Peter George Barbalias (1889–1969)
A Life Spanning Continents and Eras
Let me tell you about Peter George Barbalias, the man behind "Pete’s." Brynn and Fallon, he is your great-great-grandfather: your dad Anthony’s mom, Maria, is the daughter of Peter’s son, James. Peter was born on August 15, 1889, in Trípolis (Tripoli), in the Peloponnisos, the big peninsula that makes up the southern part of mainland Greece. It’s a region full of ancient history, and when Peter was a boy in the late 1800s it was changing fast, as modern Greece was still working out who it was as a country. Peter came to the United States as a young man.Here’s something about his name that will help you if you ever go looking for him in old records. Barbalias was first written in the Greek alphabet, as Μπαρμπαλιάς. When Greek immigrants arrived in America, their names had to be transliterated, which means rewritten using English letters. Clerks usually wrote names down the way they sounded, so the Greek ending -ias sometimes came out as -ian. That’s why you’ll find the family as both Barbalias and Barbalian. They’re the same name and the same family.Then came World War I, and it changed Peter’s life. He served in the United States military, enlisting around 1917, when he would have been about twenty-seven, and his service went on through 1918. The records list him as a World War I veteran with service number 2957905. In August 1918 he was in the 9th Company, 3rd Battalion, of the 153rd Depot Brigade. A depot brigade took in new soldiers and trained them. This was a crucial time for the country, which was rushing to build and train a huge army to send to Europe.After the war, Peter settled in Springfield, Massachusetts. In 1920, at thirty-one, he went into business for himself. He opened the Athens Candy Store on Oak Grove Avenue, and everybody called it "Pete’s." The store became a fixture of the neighborhood and stayed open for ninety years, from 1920 until it finally closed in 2010. Peter put most of his working life into it and retired in 1967.His family life grew in Springfield too. In 1923, when he was thirty-four, Peter married Virginia Meniates there. Their daughter, Alice (later Alice Barbalias Furber), was born on October 3, 1928, and their son, James Peter Barbalias, was born on June 30, 1934, both in Springfield.By 1930 the family was living at 52 Kenyon Street in Springfield, in a two-family house built in 1921. A two-family house is one building with two separate apartments, very common in New England cities. Peter stayed in Springfield for the rest of his life. Records from 1956, 1958, 1959, and 1965 all give the same address and list his job as "confectioner," which is an old word for someone who makes or sells candy. In other words, he was still at the candy store.Peter George Barbalias died on September 29, 1969, in Springfield, at eighty. Think about how far he came: from a small town in Greece, to a World War I veteran, to a successful local businessman in America. His story is the story of a whole generation of immigrants who worked hard and built families in their new country.