Diaspora

Tuesday, December 27, 2005

Cheezborger, No Kitsch: Greek American History Lessons

By Alexander Kitroeff

A recent, brief visit to Chicago turned into a pilgrimage for me to the sites of Greek America’s past and continuing presence. I was in town for the Modern Greek Studies Association’s biannual “symposium,” but I skipped the morning sessions and headed westward to Chicago’s Greektown (or, more accurately, to what is left of Chicago’s old Greek neighborhood, a string of restaurants and stores along Halstead Street). Little did I know that I’d encounter a more authentic Greek America when I returned to the city’s center for a late lunch at a much smaller but more famous landmark, the Billy Goat Tavern.

American and Greek flags were flying from a huge construction crane, silhouetted against the Sears Tower, that was busy clearing a plot of land on Halstead Street, the site of the city’s future Hellenic Museum and Cultural Center. The museum, established in 1992, will move out of its cramped quarters in a nearby office building and into its own structure, which will provide ample space for exhibits, an archive, a library, and an auditorium. Its new facilities will enable it to do an even better job in memorializing an important chapter in the history of the Greeks of the United States.

When Greek transatlantic emigration began in earnest in the 1890s, Chicago was a major destination. It offered work in its industries and retail sector, and was the gateway for all the Greeks who went on to the railroads and mines of the Mountain West. Soon, Chicago acquired the biggest Greektown of all US cities and, by the 1920s, a population of over 20,000 Greeks. It would take the Greek influx in the 1950s to push the numbers of Greeks in New York higher than those in Chicago.

Greek America’s unofficial capital during the first half of the twentieth century has been celebrated by Greek American writers like no other American city. Chicago has been a regular reference-point in the prolific writings of novelist Harry Mark Petrakis and of the late Theano Papazoglou-Margari, the doyenne of Greek American women newspaper columnists. In Papazoglou-Margari’s story, “Ê allê Eugenia” (“The Other Eugenia”), two women who left cosmopolitan Istanbul to settle in Chicago praise their new surroundings. The narrator feels at home in Chicago because it has trees and grass verges that remind her of home, while the title-character does not feel the need to join her relatives who have moved to Greece because Chicago is like a “big village by the sea.”

Papazoglou-Margari opens “To Chroniko tês Halstead Street” (“Chronicle of Halstead Street”), with the words: “Halstead Street is not a road. It is a world.” She proceeds to paint a picture of a bustling multiethnic neighborhood on Chicago’s near West Side with its own Greek section that eventually became known as “Greektown.” Chicago mayor Richard R. Daley proved far less sensitive to the cultural and historical significance of one of his city’s main ethnic neighborhoods, however. In 1961, he razed most of it to build the campus of the University of Illinois at Chicago, with support from the city’s retailers, who saw this as a way for their businesses, which had supposedly been “hemmed in” by the ethnic neighborhood, to expand westward.

What passes now as Greektown is basically a strip-mall of ethnic businesses that are reaping the benefits of gentrification. It is made up mainly of restaurants, coffee shops, grocery stores, and specialty shops that sell Greek music, Greek Orthodox icons, Greek soccer shirts, and trinkets such as blue and white kombologia and lapel pins that proclaim—ironically, considering what happened to Greektown—“Greek Power.” Thus, in search of something between ethnic memory and ethnic kitsch, I returned downtown and visited Greek America’s most famous diner, the Billy Goat Tavern—although less famous perhaps among Greek Americans than it is infamous among baseball and Saturday Night Live fans who watched the show in the 1970s.

It is quite extraordinary that among the thousands of diners that Greek Americans have owned and run for over a century, this eatery would become associated with two facets of American popular culture. The first is the “curse” cast on the Chicago Cubs by the owner of the original tavern, William “Bill” Sianis, in 1945. Sianis, a Cubs fan, was ejected from Wrigley Field because he insisted on viewing the game accompanied by his pet goat, Murphy. There was no formal prohibition against taking pets to the baseball stadium at the time, but the billy goat’s smell was apparently too much for the ushers, as well as, legend has it, for the Cubs owner himself, Philip Knight Wrigley.

It was Game 4 of the World Series, and the Cubs were leading the Detroit Tigers by two games to one. Upset at the ejection, especially since he had bought two tickets, Sianis uttered the now infamous curse: “The Cubs ain’t gonna win no more. The Cubs will never win a World Series so long as the goat is not allowed in Wrigley Field.” The Cubs ended up losing that World Series (four games to three) and have failed to make another Series appearance since then. They are known as baseball’s losingest team, and while they’ve come close to the championship and made some rare postseason appearances, the curse has, apparently, proved too strong.

The story is widely available in print and on the Web, not to mention in the tens of framed newspaper articles spanning half a century that adorn the Tavern’s walls, but I got William’s nephew, Sam Sianis, to recount it for me. He graciously took time off working behind the counter of the establishment he’s owned for 40 years and began with the story of his uncle. I frowned, trying to process the facts of a Greek immigrant owning a billy goat, being a Cubs fan, and wanting to take the animal with him to a World Series game. Sam registered my disbelief and afterward mentioned that his uncle was something of a showman. But in order to complete the explanation, he added: Το τραΐ μυρίζει άσχημα, πιο πολύ από την κατσίκα (The billy goat smells bad, worse than a goat).

Sam’s use of “τραΐ” instead of the more formal “τράγος” pointed to his rural background in Arkadia, which I asked him to talk about. He’s from the village of Palaiopyrgos, actually “Bodia” or “Bodea” before a Greek government commission “Hellenized” its name in 1937 during the Metaxas dictatorship. A website on the village’s history, administered by the University of Patras, mentions a Petros Sianis aka Bodaitês (from Bodia) who fought in the Greek war of independence. The area, the highlands of the nomos of Arkadia, has witnessed waves of emigration to America for over a century.

Sam, born in 1934, immigrated to the United States in the 1950s and started off as a “piatas” in San Francisco, working a 60-hour week. I paused, not knowing what to write—it is so rare to hear that term describing Greek Americans this side of the Atlantic, and so frequent to hear it spoken in a deprecating tone by Greeks in Greece. Sam catches me out. “Yes, write it,” he said, “there are some people who don’t want to admit where they started from, but not me.” (His strong Arkadian pronunciation of Greek was intact after a half-century in America.) After a stint on the railroad, Sam moved to Chicago in 1963; by the next year, he had joined his uncle at the Billy Goat Tavern, which had relocated to its present address in downtown Chicago.

William rescinded the curse in 1969, a year before his death, but the Cubs kept losing, so Sam, along with Socrates, a descendant of the original billy goat, took the joint responsibility of lifting the curse. In 1984, they were invited to a now-welcoming Wrigley Field, and that year the Cubs made their first postseason appearance since the curse had been cast. But, as Sam explained, “they had us to the games here in Chicago, and they won two games, but they didn’t take us with them when they went to San Diego, and they lost three there and were eliminated.” Other visits to Wrigley Field have followed, but 1984 was the closest Sianis and the goat would come to reversing the curse.

By that time, the Billy Goat Tavern had been featured on Saturday Night Live, thanks to Sam’s own brand of showmanship. He and his assistant, Bill Charuhas, used to shout out the orders to the cook, going down the line of waiting customers, and replacing the French fries that had been ordered with potato chips (“there was no room to fry potatoes,” Sam explained) and Pepsi with Coke. Their accented shouts became part of the famous SNL skit featuring the late John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Bill Murray, and Loraine Newman that aired in October 1978 and included the now immortal words, “Cheezborger, Cheezborger, Cheezborger, no fries, cheeps! No Pepsi, Coke!” The skit added more fame to the Billy Goat Tavern, and helped make it a Chicago landmark in an instant. Presidents, senators, actors, and other celebrities have visited over the years—but never a Greek prime minister. (I should add here that many people remember the running tagline as, “No Petsi, Coke”—or even, “No Coke, Petsi!” Thus does popular culture take on a life of its own.)

Naturally, the Tavern now parodies the parody of itself. All the while I was talking to Sianis, his assistant, Nontas, from the village of Levidi a few kilometers away from Palaiopyrgos, was replicating an old Sianis and Charuhas tactic that led to the skit, getting customers to order double cheeseburgers. As the line of customers approached the counter, Nontas “ordered”: “Dablecheez! Dablecheez! Dablecheez!” Sam meanwhile was telling me proudly that he was opening a branch in Washington, DC—there are already six more Billy Goat Taverns around Chicago. When I asked whether his children are following the family tradition, he gave me a sharp look. A stupid question, of course: I know Greek Americans worked in diners to help their kids have a better future, not to take over the parents’ shop. So it is with Sianis, despite or perhaps because of the Billy Goat legend. All six have gone to college, he answered, the pride resonating in his voice, but as they are lawyers and accountants, they have helped him keep an eye on the business.

Sam would not let me go without a bite to eat. I accepted gratefully and took my place on the storied counter. What I would be having—with double-cheese, naturally—was too obvious for either of us to mention. Sam took the opportunity to help in flipping the burgers on the grill and confirmed that he still does all the jobs around the store. Serving me the cheeseburger, he said, deadpanning: “Δεν έχω φράις, πάρε τσιπς” and handed me a packet. He then asked me what I wanted to drink. By then, I knew my Greek American history well: “Κόκα-Κόλα, παρακαλώ.” (I hope I got that right.)