Family Histories: A Tale of Two Greek Americans

Artist Thomas Kapsalis (1925–2022)

I learned a few weeks ago that modernist painter, Thomas Kapsalis (1925–2022), died at the age of 97. You’ll notice we share the same last name. He was my father’s second cousin whom I’d only met two times in my life before my 30s. Thankfully, my sister, writer and women’s health activist, Terri Kapsalis, and her husband, gallerist and music critic, John Corbett, reconnected with Tom after I left Chicago. Terri teaches at the Art Institute of Chicago where Tom taught painting. John also taught at the Art Institute and later opened an art gallery, Corbett vs. Dempsey, focusing on Midwest artists. He represented Tom in the later years of his career.

Because of Terri and John’s efforts to get to know Tom, I visited him on trips back to Chicago for the holidays. I was able to meet his wife, Stella, and Adamandia, both artists and craftswomen in their own right. I follow Adamandia Kapsalis on Instagram and love watching her work in process. I also have a few pieces from Stella who makes everything from purses with beautiful woven textiles to stuffed animals which delighted my daughter when she was a toddler. Stella and Tom share a generous spirit and an artistic eye. I love being at their house and seeing how they surround themselves with beauty, and they have clearly imparted this to their daughter who makes abstract quilts.

It struck me how different Tom’s life was from that of my father’s, Andreas Kapsalis. They shared common ancestry, last names, and both received Fulbright scholarships, my father’s in chemistry and Tom’s in painting. However, they had totally different lives partly because of where their lives unfolded.

Tom was born in the United States in 1925. My father was born in Greece in 1936. My father was a very young boy during WWII and told us of how they didn’t have enough to eat, or even a toothbrush, during Nazi occupation. You could see the effects of this in his mouth which was filled with gold caps and crowns, a mark of an immigrant who came from meager beginnings. My father remembered sweeping the sidewalks in Athens’ town squares to earn a little money for his family and seeing Greeks who had been publicly executed, hanging, as a warning to others who tried to oppose the German and Italian occupants. He was barely out of toddlerhood and witnessed horror.

My father would fondly recall the kind gesture of the Kapsalis relatives who had emigrated to the U.S. prior to WWII to open restaurants and raise families. They sent used clothing, including underwear, and other necessities to Greece in big boxes after WWII. He recalled that it felt like Christmas opening these boxes of used items. These are the same relatives who had a son, artist Thomas Kapsalis, who had become a prisoner of war during the Battle of the Bulge. It was a kindness during the lingering effects of WWII in both countries. My sense is that my relatives in the U.S. understood the horror my father and other Greeks had lived through with the war, and that the ongoing impact was much worse for those who remained in Greece.

Back row, from left to right: My sister, Terri, unknown man, unknown woman, Aunt Bessie, me, my grandmother. Front row, left to right: My great uncle, my grandfather.

The path of their lives diverged after WWII. Tom Kapsalis returned to the U.S. to continue his career in art-making. Surprisingly, he returned to Germany in the early ’50s on a Fullbright-Hays Fellowship to study with artist Willi Baumeister. My father grew up with extreme financial insecurity with a father who drove him hard to succeed in school. My grandfather, Apostolis Kapsalis, would frequently remind my father that he would end up shining shoes in the public squares if he didn’t work hard enough, a motivation my father carried throughout his life.

Andreas Kapsalis, possibly in Central Park, New York, New York City, c. 1966

Work was what my father did. He became top of his class in chemistry at the University of Athens. Realizing there were no opportunities to pursue his studies in Greece, he left for the U.S. in 1966 as a Fulbright scholar. Just a year later, Greece was under military dictatorship or junta, and he used some of his scholarship funds to support his family and younger brother, Panegiotis, my Uncle Takis. He emigrated to the U.S. not speaking a word of English when he arrived. He watched television to learn English while completing his master’s degree at the University of Chicago where he met my mother. He then went on to complete a PhD at the University of Illinois in immunology when my sister was born. I love a family picture of my father at his desk cradling a tiny baby, my sister, Terri who is 4 years older than me.

Glenda Hawley, my mother, and Andreas Kapsalis, my mother, getting married at the Greek Orthodox Church in the south side of Chicago. They married without telling my grandparents in Greece.

My Uncle Takis who is nine years younger took a different path. He was born after WWII in 1945 and came to the U.S. with a scholarship to pursue his MSc degree in applied and theoretical statistics at Purdue University in Indiana. It was a short trip to where we lived outside of Chicago and I remember his regular visits when I was a young child. I loved getting to know this ‘freer’ version of my father who was clearly having the time of his life attending college in the U.S. After receiving his degree and working for three years at Indiana University Purdue University in Indiana , he returned to Greece to a relatively more stable country than what my dad left, one that was free of the military dictatorship. While Greece was still a quite difficult place to pursue a career, my uncle managed to reach upper management status in the private sector. His life story had a remarkably different backdrop than my father’s.

Panagiotis Kapsalis, my Uncle Takis, in the mountains of Peloponese near my patrilineal village, Vytina.

My father’s salary was what sustained our family and sent my sister and me to university. As most first-generation kids, exceeding at school and securing a steady income was goal number one. His work ethic became ours. Even though I had inklings of creative leanings throughout my childhood, I chose more ‘practical’ pursuits as an immigrant’s daughter does to secure her future. Right out of undergrad, I took a job at an educational software company during the dot com boom as a content writer eventually becoming a project manager and graphic interface designer. As I was approaching age 30, I had a 401k and felt a level of security but wasn’t satisfied. I applied to grad school in industrial design and was laid off by the software company when it was sold. However, the question lingers to this day; what would have happened if I followed my dreams and went into textile or fashion design?

When I reconnected with Tom and his family, it gave me a sense of possibility to see that a Kapsalis family member succeeded as an artist. Tom was the gentlest soul in stark contrast to my grandfather who was a survivor. My father could also be gentle, but he struggled with PTSD his entire life and the extreme fear and anger that comes alongside it. He had night terrors throughout his later years something that I have experienced during my own acute times of stress. I even believe my father to have been creative and sensitive and saw hints of this when we roped him into decorating holiday cookies. Other signs of familial creativity came from my grandmother, Eleftheria, who was a genius in cooking, knitting, and other motherly duties that were her realm. My grandfather, Apostolis, had a beautiful voice and sang old Greek folk songs as we drove through the Peloponnesian mountains to his native village, Vytina. My favorite refrain was the one he used as we were close to arriving: “Vre paidia ap’ tin Vytina, pos pernate ap’ tin pina?” I repeated this throughout my childhood not knowing that it meant, “Children of Vytina, how does it feel to be starving?”

I am not saying that Tom had an easy life as a first-generation Greek American and prisoner of war. Greece has an incredibly difficult history of occupations and economic distress (as recent as the austerity measures inflicted by the EU). It is a southern European country that lived through terrible wars and had more difficulty being a self-sustaining country with few natural resources. Tom likely felt this history in his genetic make up. However, something about being born in the U.S. and being allowed to pursue his art might have saved him.

I wish my father had found a creative outlet, as well as some relief from his childhood trauma. Because of the pandemic, I did not see my father the last two years of his life, from ages 83–84. His body and mind were wracked with several diseases; diabetes, kidney failure, Parkinson’s, and extreme anxiety. I only realized this past year that my father and I both suffered from PTSD due to childhood trauma. Mine was from competitive ice skating, his from war. It was hard to be in the same family suffering from the same disease.

They didn’t have a name for what I was experiencing as a little girl. When I stopped eating while training several hours per day at an ice skating training camp, my pediatrician told my mom that I needed to drink some milk shakes. I’m sure they had no words for what my father suffered in Greece in the 1940s. I’ve been reading up on PTSD and learned about intergenerational, or legacy trauma, and the pieces are starting to come together for me. It’s something Ukrainians will be dealing with for a long time. It’s something enslaved descendants and Native American communities have been dealing with for a long time in the U.S. It can persist for generations, and it has been my struggle as a mother to not apply the same pressures put on me as a little girl.

My father died alone in a nursing home on September 29, 2021, in Greece, just a week after my sister was finally able to get there and extract him from yet another horrific situation where his second wife from the Ukraine, was stealing from him and emotionally abusing him. We knew the situation was bad but had no way of knowing how horrific it was for him because we weren’t able to visit during the pandemic due to Greece’s travel restrictions and my father’s fear of the vaccine. His wife had convinced my father, an immunologist who had worked in pharmacology his whole life, that the American vaccines were unsafe. We didn’t want to expose my father, a frail 84-year-old, to that risk. My uncle and aunt were also limited in what they could do but they checked in on him regularly and were immensely helpful when my sister finally got there in 2021 to transition him to a good nursing home. He died one week later, free of his second wife, but alone due to the COVID-19 quarantine 10-day policy.

It aches my heart that I wasn’t there to hold his hand. He moved back to Greece in 2001 after my parents divorced. My sister and I went annually, and my daughter got to know her Pappou (grandfather) and connect with her culture and family. This same connection made me feel special as a little girl. Greeks have a welcoming spirit and I always felt like a little queen in my grandmother’s eyes. She fed me until I burst hoping to fill me with love to sustain me through the long gap before I would see her next.

I think I have broken the cycle since my daughter’s spirit is strong and creative. There are moments when I see myself in her, a funny, vivacious little girl who loves to dance, tell jokes, and laugh. Then I wonder where my bright spirit went all those years waking up at 4AM in the morning to train in ice skating before school. And I mourn how long it took for her to come back to me. But my daughter is thriving and as my dear sister says, I am breaking the cycle. For that, I am thankful.

I miss you, Dad. Thank you for everything you gave me which includes an empathy for people who struggle in the same way you and I did. I love you.

Our last visit to Greece in 2019 before the global pandemic. My father, Andreas Kapsalis, hugging my daughter. We had tickets to visit Greece in April 2020 just after the U.S. shutdown its borders for the COVID-19 pandemic.