At 8 a.m. Sunday, Charles Kuralt of CBS-TV will visit with Tessie Argianas of South Ogden Avenue.
Not in person, of course. TV superstars rarely make house calls anymore. The loss, though, is Kuralt`s. When his camera crew came out the other day, they found her kitchen table covered with cakes and cookies the 82-year-old Argianas had stayed up half the night to bake. They also got a lesson in patriotism that will be hard to forget.
An apartment-sized version of the Statue of Liberty sits atop Argianas`
television set, which is why ”CBS News Sunday Morning” is interviewing her.
This is, in fact, The Lady`s year: Having been shuttered for repairs, the statue is to be the star of her own gala coming-out party on the Fourth of July, and the months leading up to that bash will be dotted with preliminary festivities. Argianas began her own countdown to that celebration more than 75 years ago in a mountainside village in Greece.
”You got to talk to my mama,” Delores Janota, Argianas` daughter, wrote to the folks at the Ellis Island Oral History Project. ”I read that you`re looking for immigrants with memories of what their first sight of the Statue of Liberty meant. Trust me–you won`t have to go any further, once you`ve heard hers!”
So interviewer Debby Dane and a technician flew out to Chicago to tape record Argianas for the Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation`s archives. Kuralt`s producers asked if they could tag along, too, as part of the media kick-off of the statue`s celebration, and they and several other reporters trekked up the narrow staircase and crowded into a tiny apartment above an Ogden Avenue storefront.
”No problem, no problem. We made plenty to eat. Everybody grab a plate and help yourself,” said Argianas as a steady stream of strangers paraded through her front door.
Feeding lots of folks is no big deal, Argianas explained. Until her husband`s death, the couple operated a restaurant in the storefront below.
”We called it Pete`s And Tessie`s Drive In,” she said. ”It was nothing fancy. But it put our three children through school. Some place I still got a old menu. Where, I don`t know right this second.”
The memories her out-of-town guests had come in search of were better preserved. A painting of the Statue of Liberty used to hang on the wall of her second-grade school room in Greece, Argianas recalled. ”Mrs. Thespina, our teacher, would come up beside my desk and say: `Anastasias! Where you got your mind at?` That was what they called me before my name was shortened,”
Argianas said. `I used to just stare and stare at the picture of The Lady. Holding up that torch, she looked so beautiful I`d forget to keep up with the lesson the class was supposed to be working on.”
To the young Argianas, that picture was doubly symbolic. First off, it stood for the far-away land into which her father had disappeared, promising to send for his wife and daughters once he found work and had money for their steamship tickets.
To the little girl, it must have seemed that the Statue of Liberty also guarded streets of gold. The wealthiest family in their tiny village had brought back money made in America to build a big, western-style home that clearly set them off from the rest of the villagers, most of whom were shepherds and fishermen. Every morning, as she passed that huge villa on her way to school, Argianas would dream of the magical country where people could make themselves so fabulously rich.
In truth, Argianas` imagination was running away with her. When she finally arrived in the United States, she quickly discovered the other side of the immigrant experience. Her father, it turned out, had started his new life by working for a florist and, along with his fellow non-English-speaking employees, sleeping on a cot in the basement of the shop. Even when the family was reunited in Chicago, the Argianases had to put in their time in Halsted Street`s cold-water tenements before being able to afford a more modern apartment.
Even then, the way to a better life had required that Argianas surrender her childhood. Just after her 11th birthday, her father took her to the Hart Schaffner & Marx factory. ”She`s 16–she just looks small for her age,” her father explained to the foreman on the morning she put her hand to a sewing machine`s wheel and started her carear as sweat-shop worker.
”But don`t get me wrong,” Argianas added. ”This is the greatest country. I know. Once the kids were grown, I used to travel lot. I`ve seen plenty of other places. I was on the `Loving Boat.` What those countries got? Nothing. Every time I get back, I say: Thank God I`m home again. There`s no place in the world like America!”
As if to show that she was willing to put her money where her sentiments are, Argianas picked up the miniature Statue of Liberty. Fondling it for a moment or two, she explained that she had seen a television ad in which the replicas were offered as an inducement for contributions toward the statue`s renovation.
”I heard them talking about how The Lady is so poor now, and how this time she needs money,” Argianas said. ”So I sent a check to help her out. I figured that I owed her that much. Except for this country, how would five of my grandchildren been raised to go to college? Every one of them, they have big positions now.”
” For a long time we didn`t know about a lot of this,” Delores Janota said when the technicians called a time-out to change tapes and double check their equipment. ”Back then, it wasn`t popular to be ethnic.” So she and her two brothers, Chris and Jerry, grew up knowing only a few words of Greek. Coming of age when the country still naively subscribed to the ideal of a melting pot, the younger Argianases were raised to be 100 per cent Americans above all else. Consequently, until recently the story of their parents`
migration from Europe to Chicago was a missing chapter in their family history.
The coming of Argianas` grandchildren changed that. ”At family gatherings, I always remember grandma telling us kids about her life in the Old Country,” said 23-year-old Laura Janota, who had been standing at the edge of the group and evesdropping on Argianas` memoires. ”But even now, some of this is new to me. I can never get enough of her stories.”
”That`s my baby,” Argianas said. ”Laura and me, we got a date. Next summer when they open up the Statue of Liberty again, we going to be right there to take in all the doings. You should see her do what the young people call that punk dancing. In that way, she`s just like her grandma: Me, I was born with music in my body.”
Indeed, when the videotapes were rolling again, Argianas recalled that she literally danced her way to the New World. During the 19-day trip, the ship picked up passengers from a dozen different countries, all of whom, like Argianas and her mother, were transplanting their family`s fortunes to the New World.
”I was just nine years old and the youngest child on the boat,”
Argianas said, ”So everybody adopted me. Of course, we couldn`t speak each other`s language. But that didn`t matter. One day some people would show me how to do the polka or an Italian dance. Another time, I`d show them the Greek dancing we`d do in our village on holidays.”
Except for those deck-side cultural exchanges, though, there was little on that trip that resembled her later voyage on the ”Loving Boat.” Argianas` journey to America was hardly a luxury cruise. In those days of mass immigration, steamship operators made their profits by cramming as many Americans-to-be as possible into their ships. En route to the New World, Argianas recalled, two of her fellow immigrants died, and the other passengers had to put up with living conditions that were primitive even compared with the back-country village were she had been born.
”We slept in iron beds stacked up on top of each other. There wasn`t much drinking water, and we ate lousy food off of tin plates and cups,”
Argianas said. ”Sometimes even now, I can still hear the ”clank, clank”
sound those plates made banging against each other all the way to America.”
One morning, though, Argianas came up on deck and finally saw a sight that made the journey worthwhile. At long last, their ship had entered New York harbor and was heading for Ellis Island, where its immigrant cargo would be unloaded. There, off to one side, was the real-life version of that Lady whose mesmerzing image had decorated Argianas` classroom.
”Everybody was rushing around on the deck, trying to get to the head of the line for the inspection so they could be the first off the boat,”
Argianas said. ”I grabbed this Greek man by his arm and pointed to The Lady. `You know what that is,` I asked him.”
”Some statue, I guess,” Argianas recalls the fellow saying, trying to get free of the little girl`s grasp so he could catch up with the crowd of his fellow passengers.
”Some statue!” Argianas answered him. ”You better take another look, mister. You see that torch she`s holding? That torch means liberty. The Lady, she`s holding it out for all of us. She`s opening up her arms to welcome all the peoples of the world to the land of liberty. You see her expression? She`s saying: This is a new country, and I need everyone of you to help us build it up.”
Startled at that civics lesson, the old man asked Argianas how a young girl like herself knew all of that.
”So I told him I learned it in school,” Argianas said. ”And believe you me, I haven`t forgotten a word of that lesson–it`s still written on my heart.”
