeks celebrate their saint’s name days more than birthdays. My yiya also adjusted her age like a yo-yo. She was much younger than her husband, but the age gap got wider in her mind as they grew older.

Pota and Pete on Upton Street

I remember Pota as a warm person but also slightly scary. My mother dutifully called to check in on her and sometimes would put me on the phone as well. If we didn’t call often enough, Yiya would pretend that she didn’t know who I was and would hoot at me  “Who you? Who you?” Baffled, I would try and turn the phone back over to my mother, but she would shake her head, leaving me to awkwardly explain our relationship.  

I was the tenth grandchild, and Yiya inevitably celebrated my May birthday with candy- usually a Whitman Sampler which had been carefully preserved in her overstuffed freezer since Christmas. 

(I couldn’t help but notice the poinsettia printed cellophane wrap.)

Pota outlived her husband by at least twenty years, so I remember her better than my grandfather. She never left the duplex on Upton Street across from a grocery store which is now a post office. In warm weather she liked to sit on the front porch where she could watch her roses climbing the chain link fence around the yard, and keep an eye on the activity at Safeway. I always thought it was the greatest thing that she kept a grocery cart in the front yard. If the weather was cold, she would be ensconced in her big green leather chair in the TV room at the back of the house watching her soaps. 

Pota was not much for conversation in English, but she was great at sighing. She sighed often and loudly. “Oh me! Oh, poor me.” My mother faithfully took me to visit at least once a month which became a routine of sorts. When we first arrived, we would be offered sustenance. It was decided early on that Kouleria cookies were my favorite thing. I was a picky eater and didn’t like fruit or nuts so a twisted buttery shortbread cookie right out of the freezer was fine with me. And a glass of milk. 

Then we would settle in to watch the soaps. “Oh, me !” my grandmother would sigh as she sank into her big chair in front of the TV.  My mother would sit primly on a straight back chair, a bit at a loss for words. I think she timed our visits to coincide with “General Hospital” which was one of the few things my non- Greek mother and Yiya had in common. To me daytime dramas were boring grown-up stuff. I kept my eye on the cuckoo clock ticking away above the TV, not wanting to miss the bird coming out of its little door to shout the hour. Cuckoo! Cuckoo ! Cuckoo!  Poor me!  That’s how the afternoon went.

In the late 1960s, Kalliope Kokinos, an older maiden niece from Papou's home village of Agoulnitsa, was sent as a companion and helper for Yiya and Papou. Kalliope was not a very happy person, and she always seemed a touch angry. She wore dark tinted glasses which might look cool on a poker player, but were a bit odd on an elderly woman.  

My cousin Pete called her “sweet cheeks.” In retrospect, I feel sorry for her. She was probably unwanted by family in Greece, and the solution was to boot her to America where, late in life, she was expected to be useful. She spoke almost no English, and wasn’t interested in learning.  Even though she was about thirty years younger than my grandmother, Yiya outlived her. Caliiope died in 1982. Yiya hung on another two years until just after Christmas in 1984 when she died at her home on Upton Street with all of her garages in the back.