It Was Greek to Me

By Pat Ferguson Hanson

It Was Greek to Me is the story of a young American diplomat in the l970s. Pat Ferguson served as the Assistant Cultural Attach at the U.S. Embassy in Athens, Greece. She also fell in love with a writer known as Greeces Hemingway. Pat came of age in a very exotic locale, far removed from the infl uences of her home, her family and her church. In her memoir, she dissects that process honestly and reveals why she eventually decided to return to her roots in Minnesota.


Front cover photo by Danbu14 (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

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Good material!...
Judith Guest,
Author, Ordinary People

The story is fantastic! Wonderful material about the two young women (you and Barbara )
Sheila OConnor,
Author, Where No Gods Came

It was such a pleasure to read your memoirs... Especially interesting was your personal slant on the ex-patriots life in Athens and your role as a professional in the U.S. Foreign Service It was an informative as well as entertaining read. And to have hobnobbed with so many famous people must have been a very heady experience.
Nancy Raeburn,
Author, Mykonos: a Memoir

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Dec 29, 2011
• ISBN: 9781469136646

Pat Ferguson Hanson

Pat Ferguson Hanson lives in Stillwater, Minnesota and teaches communications at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls. She is married to artist-educator Jim Hanson, with whom she has three teenage daughters. Pat claims Minneapolis as her hometown. She began her career as a journalist and spent over ten years as a member of the U.S. Foreign Service. While in the diplomatic corps, Pat served as Assistant Cultural Attache at the U.S. Embassy in Greece. Tommy and Me is Pat's second memoir. Her first, The Five Goodbyes, Mothering My Child With Down Syndrome, was published in 2003.

Book preview

It Was Greek To Me

Pat Ferguson Hanson

Copyright © 2011 by Pat Ferguson Hanson.

ISBN:          Softcover                                 978-1-4691-3663-9

                   Ebook                                      978-1-4691-3664-6

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

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CONTENTS

Introduction

Acknowledgements

Note to Readers:

PART I

Chapter 1 How I Got the Assignment

Chapter 2 VOA

Chapter 3 Greek Language Training

Chapter 4 Pre-departure

Chapter 5 En route to Athens

Chapter 6 Arrival in Athens

Chapter 7 First Weeks

Chapter 8 Finding a Home

Chapter 9 Eligible Bachelors in Greece?

Chapter 10 Celebrations

Chapter 11 A New Year (1976)

Chapter 12 Cyprus

Chapter 13 Friends in Greece

Chapter 14 Bicentennial

Chapter 15 National Symphony Orchestra

Chapter 16 Mom Visits

Chapter 17 Cultural Affairs

Chapter 18 Meeting Barbara

Chapter 19 Meeting Hillar

Chapter 20 Elections

Chapter 22 Holidays, 1976

Chapter 23 Egypt

Chapter 24 Rent is Due

Chapter 25 Blood Money

Chapter 26 I Meet George

PART II

Chapter 27 I Meet Thanasis

Chapter 28 Thanasis Courts Me

Chapter 29 London

Chapter 30 Back From London

Chapter 31 The Honeymoon

Chapter 32 After the Honeymoon

Chapter 33 Back to the Village

Chapter 34 Costa’s Birthday

Chapter 35 We’re Eating Each Other Alive

Chapter 36 Checking in with Barbara

Chapter 37 One Last Trip to the Village

Chapter 38 Scandinavia

Chapter 39 Home from Scandinavia

PART III

Chapter 40 Greece Without Thanasis

Chapter 41 My Birthday

Chapter 42 Christmas, 1977

Chapter 43 George Meets My Plane

Chapter 44 My Brother Dan Arrives

Chapter 45 Dad Visits

Chapter 46 Greek Easter

Chapter 47 Kazan Festival

Chapter 48 Wrapping Things up in Greece

Chapter 48 The Funeral

Chapter 49 Going Home to Stay

EPILOGUE

Dedicated to my husband Jim

INTRODUCTION

Three times in recent years I’ve returned to Greece, ostensibly to conduct tours for students at the university from which I’m now retired. But in reality, I’ve probably returned so often to this magical place, at least in part, in an effort to discover who I was when I lived in Greece for three years in the 1970s. And why the life I lived there, while serving as a diplomat at the American Embassy in Athens, was so different from the life I’d lived here in the U.S.

In all, I’ve returned to Greece five times since I left there over 30 years ago. Three of those times I have been accompanied by my husband Jim, to whom I’ve been married for 25 years. On our last visit to Greece two years ago, Jim met my first love, a writer known affectionately as Greece’s Hemingway. I wouldn’t say I’ve pined for Thanasis these many years. It’s more complicated than that. After meeting Thanasis, Jim said, You must have been a different person when you lived here. Either that or I don’t really know who you are. Jim knows who I am. He may not know who I was for that three year period of time, from 1975-78. I’m not sure I do either. While I explore that question, I invite you to relive with me some of the most significant years of my life, which I spent living in one of the most beautiful places on earth.

As I recall, characters in the films Shirley Valentine, Mama Mia, Sisters of the Travelling Pants and My Life in Ruins were more than a bit transformed when they went to Greece too. But their stories were fiction. I will do my best to stick to the facts.

Acknowledgements

This book has been a long time coming. As I sat down to write it, I realized I’d been working on it for over ten years, writing snippets in classes I’ve taken from so many gifted writers/instructors, including Margo Fortunato Galt, Kate Dayton, Judith Guest, Scott Russell Sanders, Sandra Benitez, Sheila O’Connor, Craig Lesley and Nancy Raeburn. I’ve been encouraged by these instructors and the students in their classes to tell this story in its entirety. I knew it was something I needed to do for myself, but work, children and the two other books I needed to write first took my attention away from this memoir. Then the kids left the nest, I retired, and suddenly I had the time and space to craft this book.

All along, my writing group has listened to elements of this story. They too made me believe I had to write it down from beginning to end. Thank you Rivertown Writers: Peggy Hale, Jane Holstein, Marlene Cox, Penny Smith, Mary Louise Olson and Margarita Hendrickson for listening with interest to the tales I had to tell.

Thank you to others who read this memoir in draft, served as fact checkers and offered enthusiasm: Kathy Matel, Jim and Kathy Findley, Bill Haratunian, and Ann Henson Feltgen.

And thank you to my husband Jim who is anxious to have this book made into a movie. He wants Julia Roberts or Hilary Swank to play me. The other reasons why I love this man will become apparent as you read my book.

Note to Readers:

This is a memoir. The characters in this book are based on real people. With only a few exceptions, I have used their actual names. I believe my memory is quite good, but these events did occur over thirty years ago. I take full responsibility for any lapses in memory or mistakes that may have found their way into these pages.

PART I

Chapter 1

How I Got the Assignment

You got a call from USIA Personnel in Washington while you were out walking on the beach, said my Aunt Jane. They have an overseas assignment for you. The guy left his number for you to call him back.

Wow, you’re kidding! Where am I being sent?

He didn’t say.

It was Labor Day weekend, 1974, and I was visiting my relatives, Jane and Chet Bejma, who lived in Virginia Beach, Virginia. I spent several holidays with them in the townhome they rented in retirement. (I had left my family home in Minneapolis, after graduating from college in Omaha, and moved to Washington, D.C., to work for the U.S. Government.) If I couldn’t find a ride, I made the five hour trip to Virginia Beach by bus; I didn’t have a car.

How did they even know where to find me? I didn’t leave your number with anybody at the office.

I don’t know, but the guy seemed very anxious to reach you and said you should call him back as soon as possible.

My heart was racing. I had been trying to land an overseas assignment ever since 1971 when I started working at the Voice of America (VOA), the radio division of the United States Information Agency (USIA). Could this finally be it? I had already turned down opportunities to serve in Quito, Ecuador and Kinshasa, Zaire. If this new assignment was not one I could live with, I doubted I’d be offered another. If that was the case, I had already decided I’d pursue more vigorously one of several opportunities that had come my way recently to switch from radio to TV broadcasting. I had decided to let the best option that presented itself first determine my career future.

Pray this is a good offer, I thought before lifting the receiver off the wall phone in the Bejma’s kitchen. I’d tried to leave the sand at the entry to their elegantly furnished home located just blocks from the beach. I sat down at their kitchen table where I’d enjoyed so many great home-cooked meals and more than a few beers. My hands were shaking but I tried to steady myself before dialing.

Mr. Mosely? This is Pat Ferguson, returning your call.

Oh, good. I’ve been trying desperately to reach you to tell you that I have an assignment for you in Athens, Greece, to become the new Assistant Cultural Attaché.

My dreams have come true! I had put Athens at the top of my wish list of places to serve.

Yes. But there is a slight problem. Greek language training began two weeks ago and if you want this job, you’re going to have to get back to Washington right away and get yourself to Greek class at the Foreign Service Institute by Tuesday at 9:00 A.M.

I can do that. No problem. But what about my bosses at the Voice of America? Do they know about this?

Yes, they weren’t too happy about it. But Hal Banks signed off on your transfer.

Well, okay then. I’ll be in class first thing Tuesday morning. I’m absolutely thrilled about this and I can’t thank you enough. You won’t be sorry. I’ll work hard and do my very best to serve the Agency well in Athens.

Like surrogate parents, Jane and Chet Bejma had been standing next to me in their large sun-filled kitchen, listening to one side of this conversation and they could tell how excited I was to have whatever assignment I’d just received.

I’m going to Athens, Greece! I shouted, as I gave first Jane and then Chet a big hug. I can’t believe it!"

Congratulations! they said simultaneously. Jane and Chet knew all about transfers, as Uncle Chet had been a salesman for General Electric until retirement and they’d lived in many cities throughout the U.S.

Aunt Jane, I’m going to need some fancy new clothes for this job and I’d love it if you could go shopping with me before I have to leave next summer.

Sure! I love to shop and I know where to find all the bargains down here, she said.

Jane, like my mom, had impeccable taste. Though technically my mother’s aunt, Jane was about my mom’s age. So they were more like cousins than aunt and niece. Mom visited Jane and Chet often during World War II, when the Bejmas were stationed in New York. Mom, born Margaret Mary O’Keefe, was an airline stewardess for TWA in those days and she flew in and out of New York, where she was based. Mom’s work was considered glamorous in the 1940s but thirty years later, I expected more for myself. The Foreign Service—the diplomatic corps—seemed to me the equivalent for a college educated woman in the 1970s. Both her job and mine offered travel, excitement and adventure.

*     *     *

Chapter 2

VOA

I need to digress for a bit to explain that the way I received my assignment to Athens was not at all the norm. Typically, one took the Foreign Service Exam, offered once a year. If you were among those scoring the highest in the written exam, you could expect to be invited to Washington, D.C., for an oral exam. If you passed both the written and oral exams, you would be placed on a list numerically determined by the combined score earned in the two exams. Not everyone on the list was invited to join the Foreign Service as a Junior Officer Trainee (as my good friend Elaine McDevitt discovered to her disappointment), because there were only so many openings in any given year. I never took the exam. I knew I’d fail it; I don’t test well. If I had entered the Foreign Service in the traditional manner just described, I would not have been allowed, as I was, to repeatedly turn down the assignments I was offered (Quito and Kinshasa). I would be out of the Service. So, how did I get in? To borrow a line from the military: on a wing and a prayer.

Typically those in the Foreign Service worked side-by-side with domestic or Government Service (GS) employees when they returned to Washington to work between overseas assignments. Foreign affairs agencies of the U.S. Government, including the State Department, were filled with GS employees who kept the home fires burning while their Foreign Service colleagues worked abroad. Only about ten percent of all employees in USIA and the Voice of America were in the Foreign Service, but there was no question that they ran the show. They constituted an elite corps and the GS employees who worked alongside them chronically complained about being treated like second class citizens. A good parallel might be the active military and the civilian employees in the military. It would be hard to become a general if you didn’t have battle experience.

When I was hired by the VOA, USIA was engaged in a reorganization designed to unify the cumbersome USIA retirement system, and treat foreign and domestic employees the same in many ways. New hires were now required to pass an oral interview, take a language test, and sign a certificate saying they would serve overseas if asked to do so. I gladly signed it. But in reality, there was little expectation on the part of USIA/VOA Personnel that most of their employees would ever serve abroad. People like me who entered the Agency during this period were not hired as GS employees. But neither were we given the prestigious Foreign Service Officer or Foreign Service Information Officer titles. So, one could still tell the wheat from the chaff. My designation initially was Foreign Service Limited Reserve (FSLR). After serving successfully stateside for a period, my designation became more permanent—Foreign Service Reserve Unlimited (FSRU). So, technically I could be sent anywhere in the world. But in reality, FSLRs and FSRUs were almost never sent overseas. The new personnel system was a sham, or at least an artificial construct to attempt to give everyone in our foreign affairs agency a Foreign Service title.

The VOA was located at the foot of Capitol Hill. I was hired by the Worldwide English Department as the first in a series of interns to be taught all aspects of radio broadcast journalism. After three years of trying my darnedest to figure out how to get sent overseas as a correspondent for the VOA, I took my petitions uptown to USIA Personnel (located a block from the White House), in an effort to get the parent organization to send me overseas as a Foreign Service Information Officer, or FSIO. That was the U.S. Information Service (which is what USIA was called overseas) equivalent of State Department Foreign Service Officers (FSOs), and offered its own brand of second class citizenship.

I wanted to get overseas so badly that I was willing to risk everything I’d built professionally in my broadcast career at VOA to do so.

*     *     *

The VOA Deputy Director’s secretary answered the phone with a chirpy voice, Serban Vallimerescu’s office.

Hi, this is Pat Ferguson. I need to schedule an appointment with Val.

May I tell him what this is about?

I’m afraid it’s personal, but it won’t take long. Twenty minutes at the most.

Just a moment please, she said, to check with the boss. Okay, yes, Val said you should come Tuesday morning at 10:00 A.M.

I’ll be there. Thank you very much.

*     *     *

How was it possible that Val, Deputy Director of VOA and I, a junior officer in the agency where we both worked, had a relationship? In part, it was because I had been elected by my peers to represent VOA on USIA’s Young Officer Policy Panel (YOPP). YOPP was established by management to productively funnel the dissent of junior officers to policy makers in the organization during the Vietnam War.

Val and I had had a number of conversations, including one over drinks not long before, when he’d asked my opinion about whether or not he should promote his old friend, Mike Hanu, into a permanent position. At the time, my boss, Mike, had been serving for over six months as Acting Director of the Features Division of the VOA English Department. (I had requested assignment to English Features after my one year rotating internship around VOA English concluded.) Mike was getting antsy. He was a controversial figure. Although he had won prestigious Peabody Awards for Broadcasting for some of his programs, Mike was nicknamed the rabid Romanian for his volatile personality. But Mike and I had always gotten along. In fact, he was one of my mentors. Mike and Val had started their careers together in VOA’s Romanian Service after World War II. They constituted the exception rather than the rule; immigrants didn’t usually make their way out of the Eastern European language divisions into the Worldwide English Department as Mike had, much less into VOA Administration as Val had. This was the Cold War era.

*     *     *

Even though Val and I were friends, I’d always been a bit intimidated by entering the big glass doors that separated VOA Administration from the programming area where my office and VOA’s 31 studios were located. (From these studios, programs were broadcast in some 40 languages, 24 hours per day, worldwide).

But once I got past the secretaries, who served as gatekeepers for the VOA Director, Deputy Director and Program Manager, I started to relax a bit. It always helped when I saw Val’s door, which was plastered with hotel Keep Out signs in at least a dozen foreign languages. It was meant to be a bit of a joke and perhaps to remind all who entered Val’s office just how well travelled he was.

Hi, Val, I said as I reached my long arm across his wide wooden desk. After shaking my hand, this warm, engaging middle aged man removed his portly self from behind his desk and invited me to be seated next to him in one of the black leather chairs that adorned the glass coffee table in his office. Val asked his secretary to serve us coffee and then instructed her to close the door behind her, giving us privacy to talk.

We talked initially about those funny hotel Keep Out signs and what countries they came from. Then we talked about the TV console in the VOA Administrative Office. It had three screens and used to sit in Lyndon Johnson’s White House so the President could watch the evening news simultaneously on the three major networks. Finally, Val and I got down to business.

Pat, tell me what I can do for you today. My secretary told me that it’s something personal.

Perhaps private is a better word, Val. I need your help.

You know I’ll help you if I can, Pat. What is it?

"Well, Val, I’ve been here for nearly three years now, and my personnel file indicates that I’ve done a good job. I’ve been promoted every year. When I came to VOA, I had two ambitions: to write and to travel overseas. I’ve been able to accomplish the first. And I had hoped that I’d be able to accomplish the second, working here at VOA. But I’ve come to see that as highly unlikely. Of VOA’s 27 correspondents, Louise Kelleher is the only woman. And I’ve seen what the guys in the Operations Division do with the reports she files from Latin America. They take the feed, have a good laugh and toss her tapes into the recycle bin, and they are never played again.

"As best I can determine, it takes seven years of indentured service in the VOA newsroom to get sent overseas as a foreign correspondent. And I don’t even work there; I’m in English Features, as you know. So to borrow an Amish phrase, ‘the harder I work, the behinder I get,’ if you know what I mean. You’re in the Foreign Service, Val. I’m here to ask your help in getting me a Foreign Service assignment with USIA overseas.

I’m determined to go either way. I’d like to serve this Agency abroad. But I’ve been saving my money and if I have to, I’ll just leave the Agency and see the world on my own.

Why is it our best people always want to leave? Val asked, as he picked up the phone to call USIA Personnel and demand that Bill Mosely ‘find this young woman a job overseas."

Don’t think of it as losing me, Val. I want to come back here. But just think how much greater a contribution I’ll be able to make to international broadcasting after a tour of duty overseas.

After putting the phone down, Val said, Go see Mosely in Personnel at USIA Headquarters uptown. He said he’ll do whatever he can to help you. Let me know what happens.

I thanked Val, pumping his hand enthusiastically as we both stood and said our goodbyes. Five nine in stocking feet, I was at least a good head taller than Val in my high heels. Looking down on his head, I thought how my long dark hair could make a nice toupee to cover his bald spots. I turned around and walked out the big glass doors I’d entered only a few minutes earlier. Then my knees began to quake. The tremendous risk I’d just taken began to dawn on me. I was so relieved Val was willing to help me see the world through the eyes of a diplomat rather than through the eyes of an unemployed backpacker. My parents would be too!

Spanish was the only foreign language I knew well at the time. Val assumed I’d be sent to Latin America where he’d happily served. But my mother begged me not to accept a position in Latin America because of the many revolutions there. Africa was having its fair share of unrest too. So when I filled in my wish list for assignments and languages, I put Athens at the top of the list of places I’d like to serve, and French (the language of diplomats) as the language I’d most like to study.

*     *     *

I would pay dearly for the unorthodox approach I took to get my assignment in Athens. I’d gone over the heads of two superiors in seeking Val’s help, and those superiors were the ones charged with writing my annual performance evaluation. I contested the evaluation they wrote, leaving my evaluation tied up in grievance proceedings for over a year. Ultimately, my evaluation was deemed to be prejudicial and removed from my files. But the grievance proceedings took a huge toll on me, taking place as they did while I was trying hard to learn the Greek Language, which the State Department had justifiably classified a difficult foreign language—difficult enough to designate ten months to teaching it to us stateside before we went overseas.

*     *     *

Chapter 3

Greek Language Training

Aunt Jane and Uncle Chet put me on the first bus from Virginia Beach back to Washington on Labor Day. I arrived about dusk at the Greyhound Bus station in D.C. It was not in a very safe area and taxis were cheap. So, I caught one to take me across town. By this time, I’d already excitedly shared the good news of my overseas assignment with my parents; the Bejmas insisted I use their phone. But I would wait to call friends until I had access to my own phone in my apartment in Georgetown. I lived in a wonderful place at a bargain basement price. It was only an efficiency apartment, but in 1974 it rented for just $128 per month. I only got into the Kew Gardens apartment building because Wendy Ross, a VOA coworker who had lived in the building for several years, put in a good word for me.

Kew Gardens, which was located on Q. Street, had two large gardens—a central garden surrounded by the four interior walls of the building, and a garden on the west side of the building where residents could barbecue, sunbathe and have small personal gardens. The first garden had beautiful flowers and a large, shallow pool with a fountain. It was stocked with tropical fish.

I gazed out the big picture window of my first floor apartment onto this lovely, large, central garden and called one after another of my former roommates to share my good news. I started with my cousin Sue, who had come to D.C. at the same time I had (she was thrilled for me), and then moved on to the roommates she and I had shared—her former Georgetown Law School classmates. They, too, were very excited for me because they knew how long I’d waited for this opportunity. Nobody could believe I was going to Greece on my first assignment. I told them that it was only because Sarah Anderson, who was the existing Asst. Cultural Attaché, had asked for an early out on her assignment; her father was dying. And that I just happened to be in the right place at the right time. I was pretty charged up by the time I’d talked to several friends; I had one heck of a time falling asleep. And I knew that the alarm clock would go off early, to give me plenty of time to shower, eat, dress and walk across Key Bridge in Georgetown to Roslyn, Virginia, where the Foreign Service Institute (FSI) was located.

*     *     *

When I had graduated four years earlier with an English degree from Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska, a college friend had given me a poster that proclaimed graduation: The First Day of the Rest of Your Life! But it was really only when I headed to class at FSI that I felt like that day had finally arrived. So, what do you wear to work on the first day of the rest of your life? I was joining a class of seasoned male diplomats. But it was a class after all; I wanted to be comfortable. I had an early morning, 45-minute walk that included a trek across the Potomac River; I didn’t want to get cold. I had a lot of pantsuits, most made by Jones of New York. I wore one of those, the navy blue knit one. I put on my sensible walking shoes, Bass penny loafers, tied my hair up so it didn’t get too windblown crossing the river and headed out the door more excited than I had been in a very long time.

*     *     *

"You must be Patricia? I will call you Patrikia. Kalos Ilthete (welcome) to Greek class!

I’m Takis Sapountzis and I will be your teacher. And I promise you that by the time you leave here, you will know Greek!"

Nice to meet you, professor, I said as I shook his hand.

No, call me Taki. That’s what everyone calls me.

Taki introduced me to the other students in the 10-month Greek language class as they arrived: Tom Cooney, Townsend Friedman, Phil Cohen, and Gene Zajak and his wife Marcella. Like the other men, Gene was a diplomat. Marcella was what was called an accompanying spouse. Spouses accompanying their husbands on overseas assignments were offered, but not required, to take language classes. But not many wives could take ten months out of their lives to study language. Gene and Marcella were the only couple who didn’t yet have kids. But even Marcella found other things to do before long, leaving me as the sole woman, and at age 25, the youngest member of the class by far and the only one who had not served overseas before. I entered this difficult language class two weeks after it started and was not made to feel welcome by my fellow diplomats. I hadn’t even started learning the language and I already felt as if I was holding the class back! They had already learned the Greek alphabet; I had not. They had learned directions, left from right; I had not. But I was nothing if not an A student. Homework, hours of it, was expected. I promised myself I would study overtime and make up for whatever I had missed.

Fortunately, Taki seemed to take an instant liking to me. It is much easier to learn from teachers who like you. He was about my height, had dark hair (though his wife would reveal to us that he used Grecian