Takis (also Panagiotis, after his grandfather) was born in Soma, Turkey on November 18, 1911 — eight months after his brother John Lazare (b. March 15, 1911, the firstborn). He went by three names across contexts: Takis in the family (Greek nickname), Panagiotis on Greek/legal records (his given Greek name), and “Peter” as his American school-enrollment name — 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.
He returned to NY again on the SS Bremen on July 26, 1933, and by 1940 his WWII draft registration places him in NYC. He was a physician — one of the four Jeannopoulos brothers who all became MDs (per Sophie’s FBI file).
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 eventually carried Takis 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.”
He died around 1980 per his niece Aline, age approximately 68–69 — roughly the same year as his brother Constantine, who died November 8, 1980 in Santo Domingo. Two Smyrna-Soma-generation physician brothers gone in the same year.
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.
