Magdalena (always known as Lena) was born September 9, 1917 to George and Katina Maniates on Chicago’s West Side, where her father and uncle Gus ran a small restaurant. When the Depression loomed, Lena, her mother, and two of her three siblings relocated to Salonika, Greece. Lena remembered almost being washed off the ship’s deck by a rogue wave during the passage. Later they survived a serious earthquake in Salonica, and Lena remembered playing with Jewish children in the neighborhood before they disappeared in the Holocaust. During their seven year stay in Salonika, Lena completed Anatolia High School. The family returned to Chicago as the storm clouds of World War Two gathered, and Lena completed a B.A. degree at Illinois Institute of Technology in 1940. She really wanted to join the Women’s Air Corps but her mother’s ill health kept her at home. Instead, she worked for the Greek War Relief to help send humanitarian aid to embattled Greece, partly as a cashier.
After the war Lena followed her true calling as a teacher at Amundson High School, teaching English, French, and Modern Greek for five years. She met Leonidas Xydes during this time, and they were married for 39 years. After a number of years teaching, Lena went into business with her brother Louis, co-owning the old-fashioned drug store Clarkville Drugs on the corner of Clark and Granville Streets on the city’s north side for ten years.
With two small kids, Lena left the business and decided to stay home, but never happy without work to do, in the five or six years she stayed home she was the leader of a Girl Scout troop, served in a number of positions in her local school’s PTA including President, and was active in the North Shore Community Council, where she was instrumental in preserving Warren Park from being developed into apartments.
When Lena returned to teaching, she served as librarian at McPherson School for two years and finally as a bi-lingual teacher and director of the Greek bi-lingual program at Budlong Elementary School, where she loved and helped Greek immigrant children adjust quickly to America.
At the age of 60, Lena returned to college and earned her Master’s degree in Education. At the age of 70, she moved to a senior development in California called The Villages, where she finally got to pursue the interests she had put aside for a lifetime of working: painting and ceramics classes, Bible study, and music. She was a member of the choral group the Village Voices for 25 years. She found a cohesive church congregation in San Jose at St. Basil’s Greek Orthodox Church and was very active in many church events.
Among the many notable events in her life, Lena attended an institute of classical studies in Athens, Greece in her sixties, traveled to the Holy Land with a church group in her seventies, cruised the Amazon River in South America in her eighties, drove all over Greece both with her son and later with her daughter and grandchildren when she was 88.
Lena was driving until she was 95, lived alone and unaided until the age of 97, survived pneumonia at 97, a hip fracture at 98, and just last month celebrated her 100th birthday with friends and family. Remarkably healthy, Lena still had all her own teeth, read small print without glasses, had no arthritis pain, and had never been in a hospital before the age of 97. She died in her sleep—her only regret in the last few years that no one would argue with her.
Lena outlived most of her generation, including her husband Leonidas, her son Christ, her sister Mary and brothers Peter and Louis. She leaves a daughter Georgia(Mark) with three grandchildren (Cameron, Evangelos, and Marika), a daughter-in-law Ronda with three grandsons (Alexander, Nicholas, and Killian), four great grandchildren (Leonidas, Juniper, Lucy, and Marlowe), cousin Tony Maniates and family, cousin Petros Xides and family, numerous nephews and nieces, and many friends both in Chicago and California. Lena requested in lieu of flowers any memorials be sent to St. Basil’s Orphanage Fund or St. Basil’s Philoptochus. (St. Basil’s Greek Orthodox Church, 6430 Bose Lane, San Jose, California 95120.
