Quarantine
My parents, Stefanos and Evangelia Glitsos Constantinides, arrived in the United States in 1919 on their honeymoon. From Smyrna, Asia Minor they sailed to Piraeus, Greece, married and headed for St. Louis, Missouri where my mother's two brothers and a sister were living.
My parents' intention was to stay in the United States for a few years and return to Smyrna. Unlike many immigrants, they had something worth going back to. The Constantinides family was part of Smyrna's foreign upper class, they owned sizable properties as well as a large home with a view of the city and port in the suburb of Kukluza. My father had attended the city's top schools for foreigners, the Evangeliki School and the American School. He had been trained as an accountant and spoke five languages.
The holocaust of the Greeks by the Turks in 1922, the unexpected destruction of the non-Turkish communities of Asia Minor instantly turned Stefanos and Evangelia--as well as more than one million Greeks and Armenians--into refugees. After they got over the shock of the complete obliteration of their lives in Asia Minor (my mother said she cried for three straight days when she heard the news) they began to make plans to stay in America.
With accounting no longer a possible profession, Stefanos bought a shoeshine parlor from Evangelia's brother John. It was located at 613 North Broadway Boulevard in the downtown business district of St. Louis a few blocks from the Mississippi River and a few blocks from where today's Busch Stadium stands. Sefanos was able to establish a business because he had brought a sizable amount of money with him to this country.
The enterprise thrived, and he eventually opened two more stores, which in addition to polishing your shoes, cleaned and pressed your clothes and blocked your hat. One store was on Delmar Avenue, the other on Easton Avenue, now named Martin Luther King Drive.
After the Smryna Catastrophe other relatives emigrated to St. Louis, including my father's brother George. My father gave him the shoe shine parlor on Broadway to run. The Delmar cleaners was given to my mother's brother Demos, leaving only the third store, the Progressive Hatters and Cleaners on Easton. My father owned the "Progressive" with a fellow immigrant Nestora Papaspanos.
Shortly after establishing himself successfully in business, my father bought a two story flat in St. Louis, at 761 Aubert Avenue, in the West End of the city. Like much of St. Louis' housing stock, it was a narrow brick building, with a large porch that extended across the front of the house on the first and second floors. In the era before air conditioning or even the extensive use of fans, large porches were the primary means residents had of trying to survive the heat and humidity of St. Louis' legendary summers.
Our family always lived on the first floor of the two family flat. I remember my parents had usually rented the flat upstairs to roomers, individual boarders, not the whole unit to a single family.
The effects of the stock market crash of 1929 created an economic recession that slowly started to set in. At first, Progressive Cleaners was not affected, but after several years, my father and Nestora realized that the business could no longer support two families. Reluctantly taking out a loan against his John Hancock life insurance policy, my father bought out Nestora; but business continued to decline until Progressive Cleaners barely sustained even one family.
In 1932 my parents decided to rent the first floor to my uncle Demos and aunt Anna and their three daughters. My parents, older sister Olympia, two younger brothers Platon and Johnny and I moved upstairs. In 1934, my sister Olympia was thirteen years old, and I was ten years old. We were in elementary school. My brother Platon, who was born in 1930, was four years old, a preschooler. My youngest brother John was just a toddler.
Platon got sick one day. My parents thought it was a minor, childhood illness; fever, sore throat, restlessness. My mother tried to treat it with her standard remedies, aspirin for the fever; common home treatment for sore throats at the time was the liberal use of Vicks Vaporub. She would rub the Vicks on the throat, which had its own distinctive pungent smell, then cover it with a handkerchief. Even more than fifty years later the smell of Vicks Vaporub evokes childhood memories. However, no home treatment seemed to make Platon feel better.
St. Louis did not have a large Greek community, though an enclave of fifteen Greek families lived in a two-block area of Aubert Avenue. All suggested their own remedies, but none were effective in treating my little brother. None of them seemed to make him feel better.
When Platon's fever continued to rise my parents took the extreme step of having a doctor, Dr. Kohler, come to the house. He was a man in his fifties; he was known to the family and was a neighbor who lived across the street. The only other time I ever recall a doctor at our home was when my mother gave birth to my younger brothers.
He examined Platon, and prescribed medicine. Platon did not get better, as a matter of fact, he seemed to be getting worse. He had a high fever, and had difficulty breathing. Dr. Kohler said in a second visit to our home a few days later that in his professional opinion, Platon had to be immediately hospitalized since he had diphtheria, a serious contagious disease which at the time struck terror in the hearts of all parents. Platon could not under any circumstances remain in the house any longer, he had to go to the hospital at once. In the 1930's diphtheria was a dreaded disease.
My father, whose Anatolian upbringing had made him reserved, lost all control of his emotions. While he didn't have the money to pay for the hospital, my father said to the doctor, "I will sell everything that I own, even my shoes, if I have to," my father promised, "as long as Platon gets proper medical care."
That's why perhaps, even though it has been over sixty years, I clearly remember my father's impassioned pleas to the doctor. The hospital! It was unthinkable. The hospital brought to mind the worst possible thoughts. How many people survived going to the hospital? In our minds, the hospital was the last stop before the funeral parlor.
My father had named his first born son after his own brother, Platon, who had died in 1928. My father's brother had survived the Catastrophe and left Smyrna as a refugee and become an important surgeon in the Greek Army. He had been vaccinated to travel to Paris, where he was to study the latest surgical techniques, but one of the needles that had been used was dirty and he got blood poisoning and died in a few days. He was only thirty years old.
Now my father was wondering whether his own son would live. Platon was taken to City Hospital, the only one of two public hospitals that would accept a patient with a highly contagious disease. In segregated St. Louis, City Hospital was for white people and Homer G. Phillips for black people.
I don't remember how or who took Platon to City Hospital, located quite a distance from our house, on the extreme southern edge of downtown St. Louis. We had no car, nor did any of our Greek friends, nor any of the other neighbors.
Though only thirteen years old, as the eldest child Olympia was entrusted with the care of our youngest brother Johnny, then two years old. I was the designated escort with the task to maneuver the city's transportation for my mother's daily trips to the hospital, even though I was only ten years old. Visiting Platon at the hospital became a daily ordeal. The forty five minute trip would involve three streetcars, as my mother and I would board the Delmar streetcar at the Aubert Avenue stop going east, ride and transfer to the Broadway streetcar and go south, transfer to the Jefferson line until we reached City Hospital.
I was an extremely verbal child and was charged with being my mother's translator when necessary, with streetcar conductors, with doctors and hospital administrators. My father's day ruled out any hospital visits. He opened the store at eight o'clock in the morning, and closed at nine in the evening, home by ten o'clock, just in time to eat dinner and go to bed, up again at six o'clock in the morning to get ready to go to work.
As if the forty-five minute trip to the hospital by streetcar were not enough, during our first visit we were asked, if we could afford it, to bring oranges for the patients. Since we were not being charged for Platon's hospital stay, from that day on we carried several large bags of oranges as we transferred from one streetcar line to the next to comply with the hospital request,the gift of oranges.
Our daily trips to the hospital were hardly reassuring. Since Platon was in isolation we were never allowed into his room; instead my mother and I would stand outside his first floor window and wave. Good days were ones when we got a wave and a smile back.
My mother, whether from her background in Smyrna, a Greek living under Turkish domination, or from the pain of being an immigrant whose home in Asia Minor had disappeared; had learned to keep her vulnerabilities to herself. During the long trips on the streetcars and during the time of looking at her first born son through a hospital window, she was quiet and subdued. She was possibly thinking, what would the outcome be?
Soon after Platon was admitted to the hospital we faced new difficulties. An official from the Health Department came and posted a large red sign on the front door which said the house was quarantined and everyone was officially prohibited from entering the premises. Luckily, relatives and close Greek friends, including several from Asia Minor, ignored the Health Department order, proving that regional and ethnic ties were stronger than the drive to fully adapt to the laws of their new land. Not to blatantly disregard the quarantine order, they used a side entrance that was not visible from the street. Olympia and I were also forbidden from attending school or even going out into the yard to play with friends. We, too, were in isolation.
More than a week after Platon had been in the hospital a policeman arrived at our home on Aubert and asked to speak to my mother. We had no telephone, the hospital couldn't call us to notify us of any change in my brother's condition. Since the police only came to your home to bring bad news, we were terrified; but he had come to tell us that Platon was getting better and was now well enough to leave the hospital. He did not have diphtheria, after all, Doctor Kohler had misdiagnosed him, he only had had a high fever with heavy congestion. A common childhood illness.
Since Progressive Cleaners also had no phone, my father didn't learn the good news until he came home from work that evening. He was so angry that the doctor had needlessly put us through such distress that he wanted to go across the street to beat Dr. Kohler up. My mother calmed him down and the crises was over.
By the end of the decade the Depression had ended and business at the cleaners picked up. We now had telephones at home and at the cleaners; my father also purchased an automobile (though he never cared about driving it), my sister and I, and eventually my mother learned to drive. Throughout our years in elementary and high school, the social lives of my brothers and sister revolved about the children of the other Greek immigrant families on Aubert and the surrounding blocks, basketball games, picnics, Muny Opera, etc., and growing up it seemed as if we would all stay in that neighborhood forever.
Although it happened in a subtle manner, we were not aware of it; over time our community was dissolving; a victim both of growing affluence and new demographic forces. The great African-American migration to northern cities in the 1940's, including St. Louis, resulted in Aubert Avenue going from being a "white" to a "black" street in a few years. The Greek and Jewish families scattered throughout the city. But until we moved away from Aubert Avenue in 1944, our family never called upon Dr. Kohler for professional assistance again and my sister, brothers and I avoided walking on the other side of the street and passing Dr. Kohler's house. His gross mistake was something we could never forget.
My father continued to work at the cleaners, never returning to either Greece or Asia Minor for a visit. In 1950, shortly after relinquishing management of the Progressive Cleaners, he died. Platon himself is in semi-retirement and the business is only open four days a week now. When he fully retires next year Progressive Cleaners will close for good. It will be an end to an era. Progressive Cleaners has done well by the Constantinides family. .
© 2003 by Jennie Constantinides Vlanton
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