Like many others in the Calumet Region, I am the proud legacy of immigrants who worked diligently and quietly to make a better life for their families.
My beloved late grandmother, Emily Colias — a native of Corinth, Greece — taught me her values of hard work, honesty and honor, like so many other immigrant families who made their mark here in Northwest Indiana.
It was at Ellis Island recently where I unexpectedly felt her presence again among the 700,000 names on the American Immigrant Wall of Honor.
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Fittingly, my fiance Joe — who has her sweet spirit — found her name resting peacefully just feet away from the ocean.
He thanked her and his own Macedonian great-grandfather — who was employed for years at Gary Works — for being brave enough to come here, so we could eventually meet.
Between 1892 and 1954, an estimated 12 million people passed through Ellis Island, according to the Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation, which has raised funds to restore both landmarks since the 1980s.
The Indiana Historical Society noted in 2010 that countries “with significant immigrant populations in Indiana include Russia, Austria-Hungary, Germany, England, Ireland, Greece, Scotland, Poland and Yugoslavia.”
Northwest Indiana is still home to the melting pot of nationalities who found their way here, primarily due to the steel industry.
“At the height of immigration in the early 20th century, about 50 nationalities and races called Northwest Indiana home,” Calumet Regional Archives Director Steve McShane said via email.
My own family was first drawn here by the promise of work in the mills. For years, my paternal great-grandfather Nick traveled back and forth from Greece to work in the mills at Republic Steel in Chicago’s Hegewisch section.
When mill work was slow, or shut down, he would return to Greece to work in the family’s olive groves.
Eventually his wife gave the ultimatum — you stay, or we all go.
Ellis Island records show my grandmother arrived at age 9 with her family in New York on Oct. 26, 1920.
Their ship was the Pannonia — a British steamship carrying 840 passengers. The trip took 30 days — far longer than expected, said my aunt, Nancy Kostopoulos.
“They were surprised to see them,” she said, “They thought the boat had sunk.”
Born into poverty, her future husband William left his mountain village in Greece at 13 to work in Athens. At 18, he emigrated alone to the United States, eventually joining a cousin living in Hammond.
For nearly 16 years, he never once wrote his family. His mother thought he was dead. She assumed he had perished in World War I, my father, James, said.
Following their 1930 marriage, Emily discovered numerous unanswered letters and wrote her back. She told her mother-in-law her son was alive with a growing family.
My father can’t say why he never wrote them. Possibly, he was just preoccupied with daily survival, he said.
My grandfather William first worked on the railroads as an engineer, then quit in the 1930s to start his own company with his wife — People’s Ice and Coal Co., formerly at 5353 Sohl Ave. in Hammond.
They also ran Delta Picnic Grove in present-day Calumet Township.
When he died in 1966, she continued to run People’s until she retired in 1997. She died in 2007.
My mother often said raising her children was much more straightforward, because she knew we would never do anything to embarrass our grandmother or tarnish our family name.
Perhaps, that was her greatest legacy.
Both my paternal grandparents entered the country during a time of severe economic inequality. They met later and were married at the start of the Great Depression.
Both were true believers in the American Dream. I decided to become a journalist partly due to their reverence for this country.
Unusual for its day, my grandmother worked at her business while raising five children. She always wore skirts and dresses and never swore. She was a lifelong dignified and charitable woman.
For years, she was active in the church at St. Demetrios in Hammond and would welcome new arrivals from Greece — often taking women to the grocery store to translate for them.
For anyone down on their luck, she would often spare them a small amount of cash and mark it down on receipts as a “tire repair.”
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While it was common among Greek-Americans to travel back and forth to Greece, my grandmother never returned.
Her attitude was, “If it was so good, we never would have left,” my Aunt Nancy often said.
My father often asked my grandfather why he came. For a man that grew up using a donkey to move down a mountain, he became a landowner in the United States — something he considered once unthinkable.
“When he was in Greece, they said, ‘In America the streets were paved with gold,'” my dad remembers him saying.
“So, I said, weren’t you disappointed when you got here?”
“He said, ‘No, they were paved in gold,'” my dad recalls. “‘In Greece, I had no chance. And here, I met your mother. I raised the family. I worked. I started my company. I never would have had that.'”
“He said, ‘Everything was here in America.'”
Twitter @meredithcolias