“Legacies” a podcast dedicated to preserving the inspiring stories and wisdom of Utah women. Zeese Papanikolas speaks lovingly of his mother, ethnic historian Helen Zeese Papanikolas who died in 2004. He describes her background, the marriage of his parents, and the beginnings of Helen’s writing career. We discuss her fiction and nonfiction work as well as her role as a mentor to young historians.
“Legacies,” a podcast by Utah Women’s Walk
Season 1, Episode 6: Helen Papanikolas
For the complete interview, click here.
Helen / Zeese Papanikolas
MW: Mention “Utah” outside of the state and people will often think of big families belonging to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. But Utah has absorbed thousands of immigrants since the Latter-day Saint pioneers first arrived in 1847. We have many of these immigrant stories thanks to the woman at the center of today’s episode.
ZP: One of the things that always interests me about my mom’s writing when I read it is that she had really kind of a wonderful sense of humor. Her sense of the pathos of life, and how hard it is for many people; it didn’t quench that. She loved a good story.
MW: I am Michele Welch from Utah Women’s Walk, and this is “Legacies,” a podcast dedicated to preserving the inspiring stories and wisdom of Utah women. Born in 1917 in a small mining camp in Carbon County, Helen Papanikolas was an acclaimed and influential ethnic historian, folklorist, and novelist. Her writings captured the immigrant experience and elevated the stories of everyday Utahans. I spoke with her son Zeese Papanikolas in 2006, two years after her death. We spoke over the phone which affected the audio. That said, we think you’ll still find it well worth a listen.
ZP: my mother was really molded by her years in Helper, Utah.
that area is filled with various immigrant population, and the story my mom always said was that there was an ad for Heinz 57 food products up on the hills outside of Helper, and people used to laugh; they’d see the big 57, and they’d say well that’s how many people—different kinds of people live in Helper, and it’s close to true.
MW: Wow.
ZP: To being true—Italians North and South, Greeks, Poles, Russians, Hispanics, you name it—all of them living in these towns and small business people as well. And that was powerful for her as was, you know—the Depression years were also very powerful when she saw what happened when the mines were shut down.
MW: Right.
ZP: And the hardships inflicted on people and the labor unrest too was something that she and her sisters were very aware of—with major strikes in the area and some violence and racism too. Talking [of an] event that always stayed with her was the hanging of a black guy who was accused of something or other, you know, a vigilante hanging.
MW: Right, where people—
ZP: But it was strong. Now when she moved to Salt Lake, she brought, I think, all of this with her—and in where you will find, I think, her experiences, although she never—she’s not an autobiographical writer in the sense that—some experiences she writes about were hers or were her friends, but you always have that distance from.
MW: Right, right.
ZP: And so I think that it, you know—it would be a mistake to read anything that she wrote as being autobiographical. But what happened I think in Salt Lake is that she was thrust into the dilemma that Greek women of her generation had; that is Salt Lake, you know. It was a city. It was filled with the latest of everything, and she was living in a house with her sisters with immigrant parents. My grandparents, her parents, I think, were extraordinary people and very intelligent and were more liberal than the average Greek immigrant parents, but nevertheless, they had old country ideals of what was proper for women and girls, and what their role was, and so to think about my mom, I think you have to think of the experience of her and the Greek women that she grew up with in those high school years as being caught between these two worlds—the immigrant world, where women were taught to be modest, taught to be deferential to the adults, and really taught that they played second fiddle always to the men. Greek culture is very patriarchal, and yet, here in high school, there are these active, bright young women that participated in clubs; they’re doing things; and especially when you go the University of Utah, you find even more of that. And so my mom absorbed that and felt that this is really where a lot of her strong writing, I think, comes from.
Greek women have an extraordinary amount of power in the house, but it doesn’t extend beyond those walls. Of course, the men probably make major decisions whether a daughter is going to go to college or not, and of course, in my mom’s generation, there still were arranged marriages where your father would say to you—even though you had been born in the United States, had gone to high school with kids of all different cultures and ethnicities—we’ve found a very good husband for you in Chicago, and you’ll be married next June.
MW: (laughs) Wow.
MW: Yeah.
ZP: —although it was becoming more rare. So, but other than that, I think that women are very strong in the home in Greek culture. And they have a kind of indirect influence on the outside world because of how close they are to their sons. And so often they will influence events through their sons, you know, enter the male sphere of action through their influence on their sons. It’s really quite an interesting thing to watch this happening.
MW: What was your mom’s experience in high school? Did she date?
ZP: Oh no, absolutely not. Neither she nor any of her sisters had anything that could be called dating. They would go out, you know; all the girls would drive together maybe and go to a drive-in and have a hamburger and a Coke, that sort of thing. Where they principally had a chance to meet young men would at the Greek dances and festivals that were sponsored by the Greek Church and then various other events like baptisms and weddings and so forth. But the Greek immigrant generation saw it as a danger—their daughters marrying non-Greeks. And so they encouraged a lot of social activities in the Greek Church, and there is a very amusing picture of my mom and her sisters dressed in the uniform of the Daughters of Penelope, which was a social organization for young Greek girls, but all of this was aimed and just trying to get them to marry other Greeks.
MW: So she attended East High School, a public school, but then as far as her social life, she was limited or maybe that’s not the right word, but required or not allowed to the high school dances and those kinds of things, it would be more in the—
ZP: Oh yeah, no, absolutely not. I don’t think that you can imagine it, as you know, her father had forbidden this.
MW: Right.
ZP: It just wasn’t done. You just grew up with the sense that you might want to do this; you might feel envious of your girlfriends who are going to the dance or the prom or something like this, but for you, it just wasn’t done. You know, it would have caused too great of breach in the structure of your society. So I think that Greek women of my mom’s generation sort of endured (laughs) that rather than were, you know, constantly rebelling against their parents.
MW: So when she was down in Helper, she was required to go to Greek school.
ZP: Right.
What the Greek school was doing was enforcing a sense of Greek cultural identity and also the Greek that these kids by in large spoke was a kind of a peasant version of Greek, and they’d contrive that to the Greek Revolution. A kind of artificial, highfalutin sort of Greek, and that’s what was taught in Greek school, which was one of the reason why it was really alienating because you were using a language that was only used in literature and in the newspapers.
MW: Interesting. So?
ZP: And so you’re always wrong, (laughs) you know.
MW: Right, right.
ZP: And it was a language that you couldn’t, you wouldn’t even be speaking it at home. So it was a pretty alienating experience for these kids.
MW: Let’s go back a little bit, and tell me what you know about your parents’ courtship and how she met your father.
ZP: Well, they met at the University of Utah—my mom and dad. And my mom (laughs) actually was not very taken with my father at first. Now, you have to remember that like all minority members, you know, you get to be sort of hypersensitive—that generation—anything that makes you stand out or makes you seem like you’re not doing things in an absolutely approved way. Well, my father had grown up hunting, fishing, and so during duck season, he would show up in his English class, and he’d go out and shoot a few ducks before class. (laughs) He would come to class unshaven in his duck hunting clothes. (laughter) And so my mother, who had a high sense of propriety, just thought that was just abominable.
She had determined that she wanted to be a writer quite young.
and she was associated with The Pen, the literary magazine at the University of Utah. And, at the time she met my father, I believe she was the assistant editor. And then they met that way.
And my father was no writer, but that became, you know, the basis of their friendship, and then they later became—her younger sister was dating, if you can call it that, to the extent that Greeks, young men and women dated—but she and one of my father’s good friends from Magna were having a flirtation. They eventually married, and so my mom and dad were sort of involved in shepherding that relation, and that’s how they got together.
My father was a businessman, very involved in his business and interested in making a success of himself. My mother, of course, an intellectual very involved in books and the world of higher culture. But they had some areas where they had a very strong bond. And one of them was the immediate family, my sister and me—very devoted to us and to their separate families, their brothers and sisters.
And so they had that. And then, of course, that’s very much in the Greek tradition and in most cultures have that very strong family bond. The other thing that they had in common, which is interesting—and both of them were very intelligent, and my father had a great deal of imagination—and both of them in their own ways, and I have written about this—had a really strong interest in history—and mostly the immediate history of the immigrant world in which they grew up, but also the larger history of Utah. And one of the things—every once in a while, I’m asked to speak about my mom—and one of the things that she has the reputation of—being an ethnic writer—someone who studied Greek immigrants, but both of my parents, as strongly as they were attached to their identity as Greeks, Greek Americans, they were equally attached to their identity as being Utahns.
They saw themselves as real westerners.
MW: Your father, did he graduate from University of Utah also?
ZP: Yes he did.
MW: And what did he do for living then, in his business?
ZP: Okay, well, he and his brothers, you know, started out with the lumberyard, and then after the war, they started building GI houses in and around Salt Lake, and then they built some shopping centers, and were partners in a regional center in Arizona. And so they were developers, homebuilders; that was their primary business.
And my father eventually went into commercial construction and built many buildings at the University of Utah.
My father was a great storyteller, you know, his story that start—and he had a wonderful sense of being able to capture, not imitate—but just give you the suggestion of how a certain person would talk: some sheepherder or you know, (laughs) “big nosed Pete” local Greek pimp in Magna or whoever it was they’d come up right before. And his stories, you know, they might have a beginning, and they might have a middle, but they never had any end. They’d just sort of wander around in all of these wonderful memories of his—would come out, and they’re often very, very funny.
Now my mother even then, before she’d actually started writing history, was very much the historian, and she wanted things to be right, and she wanted them to be accurate. And so I can hear her voice just now interrupting my father and say, “Oh Nick, that couldn’t have happened before World War I; he wasn’t even in Carbon County then; he came in 1926.” (laughter)
But my mother has been formed by the kind of American realism of the 1920s and the 1930s—the kind of social realism that the Chicago writers were working with and John Steinbeck and figures like that who are writing about the very real and often very grim lives that working class people lived, and so she wanted these stories to be accurate, and that’s the way her writing. Both the fiction and her history, they’re accurate.
She was not only the daughter of immigrants with this very strong expectation that a women devotes her life 100 percent to family and husband, but of course, also the women of the 1950s, that was very much what the middle-class women were like in the 1950s.
anything that she was doing, she was stealing the time and writing late at night, working late at night, and then she was asked to write something about the immigrant community in Carbon County.
MW: Yeah.
ZP: That became her career—start of her career as a historian.
MW: What it was like growing up in your home, and how she incorporated Greek culture in your home? I was curious if she taught you the bread was holy, for example?
ZP: : Oh no, no. A lot of those customs had gone by the boards. My mom’s relation to the Greek Church was one in which she saw it as kind of a powerful cultural center, and she read a great deal about religion and read from theologians, and she had a lot of trouble with some of the mystical doctrines of the Greek Church and other churches as well. I should say, and I think you would have to consider that she’d consider herself an agnostic. But not a postal agnostic, she loved the ceremonies of the Greek Church and the beauty of these traditions. So she didn’t feel compelled to push my sister and me in any strong religious way. But the holidays, cooking the Greek delicacies, all of those things that she was very much a participant in that. Her mother was one of the most extraordinary cooks I have ever known. She grew up in Salonica, and my grandmother, was a servant girl in Salonica. And that was, you know, a very sad thing for girls. It was a real loss of caste and status, but the one thing that was good is that she grew up in this—my grandmother did—in this sort of multicultural city, and so her cooking—and this is how it principally it came out—was the best of everything.
MW: I think I have a good list of her published things. She’s done so many, such a variety of things.
ZP: Right.
MW: From history to fiction and would you say that the Peoples of Utah—is that her crowning work? Is that her most difficult work?
ZP: Well, no because it was edit.
MW: It was edited.
ZP: You know, this was editorial work. It was difficult in another sense that this, of course, is something that hadn’t really been done in the state of Utah, and I think that it shows a lot of confidence in my mom as a historian that she was chosen to edit this. It required a lot of work in finding people to write these chapters on the various ethnic groups, the right person, and she actually did cowrote—some of them with were written by people who, you know, were amateurs and didn’t have a background as historical writers, so she did a lot of work in a number of the chapters and then various editing and tasks. It was a lot of work and a very important book—a very important book for Utah to tell the whole story of this state.
MW: Right. It was really used as a standard text for all the colleges and universities.
ZP: Right, right. And I would say that this was the side of my mom, and again it goes back to my parents. One of the other things that they really had in common was a sense of sort of civic duty, and they were generous in the donations they made in terms of money, but also in terms of time in Peoples of Utah—only one of my mom’s activities—boards she served on and so forth.
ZP: I think the book that she put most of herself into was the biography of her parents Emily-George or republished by University of Nebraska Press as Greek Odyssey and the American West.
She had a great deal—well, let’s put it this way. She wanted to find out who her parents were. She knew them as parents. She knew them as very loving parents, but also as people that you grow up with. You know, you have your frictions with and you have your you know, the day-to-day negotiations and life that you have with the parents, but this was her opportunity to find out who they were and where they came from. And so it was a powerful book of research, but she also had to find out, I think, in a certain sense who she was and to think about her relation with her parents, but to really think about what it would be like to be thrown into this new world.
And they had extraordinarily interesting lives and in many respects, especially I think her mother, very, very sad life. Where her father’s absolute need to succeed in this country comes from. You know, just this burning passion to be a success. Well, by learning this miserable village that he came from, what it was like, and what his family suffered, she got to understand that, and her mother, you know, growing up as a servant girl, trying desperately to help her family and finally coming to the United States and marrying essentially a stranger as the only way she could see of being able to help her family in the old country.
Again, one of the strongest things in my mother, I think, is her sense of other people’s suffering, and she was always very sensitive to that from girlhood, and I think this, you know, really informs her writing. So I think that that was probably the most difficult and powerful book that she had to write.
And I think it contains some of her best writing as well.
MW: Tell me about her health. It says that she had some failing eyesight. When did that occur and what happened?
ZP: Well that’s—gee now when would that have—that actually started, I think, in the eighties, and she had glaucoma and macular degeneration, and it progressed, and this was progressive, and it got to the point where she would be reading with a large magnifying glass, and her computer had a very large screen on it. It was difficult, but, you know, my mother was one of these people like Thomas Jefferson; she couldn’t live without books. And so as her eyesight decreased, I think, she rationed it to use only on her writing, but it was difficult for her to pick up a novel or an article and read it, and that was bad for her.
MW: Yeah, I bet. That leads me to my question I emailed you about: what you would consider her greatest trial? Do you think that would have been—
ZP: Oh yeah, I think, well, let me see how I can put this. Because my mother had such a strong sense of family, you know, she was very involved in her children and grandchildren and their ups and downs, and at the same time, she had a tremendous need to finish what she would consider her work that is her writing. She had really put her writing on hold for many, many years while she was a dutiful wife and mother. And I think that she didn’t resent it, but it was a hard thing to do.
MW: Right.
ZP: And so when she finally had the chance, and my father’s health was not good for many years too. He took quite a bit of tending too as well. So when she finally had a chance to have more time to devote to her writing, she really felt an urgent need to finish books, short stories, [and] novels. She never felt she’d done enough, and so she put a lot of pressure on herself. And she had these stories, which she wanted to tell. And I think that that was the main pressure. She really wanted to tell the story of Greek immigrants of her generation and even of the generation of her children, to kind of give a complete sense in both history and in fiction of what that was like.
And so that was the urgency to write better, to get it right. She always wanted to get it right and coupled with, you know, her declining eyesight and finally really working on this last novel up to within, oh, a few months of her death, really. This is, I think something that I guess you’d call it her greatest trial. But she wouldn’t put it that way. You know, she was a very stoical person; that she got from her parents, her father especially.
I remember once that she told me that her mother cut herself very badly with a butcher knife right down her forearm; she scraped off some leather from a belt, rubbed it into the wound, wrapped up the wound, and just kept on cooking.
MW: Wow.
ZP: You know, but that really is the way these—it’s the way poor people live all over the world.
Even when she quote unquote wasn’t writing, she was up late at night, and she was working on things. She was working on ideas for stories or making notes or writing in the journal or just reading those stacks and stacks and stacks of the piles in review that are still you know—when we cleaned out the house in Millbrook—were still in the basement.
She wanted to remain connected with an intellectual world and a broader world. And so I think that’s what you would have to say, you know, just—I’m going to try to figure out a simple way that might be useful to you. Trying to—I think my mother’s biggest trial was trying to live in two worlds at the same time. The world of the Greek women with its tremendous demands in terms of time and emotional connection with family, children, and the Greek community and at the same time, trying to live in the world of an intellectual, a writer, a member of a broader community of writers and thinkers and workers in the intellectual fields.
MW: She served as a mentor to many other young historians. In fact, this great book by Patricia Lyn Scott and Linda Thatcher called Women in Utah History: Paradigm or Paradox, they say— Linda said, “We all wanted to grow up and be like her.” Who were your mother’s mentors?
: Well, I knew you were going to ask this question. I was talking about it with my wife last night. You see, I think one of the things that’s one of the sadnesses of my mom and women of her generation, who don’t live in a major American city, you know, who don’t live in Chicago or New York or San Francisco, is that in the forties and the fifties, there were no women intellectual mentors for her. There were certainly women that she admired, her mother for example, and other women that she knew, but they weren’t intellectuals. I think you’d be hard put really in that era to find active Utah women who were intellectuals who weren’t, oh, in some sense kind of closeted. They may have been teaching at the University of Utah or at Logan, but few and far between is what I’m trying to say.
MW: Right, right.
ZP: The one mentor who I think is interesting—and she mentions him in a number of books, the last one and also in the story of her father—is Stylian Staes. And he was a Greek vice consul in Helper and Price, Utah, and he was a Greek immigrant, had a little more education than most of them, spoke English very well.
MW: Excuse me.
ZP: And his job was just to help these Greek immigrants negotiate the strange world of the United States and its laws. But he was an exceptional person, and when he would come and visit her house in Helper and Price, it was always a big event for her.
He encouraged her to read; he encouraged her intellectually. He gave her, I think, a sense that there was more out there for a Greek woman who had some brains than just being a wife and mother. And he encouraged her to think for herself, I think, in certain ways. She always remembered; he said to her, “Well, you know with religion you eat the flesh and throw away the bones.” And that she took to interpret as you take the good things out of religion. She was very much a Christian in the sense of the gospel; you know, Jesus’ actual words and doings [even] if she was an agnostic in terms of believing in miracles and believing in an afterlife, you know, believing in every bit of theology. So Staes was very important to her, and then later on, people she met at the University of Utah.
Wallace Stegner was one of her teachers. He was very young at the time, and of course, he was a model of someone with literary ambition and talent and skill, and he encouraged her. They kept up now and then. You know, I mean, he did not forget her, and every once in a while she’d write him a note or he would call her. But she was very close to Richard Scowcroft, who was editor of The Pin at the job she took over at the University of Utah. And these were—and literary imagination and accomplishment and Brewster Ghiselin as well.
ZP: Anyway, when you say mentors, one of the things about my mom that’s interesting: it’s not just the people who were smart or literary; she admired very much people who had a sense of dignity and a sense of strength. And so there are many people who I don’t even know about who may have been almost illiterate sheepherders who she admired.
One of the people that she very admired was the Greek midwife in Magna, Utah. Magerou, they called her. She wrote an article about her.
MW: Right, right.
ZP: Again, you know someone who’s strong and independent and just does their work and then some.
MW: Do you recall any of the honors that were particularly meaningful to her?
ZP: She was pleased to be recognized by the Association of Christians and Jews in Salt Lake and by the Modern Greek Studies Association. She wanted to be recognized by people and by organizations that she herself admired.
And then I think that’s what was important to her. More than that, I would say that when she traveled and went to give a talk or reading in Chicago or New York and some women of her generation came up to her and said to her, Oh, Mrs. Papanikolas, that story that you wrote about the women, you know, who found out her father was a padrone, that’s me. You know, I mean, the feeling of people when they found their lives articulated, this is I think what pleased her as much or more than any of the honors that she got.
Are there any portions—these books that the novels that she wrote the fiction, Small Bird, Tell Me, the Apple Falls from AppleTree, Time of the Little Black Bird, and Rain in the Valley—I think we’ve talked about this. Really I wondered if any of them, portions of them, you saw, as being autobiographical?
ZP: it would be very misleading to say that anything in my mom’s work is autobiographical just as it would be misleading to say that none of her work is autobiographical. It all is—
MW: Right.
ZP: —and isn’t. You know, like family members think that they might recognize another family member in this character or that character. But in fact, they’re often combinations of two or three or four people that she has known. This is the way she worked as a writer.
one of the things that always interests me about my mom’s writing when I read it is that she had really kind of a wonderful sense of humor. Her sense of the pathos of life, and how hard it is for many people; it didn’t quench that. She loved a good story.
But I think that one of the things that allowed my mother to see the world clearly was her sense of humor, which gives you a kind of distance and objectivity. And I’m very grateful for that, and I think that people who read her books and miss that, are missing a lot of her personality.
MW: Was she actively involved in her grandchildren’s lives? I know she—
ZP: Oh yeah, very much so.
MW: Tell me about her lymphoma at the end of her life.
ZP: Well, you know, I’m so bad on dates, but I think that she had a little over a year to live, if I’m not mistaken, and she was—it was hard on her because, you know, she wanted to keep writing. (laughs)
MW: Yeah.
ZP: I don’t think that she is a person that clung to life just as life, but she was a worker. And I think, that this was a kind of disappointment to her. And she was pretty stoical about it.
MW: Did she know when she was diagnosed that it was a noncurable type of lymphoma or was—
ZP: Well, you know, there’s always some vague hopes. And I think that like most people in that situation sometimes you think, well maybe there’s a chance, and then other times you think that there’s not. But she became reconciled to dying. She didn’t like it one bit, but she was a stoical person.
MW: what do you think she would hope to be remembered for? I’m sure, everything we’ve talked about, just her stories and her ability to put into words what it was like to be an immigrant in this country and the—
ZP: Well, you know, I think that, of course, she wanted to be remembered for, I think, specifically in Utah, I think that she would like to be remembered for doing her part to opening up the history and culture of Utah to its entire ethnic population.
MW: Right.
ZP: And, you know, not just by Peoples of Utah but the other civic work that she did.
MW: Right.
ZP: That’s what she would want to be remembered for.
We want to thank Zeese Papanikolas for the interview about his mother Helen. We honor her for her wonderful contributions to not only Utah but the country as a leading ethnic historian.
MW: If you’ve enjoyed today’s episode, be sure to share it with a friend, as well as subscribe and rate us on itunes.
To listen to the full interview regarding the life of Helen Papanikolas and other remarkable Utah women, visit our website at Utah Women’s Walk. ORG
A special thanks to our supporters Denise and Allen Alexander, Roman and Ann Takasaki, Julie Bagley and Shauna Duke.
And thank you to our writer and producer Tamarra Kemsley and our editor Ron Cool. As well as Catherine McIntyre from the UVU Archives.
Thanks again for listening to today’s episode of “Legacies.”