Dearest Squad,
This chapter is dedicated to my paternal grandfather, Sotos Kontis. I never met him—he died before I was born—but he was an engineer. Specifically, he was an engineer on ships that sailed around the world.
After my family fled the Ottoman Empire (Great Fire of Smyrna, Turkey) in 1922, the East Asian ship they escaped on dropped them off on an island in Greece. My grandfather was only a toddler (4) at the time. Despite my great-grandmother remarrying a nice, affluent widower, Sotos and his older brother and sisters were still treated badly because they were refugees (yup, they do that in Greece, too). So as soon as he was old enough, he enlisted in the Greek Merchant Marines.
In 1941, Hitler invaded Greece. Sotos was 23.
They were out to sea at the time, so his ship just…didn’t go back to Greece. They stayed out there for a while, men without a country, stealing what they needed to survive from other ships in the area.
Yup.
For a hot minute, my papou really was a pirate.
As legend has it, they “wandered around until they found the closest port” which just so happened to be in America. Like many Greeks at the time, they knew folks that had already come to the U.S.—many of whom owned a restaurant, bar, or diner—so Sotos ended up at his family’s place in Pennsylvania.
Now, this highly skilled and extremely intelligent illegal immigrant couldn’t just hang around being idle. He needed a job. So instead of working at the family restaurant, his cousin hooked him up with an interview at a local company that was desperately in need of mechanical engineers. All their employees had been drafted, you see, and they were dangerously understaffed.
So Sotos—and his cousin who spoke English—went to the interview. Which went very well. Except for the part where my grandfather still couldn’t speak a lick of English.
“Is that going to be a problem?” the interviewer asked.
My grandfather said something to his cousin, who laughed before interpreting. “He says the machines don’t care what language he speaks.”
Sotos was hired on the spot.
In 1944, my grandfather became an American citizen and joined the armed forces (not necessarily in that order), mostly so he could get the blessing to marry my grandmother. He went into the recruitment office to enlist in the Navy but—I swear to you, this is a true, famous family story—he got the directions messed up, took a left instead of a right, and ended up in the Army.
Thankfully, the Army also has some ships, so Sotos became part of the “1102nd Army Marine Ship Repair Company,” according to his records. During his time in the service, he received the American Theatre Service Medal, the Asiatic-Pacific Service Medal, and the Victory Medal.
And, of course, in America, he never went by his birth name.
Everyone called him Sam.
Much love!
xox
Princess Alethea
✨🖤✨🖤✨🖤✨🖤✨🖤✨🖤✨🖤✨
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