The Panos Dukakis-Euterpe Boukis Family
There is an old saying that if you want to live a long life, pick your parents carefully. Fortunately, I did, but my mother and father did more than live long lives. They were both remarkable people, and both of them were great examples of the American Dream come true.
My dad’s parents came from Mytilene, but like a lot of Aegean islanders, they believed they could do better by moving from the island to a predominantly Greek town called Adramiti—or Edremit—in Turkey just a few short miles from the Aegean coast and a short boat ride from their home island. So when people ask me where I am from on my father’s side, I tell them. “Eimai Mytilinios kai eimai Mikrasiatis.”
It was in Adramiti that my father was born. His two oldest brothers had already immigrated to the U.S. by 1912 and were working in the textile mills of Manchester, N.H., Lawrence and, subsequently, Lowell, Massachusetts, and my dad was determined to join them when he was 15. He did so over the violent objection of his father, who thought he was much too young, but he wanted to come to America not just to get a job but because he was determined to get an education in this new land of promise that he had heard so much about.
Defying his father, he boarded a boat at the Turkish port city of Ayvali—itself nearly 100% Greek in those days—and came by himself to the U.S. to join his brothers in Lawrence and Lowell. He worked in the mills, and he worked in restaurants, but he was at night school at five in the afternoon; then spent a year at what was then called American International Academy, now American International College in Springfield, Massachusetts; and twelve years after he arrived at Ellis Island, that young Greek immigrant was graduating from the Harvard Medical School. Don’t ask me how he did it, but he became the first American-trained Greek-speaking doctor in New England, practiced medicine for fifty-two years in Boston, and had two passions in life—his family and his profession. He was a great role model for his two sons, and if I have a reputation for integrity in public life, a lot of it comes from my dad. One of the nurses who worked with him once told me that he was the most ethical man she had ever met.
My mother was another remarkable role model in her own very special way. Her parents were from the mountain villages in Epirus, but they moved their young family to Larissa before my mother was born, and so she spent her first nine years there before the family immigrated to the U.S. to join my mother’s two oldest brothers who had already come here and settled in Haverhill, Massachusetts, a big shoe manufacturing town just ten miles from Lowell. With the encouragement of her family and a remarkable elementary school principal named Stanley Gray, she not only graduated from high school—itself an unusual step for most young Greek immigrant women—but she graduated from Bates College in Lewiston, Maine in 1925 with honors. She was, so far as we can determine, the first Greek-American young woman ever to go away to college in U.S. history—and she became a schoolteacher.
She and my dad met in Haverhill when she was still in high school, but he always said that he intended to marry her from the time he first met her, and they were married in Haverhill on September 4, 1929—my mother’s birthday. Because my dad insisted on their living close to his office, my older brother and I grew up in Brookline, a Boston suburb just west of the city and fifteen minutes from my dad’s office. There were only a handful of Greek families in Brookline at that time, but there was a large Greek community in Boston; our relatives, including my cousin Olympia, lived in Lowell and Haverhill, and my dad’s office was almost literally a stone’s throw from the Greek Orthodox Cathedral at the corner of Parker and Ruggles Streets in Boston. Fortunately for me, my dad’s mother for whom my cousin Olympia was named lived with us for the first seven years of my life. She didn’t speak a word of English, and if I can speak and understand conversational Greek, it has everything to do with my Yaya. And how she loved me! She used to say, “ Aftos o Mihalakis!” as I would take her by the arm when I was six or seven and escort into the dining room for Sunday dinner.
So in a very real sense, I received the gift of my Greek background, heritage and language from parents who achieved much and never let us forget that we had a responsibility to their adopted country. While neither one of them was a political activist, public affairs and what was going on in the world were much discussed around the dinner table. In fact, I remember during World War II in the pre-TV days that everything had to stop for the CBS World News Roundup on radio at 6 p.m. Archbishop Makarios, then a priest who had left Cyprus and was studying at Boston University, was a guest for Sunday dinner. So was Carl Compton, the president of Anatolia College who left Greece after the Nazi invasion and the German takeover of the Anatolia campus as its northern Greek headquarters.
In short, we were blessed with parents who treasured their Greek heritage, loved their adopted country, and conveyed both to their sons in no uncertain terms. In fact, I remember to this day two sayings that they reminded us of over and over again. One was, “much has been given to you, and much is expected of you.” The other was, “economia, Mihali.” Kitty says I am the cheapest guy in America. I think that is a bit extreme, but you can’t be the son of Greek immigrants and not be frugal!
Neither of my parents encouraged me directly to enter public life, but I have no doubt that who they were, what they believed and their pride in both their native and adopted countries played a huge role in that decision. We knew almost from the time we could understand the spoken word that Greece was the birthplace of democracy. Of course, my dad was a good deal more conservative than my mother. She came from a family of passionate Venizelists, while his family had grown up under Ottoman rule. In fact, I only was able to get him to register as a Democrat when I told him that he couldn’t vote for me in a Democratic primary if he continued to be registered as a Republican. But I know from talking to many of his friends and patients that he was very proud of me, and long before I had the slightest notion that I might be governor of Massachusetts, he was telling people—without telling me-- that he expected me to become governor some day.
My dad practiced medicine until he was eighty-two and died two years later. My mother lived until she was five months short of one hundred. Every one of my cousins graduated from college, and one of them is one of the finest actresses in America.
You can’t do much better than that!
