In our cover story on bond tycoon John Calamos, he recounts how his father came over on a ship hugging the shore to avoid the German U-boats on patrol during World War I and then in his early years earning a living by peddling fruits and vegetables in the streets and alleyways of Chicago, until he could scrape together the money to open up his first grocery market, where he worked for over thirty years.
It’s a typical story of immigrant grit and survival and it’s resonated with his son all his life and led to his own ambition and work ethic and immeasurable success in the biggest market in the world—the stock market.
But as Calamos himself admitted, the memory of those early pioneers and their lives is fast fading and will fade further as succeeding generations meld into the American mainstream and the legend of the pioneers becomes just that—a legend that mixes fact with fiction and becomes just as quaint and murky as those daguerreotypes you occasionally see as musky curiosities.
My father just turned 90 this year and it’s a milestone my family is both proud of and fearful because it means the legacy of his life will soon become only a memory and a life that heroic will soon vanish into the pages of old photo albums and family mementos stored in closets and basements and smelling increasingly of mold and dust.
It should rightly be honored and cherished and kept alive in the memory and consciousness of the family and be an eternal inspiration to succeeding generations—and it’s up to us to see that it is. But if we did our job as parents well, and as immigrants even better, by helping our children grow up and fashion their own brave new world, the immigrant experience will soon fade into a very distant memory for them and the rich musto of their immigrant heritage, with all its sights and sounds of the old country, like a bazaar of spices, and all the joys and heartaches our forefathers encountered in this new country, like some cold harbor at dawn, will soon vanish into the echoes of time.
We can take our children to Greece, we can show them the old farms (if they still exist) and the mountain villages and wheat fields where our ancestors made their living, and if we ourselves lived there before we emigrated, we might describe with breathless abandon what it was like to live in a world without electricity and with the moon guiding your path at night and with the lemon trees that scented the fields and which you plucked for dinner and the chickens under the floorboards where you collected your eggs and the songs you heard at night from aunts and uncles and distant relatives who sat around the gas lamp in the sala and sang about their firsthand memories of the sklavia in Greece and the heartbreak of the ships that took away your loved ones it seems forever.
Our kids can only imagine this world, which is becoming faint even to those of us who lived through its sunset, and as I watch my parents getting older like a candle guttering, I cling to those memories even more dearly and appreciate the efforts of people like John Calamos, who are keeping the flame alive by making possible the National Hellenic Museum in Chicago, where our collective memories can live and still speak to us.
Many more efforts like that are needed.
Dimitri C. Michalakis
