Helen Zeese Papanikolas was born in the Utah coal mining town of Cameron in 1917, the second of what would eventually be four girls. Her father, George Zeese, originally Yorgis Zisimopoulos was born in the mountainous region of central Greece. Her mother, Emilia Papachristos, grew up in Istanbul, where she went while still a girl to be a servant to a Greek family. The family soon moved to the railroad town of Helper, in Carbon County, center for the many coal mining camps surrounding it. Helper, with its Japanese fish market, Chinese restaurant, Greek coffeehouses and its ethnic enclaves became an abiding source for Helen Zeese’ s work as a writer.
In 1933 the family moved to Salt Lake City where Helen Zeese graduated from East High School and in 1939, after a brief stay at Northwestern, the University of Utah. In 1941 she married Nick Papanikolas, another first generation Greek American, and began a life of juggling homemaking, two children and the obligations of Greek-American family life with the desire to write that had been with her since her youth. Her first important publications were on the Greek and other immigrants in Utah, often written for the Utah Historical Quarterly. She wrote about mine strikes, bootleggers, Bingham Canyon, Greek folklore and the remarkable Magna midwife Georgia Lathouris Mageras, “Magerou.” In a dual biography, Emily-George, published in 1987, she told the moving story of her parents. Her belief that the perception of Utah as a mono-cultural, largely Mormon state needed to be corrected led, in the American bicentennial year 1976, to her editorship of The Peoples of Utah, with chapters on the state’s many ethnicities.
In 1993 she turned to writing fiction, with the publication of a collection of stories, Small Bird Tell Me, followed by a second collection, The Apple Falls from the Apple Tree and then a novel, The Time of the Little Black Bird. She was doing the final editing of another novel, Rain in the Valley, at her death in 2004. Her writing, both fiction and nonfiction, is illuminated by its humanity and fidelity to the realities of immigrant life and to the lives of the immigrants’ children and grandchildren as they negotiate between old-country customs and expectations and their lives in America.
Helen Zeese Papanikolas was the recipient of many awards and honors during her life, among them the Utah Heritage Foundation Lifetime Award, the Japanese American Citizens League Award, the Catholic Community Services Award, The Axia Award of the Hellenic Cultural Association and the NAACP Rosa Parks Award. She was made an Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters by the University of Utah in 1984.
The best source for Helen Zeese Papanikolas’ life and work, though it stops short of her three final fictions, is Miriam B. Murphy’s “Helen Zeese Papanikolas: A Unique Voice in America,” in Worth Their Salt: Notable but Often Unnoted Women of Utah, edited by Colleen Whitley (Logan, Utah, Utah State University Press, 1996).
Work
Dream and Waking: Cowboys
Dream and Waking: Cowboys
Coming home from school in the late twenties and early thirties, I sometimes saw the strangers on the one street of the town. They were not the immigrant miners and their wives from the thirty or more coal camps in the surrounding draws and arid mountainsides, who surreptitiously came to town on paydays, defying the edict of mine management to trade at mine company stores. These strangers came from the sagebrush plain southward or from the borders of the Ute reservation to the north. . . The women leaned against store fronts waiting for their men, packages at their feet. They were scrawny, their hair frizzed with permanent waves, their skin taut with myriad wrinkles, their blue eyes squinting, even on gray days, from the wind and sun of their open terrain. In late fall and early spring they shivered in black or gray-striped suit coats worn over J. C. Penney gingham dresses. In summer they wore the faded dresses without the coats. They were always waiting, looking up and down the street, their eyes following each passerby with hard, unwavering stares.
The men were wiry, stunted. Their faces weathered brown from the sun, misshape. Hand-rolled cigarettes stuck to their bleached lips, and their stockmen’s hats – not the Stetsons of the prosperous Greek, French and Mormon sheep men – were discolored above the band from years of sweat. They wore either overalls too big for their frames or Levis slipped down on their narrow hips. Their half-ton Ford trucks stood at the curb, dusty, bleached by the sun and pitted by rutted roads. In the back were bales of wire fencing, a few lengths of board, sometimes a trussed lamb or calf that brought dry grief, for they were at the mercy of the mean-eyed. At times a child stood pressed to the spackled windshield of the truck, looking out big-eyed at the people passing by. His hair was the color of straw and whacked close to his head.
Sometimes the strangers were inside the Chinese-American Café. They never went into the Grill Café, although they sometimes stood at the window and looked at the tank of green water in which trout swam. . . . When the strangers paid their bill, the Chinese proprietor nodded his head and with wide smiles rang up their money. The strangers looked at him closely, unsmiling, put toothpicks in their mouths, got into their old Ford, drove down the one street and disappeared, the child gazing back for a last look at town.
I always stopped at the Strand Theater where I stood for long minutes in front of the glass-encased posters on either side of the cashier’s booth. The heroes in immaculate cowboy clothes and ten-gallon Stetsons rode noble horses. They were even-featured, rugged like Johnny Mack Brown, silk scarves tied around their necks; tall, strong-jawed, yet boyish like Cary Cooper, Stetson pulled over one eye; lithe ones like Tom Mix in snug black trousers pushed into high-heeled cowboy boots, his black horse Tony decorated with silver-tooled bridle and saddle. There were other heroes who arrived in the nick of time and in the background of posters was a starlet with cupid-bow lips, straight-plucked eyebrows pulled downwards in anguish, wearing a gingham dress with low square collar, snug over her breast, pugged sleeves. Invariably her hands were clasped pleading for help.
It was many years before I realized that those stunted, wiry men from the sagebrush land and Johnny Mack Brown, Gary Cooper, Tom Mix were supposed to be the same people – cowboys.
From Frank Bergon and Zeese Papanikolas eds., Looking Far West: The Search for the American Wes in History, Myth, and Literature (New York and Scarborough, Ontario, Mentor/New American Library, 1978.
Bibliography
Ed., The Peoples of Utah (Salt Lake City, Utah State Historical Society, 1976.
Emily – George (Salt Lake City, University of Utah Press, 1987). Reprinted as A Greek Odyssey in the American West, Bison/University of Nebraska Press, 1997).
Small Bird Tell Me: Stories of Greek Immigrants (Athens, Ohio, Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 1993, 1994).
The Apple Falls from the Apple Tree (Athens, Ohio, Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 1996, 1997),
The Time of the Little Black Bird (Athens, Ohio, Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 1999).
An Amulet of Greek Earth (Athens, Ohio, Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 2002).
Rain in the Valley, (Logan, Utah, Utah State University of Utah Press, 2005).
