Constantine arrived in the world on the eve of one of the catastrophes of the twentieth century. Mytilene, June 1916 — a Greek island in the eastern Aegean, to Lazaros and Eftyhia. Six years later the Anatolian world that registered his birth would no longer exist.
The exact day carries a three-way drift across the surviving records, because none of his birth dates was filed by a civil registrar in the moment. All three trace back to a single 1923 priest’s affirmation at the Άγιος Θεράπων refugee settlement, where the Yannopoulos family was re-registered in the Asia Minor refugee re-establishment of civil records following the 1922 catastrophe. June 15 in the 1923 parish baptismal certificate (the Greek primary record); June 19 in the 1937 Metropolitan re-issue and the 1957 Mytilene Δημαρχείον Μητρώο Αρρένων re-issuance; June 21 in his American records. He used June 21 the rest of his life.
When the catastrophe came in September 1922 he was six. Smyrna burned for ten days; an empire collapsed; the Jeannopoulos household left behind a Soma estate later assessed at about 3,330 Turkish gold pounds — roughly $2.5 million in today’s gold-equivalent wealth. The family reached Mytilene, waited two years for papers, then sailed. He arrived in New York on the SS Themistocles in March 1924, age seven, never to live in Anatolia again. On July 9, 1931 he became a US citizen as a minor through his father’s naturalization — documented in primary form by his own 1947 US Certificate of Citizenship No. A-165551.
He graduated Cornell in 1937 with a B.A. and Phi Beta Kappa — and then, in a decision that looks reckless in hindsight, sailed back to Europe to finish medical school. The University of Perugia’s foreigners’-enrollment archive logs him there that fall, and by 1939 he had transferred to the University of Rome medical faculty: Mussolini’s Rome, on the edge of the war that would consume the continent he’d once fled.
He was not alone in the classroom. A Polish biology student named Sophie Jakowska was studying there too. Meanwhile his Greek-state paperwork was being assembled across three countries by 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.
He and Sophie married in Rome on June 11, 1941 — six weeks before he sailed for New York and what would become the US Army Medical Corps. He boarded the SS Excalibur in Lisbon and arrived August 25, 1941, taking a post at Flower-Fifth Avenue Hospital (105th & 5th Ave, Manhattan). Sophie had to get out of Europe on her own; she made it in June 1942 on the SS Serpa Pinto.
Constantine (right) and his older brother John Lazare (left) in US Army officer dress uniforms with Medical Corps collar pins, both standing behind their seated mother Eftyhia. Likely a NYC farewell or leave portrait, 1942–44 — taken in the same Bronx living room visible in other 1940s family photos. Two doctor-officer sons going to war; their mother in widow’s black, holding the center.
*The three eldest brothers — left to right almost certainly John Lazare, Takis, and Constantine — in US Army dress uniforms with Medical Corps officer collar pins. All three were physicians; all three deployed in the European Theater. Their youngest brother Achilles (Alfred A. Johnson) deployed separately and is not in the frame. Per family memoir (Aline 2026), Eftyhia “fasted, prayed and worried as all four of her sons deployed to WWII.”
WWII US Army Medical Corps service
He was granted NY State medical license No. 041039 on November 16, 1942. On April 7, 1943 he entered the US Army Medical Corps, attending the Twenty-Sixth Officers’s Course at the Medical Field Service School at Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania (April 12 – May 20, 1943). On September 4, 1943 his US Army Signal Corps ID card was issued as 1st Lt, Medical Corps; he sailed for the European Theater the next day. He was promoted to Captain effective December 1, 1943. He served 2 years 4 months in the EAME theater with the 304th Station Hospital as an orthopedic ward officer, including a four-month attachment to General George S. Patton’s Third Army Headquarters medical-dispensary network in late-war Europe. He returned to the US on January 5, 1946, and was honorably discharged at Fort Dix, NJ on March 20, 1946 with the EAME Campaign Medal and the WWII Victory Medal — primary record in his Military Record and Report of Separation.
Postwar NYC practice
Six weeks after discharge he registered as a Bronx County physician (May 3, 1946) at the family residence on Cambreleng Avenue. His New York career is documented in his own CV: VA Kingsbridge Bronx residency 1946-48; NY Orthopedic Hospital at Columbia-Presbyterian 1948-49; Assistant Attending Columbia-Presbyterian 1949-51; Chief of Orthopedic Surgery, First Army Headquarters Hospital at Fort Jay, NY 1949-51; consultant to VA Manhattan 1954-61; NY State Rehab Hospital at Haverstraw 1951-66; Institute of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation at NYU 1953-67; ending as Associate Professor of Clinical Orthopedic Surgery at NYU Medical School, Associate Attending at Bellevue, University Hospital NYU, and Faculty for the Course in Orthotics at NYU. His private practice addresses moved from 44 West 77th Street (Upper West Side, ~1949-50) to 20 East 74th Street (Upper East Side, 1951-52) to 27 West 96th Street Apt 8-D in his later years.
His sub-specialty was Sprengel’s deformity (congenital elevation of the scapula) — the subject of three of his nine published papers between 1950 and 1961, and a chapter in Sir Cecil Wakely’s Modern Treatment Yearbook 1954. His other publications appeared in the Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery, NY State Journal of Medicine, Archives of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, and Clinical Orthopedics. Constantine and Sophie had three children: Peter (October 14, 1943), John C. (1953), and Penny (1960).
1957 — the Liberia trip and the second PanAm crossing
In March 1957 Constantine made an international trip to Liberia (March 14-27, 1957) — almost certainly a medical mission. NYU orthopedic surgeons of the period were periodically recruited for medical-relief work in newly independent African nations; Liberia had been the destination of an active US-Liberia medical exchange since the 1940s. He returned to New York on PanAm on March 27. A second 1957 PanAm arrival on November 16 — destination open — completes a year of unusual international travel for a Manhattan-based academic surgeon.
The Upper West Side family residence — 28 West 69th Street
Constantine’s WWII draft registration card (1941) records his address as 28 West 69th Street, NY, NY — the family’s late-1930s / early-1940s Manhattan residence. The card shows him as a 25-year-old physician employed at Flower-Fifth Avenue Hospital (located at 105th Street and 5th Avenue) and noted at the top “Fordham Hospital” — likely his rotating affiliation. The address was shared with his brothers Takis (then a self-employed doctor at the same address) and Achilles (then a medical student living with Takis), and his mother Eftyhia, who was Takis’s listed contact-of-record on the 1940 draft. The Upper West Side block on 69th Street between Central Park West and Columbus Ave was the family’s NYC home base in the years bracketing Constantine’s Rome years.
The 1969 South Carolina episode
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.
He appears to have declined the role. Both of his surviving children — Peter (an adult in 1969) and Marie Helene “Penny” (then a child in the household) — report no recollection of any move to South Carolina; Sophie never mentioned it to either of them. Penny’s framing, recorded May 2026: “He may have been named but decided not to go.” The newspaper recorded the appointment as a fact; family life simply continued in Manhattan, where Constantine’s documented later address was 27 West 96th Street, Apt 8-D.
The next firmly-documented chapter is his and Sophie’s move together to Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic — confirmed in May 2026 by their daughter Marie Helene “Penny” Jeannopoulos, who recorded the joint move and corrected an earlier framing on this record that had implied Sophie moved separately. Constantine died on November 8, 1980, age 64, at his home at Calle Arzobispo Meriño No. 154 in the Zona Colonial. The cause was chronic renal failure with uremic cardiac insufficiency. The certifying physician on the death certificate was Dr. Vinicio Calventi, a Dominican surgeon.
