Salamis of Samos
A Laurentian Family
Joseph Graham [email protected]
Montreal’s Griffintown was a tough place in the 1930s and 40s. The Fairyland Theatre had developed there in the early days of cinema. Back in 1908, the Sperdakos brothers started with projections onto the wall of their ice cream and tobacco shop on Notre Dame Street, hoping to draw in passersby. When they saw how many clients came in to see the projections, they built a nickelodeon, an early cinema whose name came from a combination of the price of entry and the Greek word for a theatre housed under a roof. By the end of that first year they had expanded it to 750 seats and named it the Fairyland Theatre.
As the city grew, though, the character of the neighbourhood began to change and the name of the theatre evoked a bygone era. During the Depression things got really tight, but the upside for the Sperdakos family was that they could hire competent people for very little money. Their bookkeeper, another Greek, was an engineer. Basil Salamis couldn’t find much work in his own field during the Depression and so he took on whatever job he could find. He had left home at 17 in 1910, headed for the United States from Samos, a Greek island off the coast of Turkey south of Izmir. Once the home of Pythagoras, Aristarchus and Theodorus of Greek antiquity, it was hard-pressed economically by the meltdown of the 500-year-old Ottoman Empire centered in nearby Constantinople, or Istanbul. But Basil had a sunny disposition and the confidence inspired by the knowledge that the people of Samos were among the greatest scientists and thinkers in history. Pythagoras was familiar to musicians and mathematicians while Aristarchus had determined, a millennium before Copernicus was born, that Earth revolved around the sun. Theodorus invented the level, the lathe and the lock.
Given the grinding poverty of the island, his future was either South Africa or America. With the flip of a coin, and his grandfather's guitar and blessing, he set off to find a way of supporting his widowed mother and younger sister and brother, confident that, as a Samiot, he could deal with whatever came his way.
Sick with typhoid fever, he found himself quarantined when his ship docked in Wheeling, West Virginia. He didn’t know a soul and his natural optimism was put to the test. This new world with its foreign language was very demanding for him. Even his familiar name, Vasili, too unusual for the locals, became Basil for simplicity. Still he pursued his goal, sending what money he could spare home to his mother as he worked in restaurants and hotels in Cleveland, Chicago and Minneapolis. Four years later, he saw an opportunity with the beginning of the Great War and headed for Canada to fight for the British.
Refused by the military, he worked his way from Winnipeg to Vancouver where, at 21, he wrote the entrance exams and was accepted at McGill University in Montreal.
His life changed in Montreal. He became the first Greek to graduate in engineering at McGill and he went to work for General Electric for a number of years. It was during this time that he encouraged his younger brother, Nicholas, to come to Montreal where he became the most sought-after bookkeeper for many among the 500 Greek businesses.
Basil met Pota Kalfas and her father George, a Greek distillery owner. Basil began working for the distillery and soon married Pota. By 1927 they had a daughter, Marika. In 1932, Nicholas returned to Greece, having discovered a vocation to the priesthood. He came back to Toronto, serving as a Greek Orthodox priest there, working for the community during the difficult war years. He transferred to Montreal after the war, in 1945, and served as the religious foundation of the community for the balance of his career.
The Kalfas distillery was not fated to survive the Great Depression and soon Basil was looking for work to provide for his family. That was how he came to be the bookkeeper for the Sperdakos family at the Fairyland Theatre in Griffintown. His sunny disposition could not hide the state of the books from the Sperdakos family, though, and one fateful day in 1933, after a meeting that can only be imagined, the Sperdakos family solved one of their financial problems by simply turning the keys and ownership of the theatre over to him. That was the same year Basil’s son Constantine was born
By early 1934, the sun was beginning to rise from behind the clouds of the Depression. Belgium’s Baron Louis-Jean Empain, the son of Edouard-Louis-Joseph Empain and heir to half of the family fortune, had decided to smile upon Canada. His father had founded the Empain Bank and was obsessed with public transport. He had built train tracks across France, Belgium and Holland. He experimented with electric trams, supplying a long list of cities with their first public transit systems. He built the Paris Métro, the Cairo transit system and a railway through China. He built a railway in the Belgian Congo and was involved in hydroelectric projects and many other industrial developments. His great accomplishments, particularly in the Congo, led King Leopold II of Belgium to recognise him with the title of Baron in 1907. When he passed away in 1929, he left an estate estimated to be worth six billion French francs to his two sons. Clearly the Empains had as much self-confidence as a Samiot like Basil, even if Belgium could not boast of scholarly breakthroughs from antiquity.
Young Baron Louis-Jean Empain established himself in Canada in 1934. He proved to be not only the financial salvation of the Sulpicians and of the University of Montreal, but he also conceived and built a Laurentian vacation resort in Sainte-Marguerite-du-lac-Masson, calling it the Domaine d’Estérel.
The positive, sunny disposition that drove Basil’s life and outlook made it inevitable that their paths would cross.
***
It was in Basil Salamis’s nature to make things work. Having taken over the Fairyland Theatre in Griffintown in the depths of the Depression, he had to make it feed his family. Working together, Basil, his wife, Pota, and the rest of the family made the theatre viable, but the conversations around their kitchen table focused more on academics and sporting events than on the theatre. As Basil’s son Constantine (Con) grew up, he wasn’t encouraged to join the family business. Basil sorely missed his earlier profession of electrical engineering and wanted his son to follow into the applied sciences. In the meantime, Basil and Pota saw new opportunities for their children, Marika and Con. Baron Louis -Jean Empain had gone to take care of his responsibilities in Brussels and his managers here needed someone to look after their new cinema in his Domaine d’Estérel. When Basil heard about their search, he jumped on the opportunity. It would allow his family to enjoy the Laurentians and, he reasoned, there were sure to be other opportunities with the Baron. In the meantime, there were the lakes in summer and skiing in winter. His whole family would benefit while he developed a strong relationship with the young Baron.
Greek has two words for time, the familiar chronos, time as it is measured, and the less-known word, kyros, the time at which things happen. Unknown to them all, one of those things that changes everything was just about to happen.
On May 10, 1940, the German army invaded Belgium. The young Baron Empain had moved from the peace of Canada into the vortex of war as the Belgian government called up all available young men. Reporting for duty, he participated in the heroic “Campaign of 18 Days,” a series of battles that slowed the German advance, giving the surprised Allied troops precious extra time to evacuate Dunkirk. The Baron was captured and taken prisoner by the Germans. The war came into everyone’s lives and the dream of the opportunities Basil would have working with the baron became clouded and distant. The family still had responsibility for both cinemas, but they would have to wait for the end of the war to learn the fate of the baron.
The Canadian government reacted very poorly to the situation, sequestering Baron Empain’s Canadian holdings because of his status as a prisoner and subsequently as a citizen of an occupied country. Empain had married a Montrealer and was committed to his new country. He had been approached to effectively bail out the Sulpicians, who had over-extended themselves trying to establish the University of Montreal and needed to liquidate their Lake of Two Mountains holdings. He obliged by buying the extensive property, hoping to encourage Belgian emigration to it. Somehow, the Canadian government saw only the benefits of grabbing and sequestering his property and assets as though he, himself, had become an enemy. Not surprisingly, he never forgave the Canadian government and ultimately abandoned his projects in Canada, but Basil, loyal to the project the Baron had created, maintained the Laurentian theatre for many years, affording his family some escape from the city. Pota loved the Laurentians and they maintained a year-round vacation residence close to Lac Masson. They were one of the first Greek families to take up skiing in the thirties.
Later, in high school in Montreal, Con worked occasionally at the Fairyland candy counter making popcorn and serving customers. He recalls how rough the crowds were and how they hired Marcel “Rocky” Brisebois to act as a bouncer. Rocky was one of those Griffintown French Canadians who was so tough he was adopted by the local Irish gangs. Even his English had an Irish lilt. About five years older than Con, his career as welterweight boxing champion had not yet begun though he was still a teenager when boxing took him away from the theatre.
In the early hours of October 28, 1940, five months after the collapse and surrender of Belgium, the Italian ambassador rudely awoke Greek Prime Minister Ioannis Metaxas and demanded strategic access to Greek soil and some ports. Metaxas, a dictator who had modelled his government on Benito Mussolini’s Italian regime, knew Greece was at a crossroads. To maintain his authority, he was dependent upon the Greek king (George II) as well as the military, both of whom were favourable to the British-French alliance. Acceding to the ultimatum on that early morning in October would have made Greece a part of the Axis and his government would have become a puppet of Mussolini. He is purported to have answered the Italian ambassador with the French words “Alors, c’est la guerre,” but his official response was “Ohi!” (Greek for “No!”), reminiscent of more current events in Greece, opposing the intensive austerity of the European Community. His statement also served as a battle cry and, within hours, the Italians invaded through Albania.
At home, the Salamis family listened and read the news as the poorly equipped and outnumbered Hellenic army pushed the Italians sixty kilometers back into Axis territory in Albania. Metaxas was a dictator who had a reputation for ruthlessness inside Greece and had taken complete control of the media, burning and prohibiting books – including Plato’s Republic. Even so, Greeks everywhere, including Basil and his family, were proud of the repulsion of the Axis forces that winter and when Metaxas died suddenly in late January of 1941, the defensive line the Hellenic Army had established was named in his honour. A week before what would have been his 70th birthday, in early April, the powerful German army broke through the Metaxas Line and another Axis power, the Bulgarians, also crossed into Greece as occupiers.
Once the German, Italian and Bulgarian occupation was complete, Greek resistance kept their occupiers busy, while Greek nationals elsewhere helped any way they could. From the moment of the invasion, all food had been requisitioned for the occupation forces and death was the penalty for anyone hiding supplies. It wasn’t until 1942 that the British accepted to lift their Mediterranean blockade, allowing neutral Swedish and Turkish ships through with aid. Not able to stand idly by, Basil, together with four other Greek Canadians, co-founded the Greek War Relief Fund in Canada, eventually succeeding in sending Canadian wheat on neutral Swedish ships through the British blockade. Forty thousand people died in the German-occupied greater Athens area alone and the country was pillaged, leaving Greece impoverished and split among occupiers as well as among contending resistance groups. By the end of the war, fully a third of the country was dependent upon aid.
From the beginning of the war, Pota also worked diligently for Greece, becoming president of the Greek section of the Canadian Red Cross. After the war, some 100,000 Greeks immigrated to Canada. Both she and her father, George Kalfas, dedicated themselves to helping Greek immigrants establish themselves in Canada. Even her daughter Marika worked as a volunteer.
At the end of the war, Basil Salamis was honoured by the Greek government, being named Commander of the Greek Order of the Phoenix, and was also recognized with the highest decoration from the Hellenic Red Cross Society, the Golden Cross with Laurels.
During the war, Basil’s mother and his sister, who remained in Greece, experienced serious deprivation and one can only imagine the concerns Greek Canadians would have had for family members in the occupied country. The population of Greece, just one of the many countries destroyed by the war, declined by three million people.
Well after the war had ended, Basil’s whole family remained involved with and concerned for Greece and the Greek immigrants who had found their way to Canada.
It was well after the war, too, that the young Con, a graduate in engineering from McGill, met Katherine Schoolarinos, daughter of a family that had immigrated to Canada from Sparta, Greece, in 1912.
***
Following the end of the war, the Salamis family maintained their presence in the Laurentians. It had become, as it has for so many of us, an important, even central, part of their lives. Basil Salamis undertook to investigate the mineral potential of the lower Laurentians. Titanium, named for the Titans of Greek mythology, was present in the area between Ivry and Saint-Hippolyte. Viscount Ogier d’Ivry had tried to mine it before the Great War, but it wasn’t economically viable because the techniques to separate it from its ore had not yet been developed. After World War II, though, the Soviets were said to be developing titanium for military applications, so of course the United States military did the same, encouraging its mining and development. Basil created the company Laurentian Titanium Mines. It was Con, in his early university years, who discovered the highest grade prospect in the Lac Pin Rouge area of Saint-Hippolyte. That event persuaded him to pursue Mining Engineering at McGill, graduating in 1956.
Some time after graduating, Con fell in love with another member of the Montreal Greek community, Katherine, the daughter of Constantine and Helen Schoolarinos. In her early years, Kathy, reputed for her beauty, worked the cash at the family business, the Diana Restaurant on St. Catherine Street. Her father was a great supporter of the Greek community and normally could not refuse a request from its spiritual leader, Basil’s brother, Reverend Salamis. But one day when he was sick in bed, the priest came to see him to ask that Katherine participate in a Greek community beauty contest. He was adamantly opposed. Her father’s wishes were respected and Katherine did not participate. The Schoolarinos family owned two restaurants, the Diana, and the Cadillac on Peel Street, and they were among the earliest Greek restaurateurs in the city. Anyone familiar with Montreal cuisine today knows how much our Greek restaurant owners have influenced our tastes.
Con and Kathy married in July 1960. By then, Con had moved to Val d’Or, where he was involved in a geophysical consulting partnership. A city girl, Kathy adapted, giving birth to their daughter, Alexandra, in their new, rural community. Soon, though, Con was working on world-wide assignments that led to the discovery of two significant gold mines in Burkina Faso, Africa. How different could that be? Kathy prepared to adapt once more. Then, when they moved to Nicaragua in the mid-sixties, she had great difficulties living in its frontier environment. Political enemies of the Somoza regime disappeared with alarming frequency. The young Salamis family lived in what we would now call a gated community that included a guard at the entrance who was regularly beaten up even though he was heavily armed. Added to Kathy's concerns was the safety of their now three-year-old daughter, Alexandra. A young mother of twenty-three, it was not what she had anticipated when she imagined the bliss of married life. It was too colourful for her, and often for Con as well.
One midweek evening in Managua, Con went with a colleague to a steak house just outside of town. Parked outside the restaurant was a hefty looking station wagon adorned with the national flag and equipped with thick bulletproof glass. Clearly some important event was taking place inside. Upon entering they noted that only four tables were occupied and the patrons were nervous-looking heavily armed young men. In the centre General Somoza, the Nicaraguan dictator, sat with what appeared to be a young girlfriend. All the men, including the general, wore bulletproof vests. In retrospect, it mystifies Con why he and his colleague were even allowed into the restaurant. Somoza’s father had been assassinated during the early thirties while lunching in a restaurant under similar circumstances. As Con and his colleague sat, they became aware that their every move startled the heavily armed youths protecting the general. If their hands dropped under the level of the table top, the tension became almost palpable. The quiet lunch they had imagined was turning into a nerve-wracking mistake. Suddenly, the general rose and his party fell into protective positions around him and his girlfriend as they walked out.
At another time, while looking for rock outcroppings in the rain forest in eastern Nicaragua, Con was struggling through an overgrown bush trail when he felt his right leg start moving to the right on its own. Glancing into the brush, he saw that his foot was firmly planted on the back of a large snake, a boa constrictor. Startled, he jumped back only to watch the huge snake continue on like a moving sidewalk, indifferent to the occasional preoccupied prospector. After that, Con determined to ensure that someone more familiar with the fauna walked ahead.
Kathy returned several times to Montreal, happy to get away from Nicaragua. On one of these vacations home, she discovered she was pregnant. It was early 1966, a few months before Con's two-year contract was due to expire, but Kathy was distressed to discover he had accepted a further one year assignment in Kenya and she had difficulty imagining having her baby in a primitive maternity ward in Africa.
Close friends living in Nairobi, Kenya, did their best to reassure them that it was a much different place, one not to be missed. In spite of all the previous hardships, Kathy consented to join Con there two months after his arrival in Kenya. When she arrived six months pregnant, his first words were "Welcome to paradise," as indeed it was at that time. George was delivered at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital with the help of a midwife, much to the surprise of family in Canada. They spent a delightful year in newly independent Kenya with its huge parks teeming with game, much of which has since disappeared.
Upon their return to Canada, Con worked in Quebec City and Montreal but had no desire to live in a metropolis and Kathy was comfortable with her capacity to adapt, so they looked outside the city. That was when Con’s strong relationship with the Laurentians directed him to come and look here. Even though his father's dream of a titanium mine in the Laurentians ended with his death, and Baron Empain's Laurentian dream ended with his self-imposed exile from Canada and the Domaine d'Estérel, Con’s connection to the Laurentians is a part of the legacy of both those men.
After a thorough search, Con and Kathy settled in Morin Heights where young George attended school before following in his father’s career footsteps. Kathy threw herself into local projects, co-founding Theatre Morin Heights and, later, becoming an actress in it.
Today George, a mining engineer, lives in Vancouver and works on a gold project in Val D'Or. Alexandra is Director of her own company through which she provides leadership and management consulting and coaching services to the Government of Canada. Both return regularly to visit their parents in Morin Heights.
Montreal’s Griffintown was a tough place in the 1930s and 40s. The Fairyland Theatre had developed there in the early days of cinema. Back in 1908, the Sperdakos brothers started with projections onto the wall of their ice cream and tobacco shop on Notre Dame Street, hoping to draw in passersby. When they saw how many clients came in to see the projections, they built a nickelodeon, an early cinema whose name came from a combination of the price of entry and the Greek word for a theatre housed under a roof. By the end of that first year they had expanded it to 750 seats and named it the Fairyland Theatre.
As the city grew, though, the character of the neighbourhood began to change and the name of the theatre evoked a bygone era. During the Depression things got really tight, but the upside for the Sperdakos family was that they could hire competent people for very little money. Their bookkeeper, another Greek, was an engineer. Basil Salamis couldn’t find much work in his own field during the Depression and so he took on whatever job he could find. He had left home at 17 in 1910, headed for the United States from Samos, a Greek island off the coast of Turkey south of Izmir. Once the home of Pythagoras, Aristarchus and Theodorus of Greek antiquity, it was hard-pressed economically by the meltdown of the 500-year-old Ottoman Empire centered in nearby Constantinople, or Istanbul. But Basil had a sunny disposition and the confidence inspired by the knowledge that the people of Samos were among the greatest scientists and thinkers in history. Pythagoras was familiar to musicians and mathematicians while Aristarchus had determined, a millennium before Copernicus was born, that Earth revolved around the sun. Theodorus invented the level, the lathe and the lock.
Given the grinding poverty of the island, his future was either South Africa or America. With the flip of a coin, and his grandfather's guitar and blessing, he set off to find a way of supporting his widowed mother and younger sister and brother, confident that, as a Samiot, he could deal with whatever came his way.
Sick with typhoid fever, he found himself quarantined when his ship docked in Wheeling, West Virginia. He didn’t know a soul and his natural optimism was put to the test. This new world with its foreign language was very demanding for him. Even his familiar name, Vasili, too unusual for the locals, became Basil for simplicity. Still he pursued his goal, sending what money he could spare home to his mother as he worked in restaurants and hotels in Cleveland, Chicago and Minneapolis. Four years later, he saw an opportunity with the beginning of the Great War and headed for Canada to fight for the British.
Refused by the military, he worked his way from Winnipeg to Vancouver where, at 21, he wrote the entrance exams and was accepted at McGill University in Montreal.
His life changed in Montreal. He became the first Greek to graduate in engineering at McGill and he went to work for General Electric for a number of years. It was during this time that he encouraged his younger brother, Nicholas, to come to Montreal where he became the most sought-after bookkeeper for many among the 500 Greek businesses.
Basil met Pota Kalfas and her father George, a Greek distillery owner. Basil began working for the distillery and soon married Pota. By 1927 they had a daughter, Marika. In 1932, Nicholas returned to Greece, having discovered a vocation to the priesthood. He came back to Toronto, serving as a Greek Orthodox priest there, working for the community during the difficult war years. He transferred to Montreal after the war, in 1945, and served as the religious foundation of the community for the balance of his career.
The Kalfas distillery was not fated to survive the Great Depression and soon Basil was looking for work to provide for his family. That was how he came to be the bookkeeper for the Sperdakos family at the Fairyland Theatre in Griffintown. His sunny disposition could not hide the state of the books from the Sperdakos family, though, and one fateful day in 1933, after a meeting that can only be imagined, the Sperdakos family solved one of their financial problems by simply turning the keys and ownership of the theatre over to him. That was the same year Basil’s son Constantine was born
By early 1934, the sun was beginning to rise from behind the clouds of the Depression. Belgium’s Baron Louis-Jean Empain, the son of Edouard-Louis-Joseph Empain and heir to half of the family fortune, had decided to smile upon Canada. His father had founded the Empain Bank and was obsessed with public transport. He had built train tracks across France, Belgium and Holland. He experimented with electric trams, supplying a long list of cities with their first public transit systems. He built the Paris Métro, the Cairo transit system and a railway through China. He built a railway in the Belgian Congo and was involved in hydroelectric projects and many other industrial developments. His great accomplishments, particularly in the Congo, led King Leopold II of Belgium to recognise him with the title of Baron in 1907. When he passed away in 1929, he left an estate estimated to be worth six billion French francs to his two sons. Clearly the Empains had as much self-confidence as a Samiot like Basil, even if Belgium could not boast of scholarly breakthroughs from antiquity.
Young Baron Louis-Jean Empain established himself in Canada in 1934. He proved to be not only the financial salvation of the Sulpicians and of the University of Montreal, but he also conceived and built a Laurentian vacation resort in Sainte-Marguerite-du-lac-Masson, calling it the Domaine d’Estérel.
The positive, sunny disposition that drove Basil’s life and outlook made it inevitable that their paths would cross.
***
It was in Basil Salamis’s nature to make things work. Having taken over the Fairyland Theatre in Griffintown in the depths of the Depression, he had to make it feed his family. Working together, Basil, his wife, Pota, and the rest of the family made the theatre viable, but the conversations around their kitchen table focused more on academics and sporting events than on the theatre. As Basil’s son Constantine (Con) grew up, he wasn’t encouraged to join the family business. Basil sorely missed his earlier profession of electrical engineering and wanted his son to follow into the applied sciences. In the meantime, Basil and Pota saw new opportunities for their children, Marika and Con. Baron Louis -Jean Empain had gone to take care of his responsibilities in Brussels and his managers here needed someone to look after their new cinema in his Domaine d’Estérel. When Basil heard about their search, he jumped on the opportunity. It would allow his family to enjoy the Laurentians and, he reasoned, there were sure to be other opportunities with the Baron. In the meantime, there were the lakes in summer and skiing in winter. His whole family would benefit while he developed a strong relationship with the young Baron.
Greek has two words for time, the familiar chronos, time as it is measured, and the less-known word, kyros, the time at which things happen. Unknown to them all, one of those things that changes everything was just about to happen.
On May 10, 1940, the German army invaded Belgium. The young Baron Empain had moved from the peace of Canada into the vortex of war as the Belgian government called up all available young men. Reporting for duty, he participated in the heroic “Campaign of 18 Days,” a series of battles that slowed the German advance, giving the surprised Allied troops precious extra time to evacuate Dunkirk. The Baron was captured and taken prisoner by the Germans. The war came into everyone’s lives and the dream of the opportunities Basil would have working with the baron became clouded and distant. The family still had responsibility for both cinemas, but they would have to wait for the end of the war to learn the fate of the baron.
The Canadian government reacted very poorly to the situation, sequestering Baron Empain’s Canadian holdings because of his status as a prisoner and subsequently as a citizen of an occupied country. Empain had married a Montrealer and was committed to his new country. He had been approached to effectively bail out the Sulpicians, who had over-extended themselves trying to establish the University of Montreal and needed to liquidate their Lake of Two Mountains holdings. He obliged by buying the extensive property, hoping to encourage Belgian emigration to it. Somehow, the Canadian government saw only the benefits of grabbing and sequestering his property and assets as though he, himself, had become an enemy. Not surprisingly, he never forgave the Canadian government and ultimately abandoned his projects in Canada, but Basil, loyal to the project the Baron had created, maintained the Laurentian theatre for many years, affording his family some escape from the city. Pota loved the Laurentians and they maintained a year-round vacation residence close to Lac Masson. They were one of the first Greek families to take up skiing in the thirties.
Later, in high school in Montreal, Con worked occasionally at the Fairyland candy counter making popcorn and serving customers. He recalls how rough the crowds were and how they hired Marcel “Rocky” Brisebois to act as a bouncer. Rocky was one of those Griffintown French Canadians who was so tough he was adopted by the local Irish gangs. Even his English had an Irish lilt. About five years older than Con, his career as welterweight boxing champion had not yet begun though he was still a teenager when boxing took him away from the theatre.
In the early hours of October 28, 1940, five months after the collapse and surrender of Belgium, the Italian ambassador rudely awoke Greek Prime Minister Ioannis Metaxas and demanded strategic access to Greek soil and some ports. Metaxas, a dictator who had modelled his government on Benito Mussolini’s Italian regime, knew Greece was at a crossroads. To maintain his authority, he was dependent upon the Greek king (George II) as well as the military, both of whom were favourable to the British-French alliance. Acceding to the ultimatum on that early morning in October would have made Greece a part of the Axis and his government would have become a puppet of Mussolini. He is purported to have answered the Italian ambassador with the French words “Alors, c’est la guerre,” but his official response was “Ohi!” (Greek for “No!”), reminiscent of more current events in Greece, opposing the intensive austerity of the European Community. His statement also served as a battle cry and, within hours, the Italians invaded through Albania.
At home, the Salamis family listened and read the news as the poorly equipped and outnumbered Hellenic army pushed the Italians sixty kilometers back into Axis territory in Albania. Metaxas was a dictator who had a reputation for ruthlessness inside Greece and had taken complete control of the media, burning and prohibiting books – including Plato’s Republic. Even so, Greeks everywhere, including Basil and his family, were proud of the repulsion of the Axis forces that winter and when Metaxas died suddenly in late January of 1941, the defensive line the Hellenic Army had established was named in his honour. A week before what would have been his 70th birthday, in early April, the powerful German army broke through the Metaxas Line and another Axis power, the Bulgarians, also crossed into Greece as occupiers.
Once the German, Italian and Bulgarian occupation was complete, Greek resistance kept their occupiers busy, while Greek nationals elsewhere helped any way they could. From the moment of the invasion, all food had been requisitioned for the occupation forces and death was the penalty for anyone hiding supplies. It wasn’t until 1942 that the British accepted to lift their Mediterranean blockade, allowing neutral Swedish and Turkish ships through with aid. Not able to stand idly by, Basil, together with four other Greek Canadians, co-founded the Greek War Relief Fund in Canada, eventually succeeding in sending Canadian wheat on neutral Swedish ships through the British blockade. Forty thousand people died in the German-occupied greater Athens area alone and the country was pillaged, leaving Greece impoverished and split among occupiers as well as among contending resistance groups. By the end of the war, fully a third of the country was dependent upon aid.
From the beginning of the war, Pota also worked diligently for Greece, becoming president of the Greek section of the Canadian Red Cross. After the war, some 100,000 Greeks immigrated to Canada. Both she and her father, George Kalfas, dedicated themselves to helping Greek immigrants establish themselves in Canada. Even her daughter Marika worked as a volunteer.
At the end of the war, Basil Salamis was honoured by the Greek government, being named Commander of the Greek Order of the Phoenix, and was also recognized with the highest decoration from the Hellenic Red Cross Society, the Golden Cross with Laurels.
During the war, Basil’s mother and his sister, who remained in Greece, experienced serious deprivation and one can only imagine the concerns Greek Canadians would have had for family members in the occupied country. The population of Greece, just one of the many countries destroyed by the war, declined by three million people.
Well after the war had ended, Basil’s whole family remained involved with and concerned for Greece and the Greek immigrants who had found their way to Canada.
It was well after the war, too, that the young Con, a graduate in engineering from McGill, met Katherine Schoolarinos, daughter of a family that had immigrated to Canada from Sparta, Greece, in 1912.
***
Following the end of the war, the Salamis family maintained their presence in the Laurentians. It had become, as it has for so many of us, an important, even central, part of their lives. Basil Salamis undertook to investigate the mineral potential of the lower Laurentians. Titanium, named for the Titans of Greek mythology, was present in the area between Ivry and Saint-Hippolyte. Viscount Ogier d’Ivry had tried to mine it before the Great War, but it wasn’t economically viable because the techniques to separate it from its ore had not yet been developed. After World War II, though, the Soviets were said to be developing titanium for military applications, so of course the United States military did the same, encouraging its mining and development. Basil created the company Laurentian Titanium Mines. It was Con, in his early university years, who discovered the highest grade prospect in the Lac Pin Rouge area of Saint-Hippolyte. That event persuaded him to pursue Mining Engineering at McGill, graduating in 1956.
Some time after graduating, Con fell in love with another member of the Montreal Greek community, Katherine, the daughter of Constantine and Helen Schoolarinos. In her early years, Kathy, reputed for her beauty, worked the cash at the family business, the Diana Restaurant on St. Catherine Street. Her father was a great supporter of the Greek community and normally could not refuse a request from its spiritual leader, Basil’s brother, Reverend Salamis. But one day when he was sick in bed, the priest came to see him to ask that Katherine participate in a Greek community beauty contest. He was adamantly opposed. Her father’s wishes were respected and Katherine did not participate. The Schoolarinos family owned two restaurants, the Diana, and the Cadillac on Peel Street, and they were among the earliest Greek restaurateurs in the city. Anyone familiar with Montreal cuisine today knows how much our Greek restaurant owners have influenced our tastes.
Con and Kathy married in July 1960. By then, Con had moved to Val d’Or, where he was involved in a geophysical consulting partnership. A city girl, Kathy adapted, giving birth to their daughter, Alexandra, in their new, rural community. Soon, though, Con was working on world-wide assignments that led to the discovery of two significant gold mines in Burkina Faso, Africa. How different could that be? Kathy prepared to adapt once more. Then, when they moved to Nicaragua in the mid-sixties, she had great difficulties living in its frontier environment. Political enemies of the Somoza regime disappeared with alarming frequency. The young Salamis family lived in what we would now call a gated community that included a guard at the entrance who was regularly beaten up even though he was heavily armed. Added to Kathy's concerns was the safety of their now three-year-old daughter, Alexandra. A young mother of twenty-three, it was not what she had anticipated when she imagined the bliss of married life. It was too colourful for her, and often for Con as well.
One midweek evening in Managua, Con went with a colleague to a steak house just outside of town. Parked outside the restaurant was a hefty looking station wagon adorned with the national flag and equipped with thick bulletproof glass. Clearly some important event was taking place inside. Upon entering they noted that only four tables were occupied and the patrons were nervous-looking heavily armed young men. In the centre General Somoza, the Nicaraguan dictator, sat with what appeared to be a young girlfriend. All the men, including the general, wore bulletproof vests. In retrospect, it mystifies Con why he and his colleague were even allowed into the restaurant. Somoza’s father had been assassinated during the early thirties while lunching in a restaurant under similar circumstances. As Con and his colleague sat, they became aware that their every move startled the heavily armed youths protecting the general. If their hands dropped under the level of the table top, the tension became almost palpable. The quiet lunch they had imagined was turning into a nerve-wracking mistake. Suddenly, the general rose and his party fell into protective positions around him and his girlfriend as they walked out.
At another time, while looking for rock outcroppings in the rain forest in eastern Nicaragua, Con was struggling through an overgrown bush trail when he felt his right leg start moving to the right on its own. Glancing into the brush, he saw that his foot was firmly planted on the back of a large snake, a boa constrictor. Startled, he jumped back only to watch the huge snake continue on like a moving sidewalk, indifferent to the occasional preoccupied prospector. After that, Con determined to ensure that someone more familiar with the fauna walked ahead.
Kathy returned several times to Montreal, happy to get away from Nicaragua. On one of these vacations home, she discovered she was pregnant. It was early 1966, a few months before Con's two-year contract was due to expire, but Kathy was distressed to discover he had accepted a further one year assignment in Kenya and she had difficulty imagining having her baby in a primitive maternity ward in Africa.
Close friends living in Nairobi, Kenya, did their best to reassure them that it was a much different place, one not to be missed. In spite of all the previous hardships, Kathy consented to join Con there two months after his arrival in Kenya. When she arrived six months pregnant, his first words were "Welcome to paradise," as indeed it was at that time. George was delivered at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital with the help of a midwife, much to the surprise of family in Canada. They spent a delightful year in newly independent Kenya with its huge parks teeming with game, much of which has since disappeared.
Upon their return to Canada, Con worked in Quebec City and Montreal but had no desire to live in a metropolis and Kathy was comfortable with her capacity to adapt, so they looked outside the city. That was when Con’s strong relationship with the Laurentians directed him to come and look here. Even though his father's dream of a titanium mine in the Laurentians ended with his death, and Baron Empain's Laurentian dream ended with his self-imposed exile from Canada and the Domaine d'Estérel, Con’s connection to the Laurentians is a part of the legacy of both those men.
After a thorough search, Con and Kathy settled in Morin Heights where young George attended school before following in his father’s career footsteps. Kathy threw herself into local projects, co-founding Theatre Morin Heights and, later, becoming an actress in it.
Today George, a mining engineer, lives in Vancouver and works on a gold project in Val D'Or. Alexandra is Director of her own company through which she provides leadership and management consulting and coaching services to the Government of Canada. Both return regularly to visit their parents in Morin Heights.
Joseph W. Graham [email protected]
Adapted from Main Street for the Quebec Heritage News, Volume 10, #1. Special thanks to Con and Kathy Salamis for the patience and encouragement; additional references include G. Scott MacLeod, Dans l’Griff-In Griffintown: Three personal French Canadian narratives on their homes, public spaces, and buildings in the former industrial neighbourhood of Griffintown, Department of Art Education, Concordia University; Rocky Brisebois obituary http://www.federationgenealogie.qc.ca/avisdeces/avis/pdf?id=24998, accessed June 27, 2015; Information pertaining to the Fairyland Theatre was found at https://movietheatres.wordpress.com/the-movie-theatres/fairyland, accessed June 28, 2015.
Adapted from Main Street for the Quebec Heritage News, Volume 10, #1. Special thanks to Con and Kathy Salamis for the patience and encouragement; additional references include G. Scott MacLeod, Dans l’Griff-In Griffintown: Three personal French Canadian narratives on their homes, public spaces, and buildings in the former industrial neighbourhood of Griffintown, Department of Art Education, Concordia University; Rocky Brisebois obituary http://www.federationgenealogie.qc.ca/avisdeces/avis/pdf?id=24998, accessed June 27, 2015; Information pertaining to the Fairyland Theatre was found at https://movietheatres.wordpress.com/the-movie-theatres/fairyland, accessed June 28, 2015.