'Yia sou, ti'ka'nis,' said Dimitri, whom my friends and I would call Mr. Dimitri.
"Yia sou, ti'ka'nis, Mr. Dimitri,' the three of us said in a pretty raggedy chorus. Dimitri was the frankfurter man on 89th Avenue in Jamaica, Queens. In fact, Frank Marano said that he was 'The World's Best Frankfurter Man.'
And who could fight it? The smell of those Sabrett franks, all steamy and delicious, loaded with cooked onions and sauerkraut was enough to cause my other friend, Pat Reilly, to give a "one thumbs up" sign (his other thumb trying to hang on to the dog) when we stopped at the stand on a Friday after school for a special, weekly treat.
Mr. Dimitri always wore a Greek fisherman's cap and he had a weathered face, even though he told us he was in his forties at the time, which of course seemed ancient to us then. He said he was from Kalavryta, in Greece, but never wanted to tell us any more, and we didn't press.
'Do you have any kids?,' asked Pat.
'Yes, I 'av two boys; one of them in college,' he said, beaming. 'They're good boys. Am so proud of them.'
As we stood there, workers from Mary Immaculate Hospital would stop by at the end of the day shift. Some of the people from the big courthouse on Sutphin Boulevard, two blocks away, would also swing by and get a hot dog, enchanted as we all were by Dimitri's frankfurter stand.
Old Dimitri, as we sometimes called him when we were by ourselves, had a lot of customers. Although we never knew exactly what he did before he came to the U.S., we did know that the smell of his hot dogs, with all the fixins', was something heavenly. In the winter, he would even roast chestnuts over a little fire that he'd set up.
It started to get too busy for us to talk, so Frank said, 'Okay, Mr. Dimitri, we'll see you next Friday, okay?'
As busy as he was, the frankfurter man said, with what looked like tears in his eyes,'You all good boys. Stay safe, okay?'
We all waved back as we headed across the street to Rufus King Park. "What's up with Old Dimitri?' asked Pat.
'Yeah, it looked like he was cryin' or something,' said Frank.
It was years later when Frank told me that Mr. Dimitri was one of the few survivors of the Massacre of Kalavryta. Apparently when the Nazis reached his town, on December 13th, 1943, the soldiers locked the women and children thirteen years and younger in the school and then ordered all remaining males to a field outside the village.
The Nazis then machine-gunned down over 1,300 boys and men. The next day they burned the town to the ground.
'That's why he always asked us to be safe,' I said to Frank, who now had tears in his eyes too.
