NICK SCULLY
In what was formerly the bustling kitchen of her family’s restaurant, Patsy stands beside her father as workers haul away the last of the large kitchen appliances to which she has grown so familiar. The pots and pans and the flour sifter her mother used to make her famous chocolate cakes are all long gone. Three men have finally finished their struggle to get the oven through the back door and into the alley. All that remains in the kitchen is her father’s butcher block.
The butcher block was always the most worn item in the kitchen, but now it looks beaten. The scars on its surface have never seemed so deep, and the six legs that the long block stands on suddenly look weak in the knees. Patsy can’t help but think about all the half cows that she had seen her father disassemble on that very block over the past ten years, and the delicious steaks and ribs and roasts that would fill the kitchen with lingering aromas throughout the week. She remembers the look of pride he reserved only his butcher block, the one item in the kitchen that he felt was truly his.
The men walk back into the kitchen. After a moment to assess the entire room, they head directly for the butcher block. Patsy hears him utter a quiet, “Oh no.” She takes his hand and feels it tremble against hers. His eyes are locked on the butcher block as the men slowly carry it away, the look of pride now replaced with one of grief. Patsy squeezes his hand as the butcher block leaves his sight forever.
Later that night, after her father has signed some documents for unknown men, Patsy waits outside for her father to lock the doors to the restaurant. Once the lock clicks, he hides his face in his hands and his shoulders begin to shake, and sixteen-year-old Patsy realizes that this is the first time she’s really seen her father cry.
~ ~ ~ ~
Charles Karvon was always a man who wanted more; but his name wasn’t always Charles Karvon. He was born Zaharias Karvouniaris in 1901 in a small town in Greece near Sparta. As he was growing up, his father would work alternatively in America and home in Greece for years at a time; he wanted more for his family than the poor shepherd life that was his only foreseeable future in Greece. In 1913, Zaharias’ family moved to America permanently; his parents would never set foot in Greece again.
Zaharias and his little sister were able to live in America on their parents’ visas. For the first few months of their migration, the family moved from New York to New Hampshire to Arizona, where Zaharias’ father had the opportunity to work in the coal mines. Zaharias only stayed there for a year and a half, and he attended the local school where a neighbor was a teacher. On the first day of classes, Zaharias walked to school with the teacher, who told him that his name was too difficult to pronounce; it would be easier to just call him Charles. Charles Karvon. From that day on, everyone knew him as Charles—or even more simply, Charlie.
His family then moved to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, but in 1917, Charlie moved to Chicago by himself at the age of 16; he never returned to school after 8th grade. He lived in a small apartment near the variety store and restaurant where he worked with three other young men; however, it was rare that all four occupants were in the apartment at the same time. They lived and worked in shifts: when two of the men were at the restaurant, the other two would be at the apartment sleeping. When Charlie went to work, he would relieve one of his co-workers so that man could go and get some sleep. Since Charlie was not a citizen but yearned to be independent, this repetitive routine was the best he could hope for in the big city of Chicago.
~ ~ ~ ~
It is 1919, and Charlie has worked at the variety store for two years. He is on dinner break after a six-hour shift; he has four more hours ahead filled with restocking the grocery shelves and hauling garbage to the alley. He gets free meals from the store, but is only allowed to eat leftovers or simple meals like soup or salad. After the day he’s had, he couldn’t care less about the chef’s rule—with only a wink of his chocolate-colored eyes and a few specially-picked words, Charlie had persuaded the waitress to order him special of the day: pot roast.
He’s halfway through the succulent dish when the beefy chef storms through the kitchen door, yelling obscenities in Greek, and snatching the plate from Charlie mid-bite. Without hesitation, and despite the hundred and fifty pounds that separate him from the chef, Charlie swiftly grabs the sugar bowl on the table and swings around until it collides with the side of the chef’s head. Seeing the broken glass and sugar and blood, Charlie bolts out the door before anyone has time to react.
~ ~ ~ ~
Charlie then briefly lived with and worked for an uncle who owned a restaurant in Chicago, where he learned how to cook, but after a year the uncle had to sell the restaurant. So Charlie moved back to Cedar Rapids, where he bought a small sandwich shop for $400, in cash of course. He was 20 and wanted to try working for himself, so he kept it for three months, then sold it for $2,000. He thought had done pretty well. Later he learned that the couple who bought it from him actually cleaned out the dark and dirty basement that Charlie never bothered to set foot in—they found an old suitcase with $2,500 in cash.
In 1922, Charlie and his parents moved to Chicago—his sister had gotten married young and subsequently moved to California with her husband. Charlie, his uncle Dionissios, and a friend opened a restaurant at 63rd and Prairie. They did alright, serving all kinds of food to the people of West Lawn. Dionissios bought a six-legged butcher block and they started cutting their own cuts of beef, instead of ordering cuts from a butcher. Charlie learned the most efficient ways to cut up a cow, and became an expert over the next five years.
Then, the friend who owned the restaurant with him died in a car accident, leaving behind a wife and two kids. Charlie and Dionissios had to support them, but this soon put them out of business. Dionissios put the butcher block in storage and Charlie bought himself a little silver Maxwell with the cash he had saved—he had crashed his fancy motorcycle a few years back and had been using a bicycle ever since—and moved down to Memphis.
After a quick stint as the head chef at a poorly-run barbeque restaurant, Charlie moved back to Chicago in time for the 1933 World Fair. He sold food in a tent that was owned by Frank Champulous. When the Fair reopened the next year, Charlie worked for Frank again. After briefly owning a nightclub in Lansing and discovering that his partner was a con man, Charlie started working for Frank as a chef in his kitchen.
~ ~ ~ ~
By 1936, Charlie (now going by Charles) is finally starting to feel rooted. His hair had fallen out years ago from previous stresses, but he’s doing well, enjoying his job, and has plenty of Greek friends in the restaurant business. Because he and Frank became quick friends, Charles finally has some job security, without worrying about the fact that he still isn’t a citizen. When he was a bit younger, he feared that if he were to apply for citizenship, Greece would deny him and would force him to move back in order to serve in the army. Now that he’s more comfortable and managing life in America without it, the thought to gain citizenship doesn’t cross Charles’ mind.
It’s the end of a hot Thursday in July; Frank and Charles and a bunch of men loved to get together to play cards after work, and tonight, Mr. Vassilopoulos is hosting again. Halfway through the first game, Mr. Vassilopoulos’s daughter Anne walks into the dining room to bring her father a glass of soda. For the third time this month, Charles compliments Anne and asks her to go out on a date with him. For the third time this month, Anne turns him down with the retort, “I don’t date bald men.” Everyone laughs and Frank playfully jabs Charles in the ribs, but he laughs along with them and gives Anne a wink. She rolls her eyes as she leaves the room.
It would be another two months before Charles finally wears her down and she agrees to go on a date with him—and in January of 1937 they are married. Four years later, they have had three children.
~ ~ ~ ~
In 1942, just after the United States entered World War II, Charles got very sick with arthritis. For two years he was completely bedridden and couldn’t work, and Anne had to support the family like the army wives—even though her husband wasn’t fighting overseas. Despite her natural gift for math and numbers, she worked at Hallicrafter’s Defense Plant, making airplane radios.
Once Charles got well and was able to work for about a year, he and Anne managed to save enough money to open a restaurant of their own in 1945. He decided that it could only be named Anne’s Restaurant.
Anne’s Restaurant was located at the southwest corner of 26th & Pulaski. It wasn’t very large; there were five tables that could seat four people each, plus a chrome-lined counter with eight stools covered in red vinyl. Behind the counter was a glass case that housed homemade desserts by Anne herself. Above the case was a window into the kitchen, through which the waitresses were handed dishes. And housed in the kitchen was the six-legged butcher block—Dionissios had passed it down to Charles, who was sure to put it to good use, day in and day out.
Anne’s usually smelled like burgers and fries, but they served all kinds of food: beef stroganoff, chicken pot pie, stuffed peppers, stuffed cabbage, pork dumplings (these were for the Bohemians in the area), spare ribs, Memphis-style barbeque chicken, chop suey made with pork tenderloin, BLTs, Reubens, scrambled eggs, pancakes, milkshakes, ice cream sundaes to die for. Charles tried to do a different dinner special every day, but the meatloaf was far and away the neighborhood favorite.
~ ~ ~ ~
At three in the afternoon on a Friday, Charles decides that he’s earned a break from his daily 6AM to 2AM routine at the restaurant. Anne is at home with Helen and Teddy, but his middle child Patsy (short for Patricia) wanted to spend the day with her Daddy. She’s six and can never seem to get enough time with him. He tries to convince her to stay at the restaurant with the nice waitress he hired last week, but he knows that she’ll be tagging along with him to the Greek coffee shops on Halsted. These little shops are for men only, so as they walk out the front door of Anne’s, Charles reminds her that she will have to hide under the table while he talks to his friends.
She just smiles and says she doesn’t mind, holding his hand as they walk and swinging it back and forth. When they arrive at the coffee shop, Charles finds a table right by the door, quickly ushering Patsy under the white tablecloth. She nestles against her father’s legs, tracing the patterns on the tablecloth and listening to her Daddy say something to his friends about wishing he were able to help someone named Truman regain office. But before long, the conversations she doesn’t understand turn back to the card game they are playing and his thunderous laugh echoes off the walls.
~ ~ ~ ~
When Patsy and her siblings were a bit older, they weren’t exempt from work by any means. If a waitress didn’t show up in the morning, Charles would call home and have Anne get the girls out of bed to help with the morning rush before it was time for school. And they worked most days after school as well, after dad fed them whatever they wanted, of course—Patsy almost always got a burger, hand-ground and spiced and always made one hundred percent fresh by her father. And he paid them, but made them put three-quarters of their wages in the bank; the rest was theirs to spend as they pleased. Patsy always spent her money on jewelry—because of this, Charles called her his “gypsy girl.”
Things were going well for Charles. He had built a restaurant on his own that had lasted for five years, and it was always full. He had bought the space next door and turned it into a banquet hall that could seat 70 plus people. He hosted and catered weddings and small award ceremonies and union meeting and dances and retirement parties and birthday parties and basically any event you could think up. Entertaining people and interacting with them was his favorite part of his job. He didn’t have many employees, but he was always sympathetic to their concerns outside of the restaurant. If a waitress’s child was sick, he would give her a few days off and a pay advance. If a cook’s wife lost her job, he would give him a bonus and bring a few meals over to their home. He would throw picnics and holiday parties for his employees, and he would vehemently threaten anyone who dared say something about the presence of Mamie—the black woman who worked at Anne’s as a dishwasher—and her family.
When Patsy’s older sister was old enough to go to high school, Charles was proud to be able to send her to Sacred Heart Academy, an all-girls private boarding school in Downers Grove. In 1954, Patsy followed, but things were starting to get really hard for Charles. His wife had given birth to another baby, and they now had a two-year-old to take care of at home. A restaurant named Hasty Tasty Snack had opened up kitty-corner from Anne’s a year or so beforehand—Hasty Tasty was a precursor to the fast food restaurants which would come to rise in the next few decades. They had four or five restaurants in Chicago, and were able to buy in bulk and sell cheap, speedy food. Suddenly, people were more eager to grab a quick burger than to sit down in a family restaurant and wait for a higher quality meal. He had to close the banquet hall just before Patsy started high school.
In 1956, the restaurant went bankrupt. All the people that Charles owed money to (including the banks) came and took his equipment as partial payment. He and Anne continued to work various jobs to get their children through school—Charles had a truck and would sell sandwiches to the workers at Western Felts during their lunch break; eventually they opened a cafeteria and he got a job there—but he never owned, or even worked in, another restaurant again.
~ ~ ~ ~
It is early November, 1984. Patricia is visiting her father in the hospital. He has suffered both a heart attack and a stroke in the past ten years, and things aren’t looking great for him. She hands him an absentee ballot for the presidential election. He’s giddy and warns her not to look, since it’s “supposed to be a secret ballot.” Patricia rolls her eyes. He only became an official citizen of the United States four years ago at the behest of his wife, and this is the first time he has been allowed to vote, to have a say in the way the country runs. She’s a very vocal Democrat, but she just knows that her father is voting for Regan.
He finishes his voting and slowly seals the envelope, checking carefully to make sure it’s properly closed. He winks as he hands it to Patricia, laughing as he says, “Don’t you peak now, gypsy girl.” Patricia laughs along with him; she hasn’t heard him laugh like this in years.