Takis (Panagiotis) Jeannopoulos in his 1931 University of Florida yearbook portrait — age 19, the year of his graduation. He left for the University of Paris medical school the same year.
Takis came home twice. The first time, in 1925, was as a runaway thirteen-year-old who had been brought back from Greece after he and his older brother John Lazare had forged passports and lied to the Greek consulate in NYC about being orphans. The second time, in 1933, was as a man — recorded on the SS Bremen as “Takis Jeannopoulos, 23.” Between those two crossings he finished high school, completed his undergraduate degree at the University of Florida at Gainesville in 1931, and left for medical school at the University of Paris.
He was born Panagiotis Lazare Jeannopoulos, in Soma, Turkey, on November 18, 1911 — eight months after his older brother John Lazare (b. March 17, 1911, the firstborn). He went by three names across contexts: Takis in the family (the Greek diminutive for Panagiotis), Panagiotis on Greek and legal records (his given Greek name, after his paternal grandfather), and “Peter” as his American school-enrollment name. The “Peter” usage is confirmed by the October 11, 1925 New York Daily News appeal about the missing boys, which lists “John Jeannopoulos, 15, and his brother, Peter” missing from 130 W 28th St.
The single most vivid family story belongs to the brothers together: in late 1925, both around thirteen, Takis and John Lazare ran away from New York to Greece. They forged passports, told the Greek consulate their parents were dead, and got themselves shipped back to the old country. Family in Greece took them in; Lazaros and Eftyhia posted newspaper notices in NYC and dealt with a fake ransom note before arranging the return. Takis is the “Panagiotis Jeannopoulos” on the 1925 SS Byron arrival manifest — that’s the return of the runaway. A NYC public school principal eventually re-enrolled them at De Witt Clinton High School at the proper grade level.
After the runaway, Takis settled into the long American educational arc that the rest of his brothers would also walk. He left NYC for the University of Florida at Gainesville, graduating in 1931 at age nineteen or twenty — a striking choice for a Greek-immigrant family then living in the Bronx, and the only Jeannopoulos sibling whose undergraduate years took him to the American South. He left for Paris immediately after to begin medical school (his father Lazaros’s 1937 affidavit recorded the boys leaving the US for the University of Paris that same year). He returned to NY briefly on the SS Bremen on July 26, 1933, then returned to Paris to finish; by 1940 his WWII draft registration places him back in NYC. He was a physician — one of the four Jeannopoulos brothers who all became MDs (per Sophie’s FBI file).
Takis (right) and his older brother John Lazare (left), posed in white shirts against the bow of the Greek sponge boat American Girl (hull No. 173), with another vessel named DEMET[rios] moored alongside — the Tarpon Springs sponge docks on Florida’s Gulf coast, the major Greek-American community of the early 20th century. Late 1920s or early 1930s. The photograph is the first documented Tarpon Springs evidence in the family record, and it likely answers a standing question: how did a NYC-Bronx Greek-immigrant family come to send their middle son to the University of Florida at Gainesville in 1931? Tarpon Springs is the most plausible bridge — a Greek-American Florida network that two young Jeannopoulos brothers were clearly already moving through.
The earliest preserved family handwriting
The family archive preserves four pages from a Greek school exercise notebook signed throughout “Παναγιώτης Γιαννόπολος”. The earliest page is dated 1922 — Takis at age ten, the year of the Asia Minor catastrophe. The other three pages span May 12–19, 1923, in Mytilene — Takis at age eleven, during the family’s refugee year on Lesvos.
The subject matter is a routine Greek-school curriculum of historical and classical compositions — accounts of commanders and consuls, towers and barbarian kings. What makes the notebook genealogically significant is not the content but the existence: that Lazaros and Eftyhia kept their displaced sons in school through 1922–23, producing weekly history compositions on Aegean refuge soil six months after losing everything in Soma. It is the earliest preserved Jeannopoulos-family handwriting in the archive, and the start of an educational arc that carried Takis from refugee classrooms in Mytilene through a Bronx high school, the University of Florida at Gainesville (B.A., 1931), and finally to a Doctorat Universitaire in medicine from the University of Paris, certified in November 1937 — his name on that French government document still reading “JEANNOPOULOS PANAGIOTIS, born 18 November 1911 in SOMA, Asie Mineure.”
28 West 69th Street — the family’s Upper West Side address
Takis’s WWII draft registration card (1940) records his address as 28 West 69th Street, NY, NY, age 29, self-employed at the same address (his private practice). The listed contact-of-record is his mother Eftyhia at the same address — the strongest single document we have placing Eftyhia at the Upper West Side block on 69th Street between Central Park West and Columbus Ave in the pre-WWII years. This was the family’s gathering address — Constantine (then 25) and Achilles (then a medical student) both later listed 28 W 69 St as their own address on their 1941 draft cards.
Alina
Takis with his wife Alina, seated together indoors — color photograph, likely 1950s or 60s. From the 2026 photo batch supplied by Aline; the first color portrait of the couple in the archive.
Takis married Alina — a Polish woman born 24 July 1919 in Łuck (Luck), in then-Polish Volhynia (now Lutsk, Ukraine). The most plausible reading of the dates is that they met during Takis’s University of Paris medical school years (1931-37), married somewhere in interwar Europe, and were then separated by WWII — he back in NYC by the 1940 draft, she stranded in occupied Poland-then-France through the war. She finally crossed the Atlantic to rejoin him in March 1946 on the USAT George W. Goethals sailing from Le Havre. They had no children; the line ended with the two of them.
104 Asharoken Avenue — the bungalow
Takis and Alina were the owners of the family beach house at 104 Asharoken Avenue, Northport, NY 11768 — the bungalow in family memory. It sat on the Long Island Sound side of the Asharoken peninsula, about three miles from the East Northport address where his brother John Lazare would eventually retire. Takis and Alina had no children, but they had a beach house, and they opened it each weekend to John’s three daughters and to their mother Eftyhia, who lived with them year-round in Washington Heights and came along to the Sound as a matter of course. It is the house Aline’s published memoir column describes, and the house where Eftyhia would die in December 1968 with Takis and John at her side. Alina kept the bungalow for the thirty-three years between Takis’s 1976 death and her own death at the same address on February 16, 2010, in her 90th year. The family sold the house only after Alina was gone.
Washington Heights — the household with Alina and Eftyhia
Per Aline’s May 2026 recollection, Takis and Alina shared a Washington Heights apartment building with Aline’s family (and with Eftyhia herself). The household was a Greek-immigrant family compound on the Upper Manhattan grid: Takis + Alina + Eftyhia in one apartment, John Lazare + Ines + the three daughters in another, all within the same building. Eftyhia’s 1948 documented address — 370 Fort Washington Avenue — is most likely the building.
This puts Takis at the center of the family’s mid-century NYC life: Eftyhia lived with him after Lazaros’s 1939 death; Achilles (briefly, per his 1941 draft card) and Constantine (briefly, per his 1941 draft card) had also shared the earlier 28 W 69th Street address; in the postwar period the household consolidated up in Washington Heights with Takis and Alina as anchors.
The shared brothers’ office near the American Museum of Natural History
“All the brothers had an incredible office across the street from the museum of natural history in NYC the entrance by the big boat. Last time I was there you could still see where their name plaques hung.” — Aline Pepe, 2026-05-24
The four Jeannopoulos brothers (Takis, John Lazare, Constantine, Achilles — all MDs) shared a medical office across the street from the American Museum of Natural History in NYC, by the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial entrance (“the big boat” = the equestrian statue, since removed in 2022). Their name plaques were still visible on the building when Aline last visited.
The Roosevelt Memorial faces Central Park West at 79th Street — the brothers’ shared practice was somewhere on that block or its immediate cross streets. As children, Aline and her cousins had free run of the museum, walking back and forth between their fathers’ office and the dinosaur halls.
“In Uncle Takis’s office there was a library and a secret panel you could open into a whole other wing! Like in those old silly haunted house movies I kid you not!!” — Aline Pepe, 2026-05-24
Takis’s individual office had a library with a concealed panel that opened into another wing of the building. The architectural detail has not been independently confirmed but Aline insists on it.
Cancer, and the butterscotch candies
Takis at the bungalow holding an American flag on July 4th, 1976, wearing a head bandana over a striped short-sleeve shirt — the US Bicentennial. He is visibly thinner than in the 1950s family photographs. Per Aline’s 2026 caption: “Uncle Takis joking around on the Bicentennial! 1976 just a few months before we lost him.” This is the last known photograph of him alive — four months and sixteen days later, on November 20, 1976, he was gone.
He died on November 20, 1976 — two days after his sixty-fifth birthday — of cancer. In his final chemo-nauseated weeks, he grabbed his niece Aline’s arm and asked her to hunt the city for butterscotch candy — which she did, store to store, finally understanding who their grandmother Eftyhia had been keeping the butterscotch in her drawstring bra-bag for, all those decades. The peppermints had been for the children. The butterscotch had been for Takis.
He predeceased his younger brother Constantine by four years (Constantine died November 8, 1980 in Santo Domingo). He was the first of the Anatolia-born Jeannopoulos siblings to die, opening the long sequence that would close in 2004 with Achilles and John Lazare nine days apart. He was buried at Mt Olivet Cemetery in Queens, alongside his parents Lazaros and Eftyhia.
Note: an earlier draft of this record attributed Ines Valda and her daughter Eftichia to Takis. That attribution was wrong — they were actually John Lazare’s wife and daughter; the correction came from John Lazare’s daughter Aline in May 2026.
