Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, June 20, 1995 TAG: 9506210040
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: KATHLEEN WILSON
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
The men were in one heated discussion. The ladies, in another.
I couldn't understand a word. All eight were speaking Greek.
Not the ``it was all Greek to me'' thing.
They were speaking the language of their homeland - Greece.
For the first time since I've lived in Roanoke - three years on a commuter basis and now nearly seven full-time - I felt like I was at home.
Yes, on Sunday, June 11, in the hall of the Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church - where Penelope and George Frank Roupas were celebrating their 60th wedding anniversary with 250 people - it felt like I had somehow landed in my home town of Pittsburgh.
It wasn't my religion. And I sure didn't speak the language. But I was home.
While I've been honored to have met some of the nicest folks I'm sure I'll ever meet here, there has always been something missing.
Ethnicity.
George and Penelope Roupas and everyone at this event were the mirror images of the parents and the grandparents of my very best friends. Friends whose last names are Wisniewski, Donatelli and Hanrahan. Who still live in a town where we grew up rooting for a great baseball team with players named Clemente, Sanguillen and Mazeroski.
The Roupas' anniversary party reminded me of the first wedding I went to in Pittsburgh. It was Polish-Italian, there were 400 guests and the families made all the food.
Many of the 50th wedding anniversary affairs I've been lucky enough to cover have some sort of great love story behind them. War brides. Folks who got married during the war after knowing knew each other for a week or a month.
But the Roupas' love story is one I'm more familiar with. Grandfather Frank Roupas came to America from Athens in 1910. In 1930, he and his son, George, founded the Sunshine Cleaners and Hatters in Roanoke. In 1935, George and Penelope Simopoulos were married by a Greek Orthodox priest in Lynchburg.
The same year, the family moved to the Roupas building on the Roanoke City Market. George retired in 1984; Penelope in 1985.
Theirs is the kind of quiet, everyday love that finds its roots in a homeland, Greece. The kind of love where God comes first, family second, and respecting and understanding your roots is probably a close third.
It's the kind of love everyone at this party at the Greek Orthodox church knows firsthand, no matter how old they are. No matter how long they've been married.
Take Betty and Jim Triantafilles of Hardy.
Betty understood why I felt like I was in Pittsburgh, even though she was born and raised in Danville in a home where English was the second language. Her family spoke Greek. When she married Jim - whose name in Greek is really Athanasios Demetrios Triantafilles (imagine learning to write that name as child!) - she married a man who through shared cultural family experiences already knew her very well before they'd even met.
``We had to go to Greek school after regular school in Danville,'' Betty recalled. ``I remember trying to hide my Greek books because I thought everyone in school was looking at me funny.''
Tom Triantafilles, Jim and Betty's 7-year-old son, goes to Fishburn Park Elementary School. When I asked him what kind of name Triantafilles was, he told me proudly it was Greek.
Here's what I got when I asked him about what it was like to be Greek:
``We eat different breads on different holidays,'' he told me. ``One Greek bread had little gold money in it. And for Easter, our bread has ...''
``Eggs wrapped in it?'' I finished, wondering how I knew that, which friend of mine went to a Greek Orthodox church back home.
Tom doesn't have to go to Greek school, and English is the language in his home.
``But I want to learn Greek when I'm 10,'' he said. He says he's going to learn from his Gia-Gia (pronounced ya-ya), his grandmother.
Roanoke Mayor David Bowers was on hand to declare June 11, 1995, George F. and Penelope S. Roupas Sixtieth Diamond Anniversary Day by city proclamation.
Although he talked a lot of politics, even bringing along Vice Mayor John Edwards to plug him for the state senate, and told a lawyer joke I could have lived without, I hear Mayor Bowers would probably understand why I felt so at home in such an ethnic setting, even if it wasn't my own.
Rumor has it he throws the best St. Patrick's Day party in town.
by CNB