Constantine was born in Mytilene in June 1916, to Lazaros and Eftyhia. The birth date carries a three-way drift in the surviving records — June 15 in the 1923 parish baptismal certificate, June 19 in the 1937 Metropolitan re-issuance, June 21 in his American records — because his Asia Minor refugee birth was never civilly registered. Every Greek-state document about him traces back to a single 1923 priest’s affirmation, with each subsequent re-issuance introducing small clerical drifts.
When the Asia Minor catastrophe of 1922 uprooted Anatolian Greek life, he was six years old. The family eventually reached the United States via Lazaros’s medical career and 1931 naturalization, which made Constantine a US citizen as a minor.
He returned to Europe — the University of Perugia’s foreigners’ enrollment archive places him there, and he completed his medical training at the University of Rome (Royal University), where he met Sophie as a fellow student. During his Rome years, his Greek-state paperwork was assembled from New York and Mytilene through a network of relatives: in August 1937 the Mytilene law office of Kambas & Sakhpaloglou produced both a municipality certificate and a Metropolitan ecclesiastical certificate of his birth and baptism, working through Yannopoulos intermediaries in Mytilene known in the correspondence only as “Uncle Alekos” and “Uncle Dimitrakis.” Their precise relationship to Lazaros is still being researched. They married in Rome on June 11, 1941, weeks before he crossed to New York. He sailed on the SS Excalibur from Lisbon, arriving August 25, 1941, taking up a position at Flower-Fifth Avenue Hospital (105th & 5th Ave, Manhattan). Sophie followed in June 1942.
He was granted NY State medical license No. 041039 on November 16, 1942, and on September 2, 1943, was accepted into the US Army Medical Corps, pulling him into wartime military medicine. His later NY hospital affiliations — recovered from Sophie’s 1970 FBI file — include NYU Medical (Rusk Institute and Bellevue), the Helen Hayes Rehabilitation Institute in Haverstraw NY, and the US Public Health Service. By the 1950 US census the family was settled together in the Bronx with their seven-year-old son Peter; later they moved to 370 Fort Washington Avenue in Washington Heights. Constantine and Sophie had three children: Peter (1943), John C. (1953), and Penny (1960).
His specialty was orthopedic surgery. His New York affiliations spanned NYU Medical (Rusk + Bellevue), the Helen Hayes Rehabilitation Institute, the US Public Health Service, and Veterans Affairs hospitals.
In April 1969 he was named Chief of the Surgical Staff, Orthopedic Section, at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Columbia, South Carolina — announced on April 24, 1969 in both Columbia daily newspapers (The Columbia Record’s “Hospital Names Chief Surgeon For Orthopedics” and The State). The press release confirmed he came from associate-professor work at NYU Medical Center, with Sophie and their three children Peter, John, and Marie. Whether Constantine actually relocated to Columbia is uncertain: his son Peter, an adult by 1969, recalls his father only ever living in Manhattan; his later documented address was 27 West 96th Street, Apt 8-D in the Upper West Side. The newspaper evidence confirms the appointment was made; whether he took it up, held it briefly, or never actually moved south is open. The next firmly-documented chapter is his eventual settling in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, where he died on November 8, 1980, age 64, at his home in the Zona Colonial. The cause was chronic renal failure with uremic cardiac insufficiency. The certifying physician on the death certificate, Dr. Vinicio Calventi, would later serve as Vice President of the Dominican Republic.
