What may sound trivial to many “outsiders” reading this post is actually quite a consequential moment in the history of the Greek community in the United States, and also something very personal to me.
On July 3, hundreds of delegates from throughout the United States and Canada, representing local Cretan associations from cites like Salt Lake City, Pittsburgh, Boston and all points across the continent, held their national convention in Cleveland, Ohio.
And at this convention, the Pancretan Association of America, an organization that still, to this day has many separate “men’s clubs” and “ladies clubs” in existence, elected its first ever female national president.
Diane Kounalakis-Baxter made history, following in the footsteps of dozens of men before her, taking on the tremendous burden of leading an organization that was founded in 1929 and counts thousands of members across the nation in more than sixty local chapters.
It should be a proud moment for anyone who has been involved or grown up in this organization, including me. But my proud moments aren’t only for the Cretans of America, who have finally elected their first female national president. My proud moment is for the person they have elected to lead them for the next two years, and hopefully beyond.
I first met Diane on a KTEL bus somewhere in Crete… Going to Hania, or leaving Hania. It was the early 1980s and I was a teenager, already deeply involved in the Pancretan Youth Association. When I saw Diane I was– to say the least– “starstruck” because she was, at that time, the Youth Association’s National President. To any young Cretan kid who attended conventions and other Cretan functions, it was like seeing god.
To make a very long story short, we became friends and Diane (along with a guy named Mike Kastrenakes, who was also very involved in the Cretan Youth at the time) took me under their wing and helped me evolve into the leader of the same organization several years later.
It was Diane who saw me and gave me that attention and time– when others in her position would have shooed me away and brushed me off as a bothersome little kid they didn’t have time for.
I would go on to be elected National President of the Pancretan Youth several years later and to this day, I credit that experience as the “grooming period” for my various leadership roles in the Greek American community, to this day.
Forty years later, our friendship is flourishing and I still remind her, even though we are more of “contemporaries” now that we’ve both passed well into our 50s, I still remind her what an impact she had on me and how that impact on me has had a ripple effect on practically everything I have down in the Greek American community.
I often think back what my own life would have been like if Diane didn’t give me the time of day on that bus in Hania way back in the 1980s. But she did… and I think the results of her compassion, her smile and her time that she gave me then, are quite obvious in my own work in this community to this day.
So, congratulations to the Pancretan Association for this historic moment in your existence and for electing such an individual to lead you for the next two years.
And congratulations Diane. Yes, for your election as the Pancretan Association of America’s first female. But more so for continuing to be the Diane that I met way back on that bus in Hania in the early 1980s.
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