The aroma of garlic, onions and roasted meat fills the air in a room lined with pictures of white buildings and the blue Mediterranean Sea. In the background, a gyro (yee-roh) machine hums softly as it slow-roasts a turning spit of meat. Dice roll on a beautifully inlaid wooden backgammon board, as two men speak softly in Greek.

This is Flora’s, a little hole-in-the-wall Greek restaurant across the street from DVC that sits between a used book store and the International Education Center. Its owners are Soteris “Sam” and Eleftheria “Ellie” Vassiliou (in Greek “savior” and “freedom,” respectively).

Sam, 67, arrives at 6 a.m., Ellie not long after. Often they both stay until 7 p.m.

He is known for his spanakopita, sautéed spinach and feta cheese wrapped and baked in phyllo dough. Her specialty is a light, flaky baklava, a pastry of layered walnuts and phyllo dough, flavored with nutmeg, cinnamon and honey.

While the food at Flora’s is very good, it is surpassed by Sam’s stories about his life.

Born on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus, he was orphaned at age 2 and raised, along with three siblings, by his then-16-year-old brother.

“We were the poorest in the village,” Sam says of those years.

At the time, Cyprus was occupied by the British, and although Winston Churchill had promised to return the island to Greece after World War II, it continued its occupation through the 1950s.

Sam says his entire family was involved in the underground resistance movement. One night while on patrol in his village, he lost hearing in his right ear after a land mine was accidentally triggered and set off a chain of explosions.

“My ears were buzzing for two months,” he says.

After his entire family was captured (he spent three months in prison), Sam began to seek a way out. When the British would not give him papers to leave, he went to the American embassy, which provided the proper documents to emigrate.

Offered a job in America as a fry cook, Sam recalls saying, “I don’t know what that is, but give me a chance and I’ll be the best damn fry cook you ever had.”

But it was at his second job, the Bow and Bell restaurant in Jack London Square, that Sam, then 17, got his name and a mentor.  As Sam tells the story:

The very first night this guy’s sitting at the end of the bar, watching a baseball game on a black and white TV. He asks me why I’m not watching, and I say the game is stupid, and I have work to do.

He gives me an envelope and says it’s from the boss, the guy sitting at the end of the bar.

Thinking he was about to be fired, Sam opened the envelope to find $50 and a note: “You’re a hell of a guy, go buy a pair of black shoes.”

The boss turned out to be professional baseball player Jackie Jensen, MVP of the American League. He took Sam to the next Giants’ home game, paid him a day’s salary and thoroughly explained the game.

“It bothered him so much I said this is a stupid game,” Sam says, recalling that Jensen did such a good job of teaching him the rules; he now knows the game better than most Americans.

More than 50 years later, Sam looks back on a career that includes four college degrees (including a doctorate in political science), a teaching stint in the political science graduate program of College of the Pacific (now University of the Pacific) in Stockton, and ownership of the four-star Savoy restaurant in Pleasant Hill.

Few people know about his academic life.

“Ellie, where is my degree?” he asks his wife.

“I don’t know,” she answers. “In the garage.”

The box in the garage also holds his other degrees, a first-place trophy for beating out 499 other backgammon players in 1964, and a medallion and proclamation from the president of Cyprus honoring his “service in the underground.”

Inside Flora’s, some items speak to Sam’s more recent connection to DVC and IEC students.  Like the porcelain figurines of four Chinese opera singers ornately dressed in silk robes, the special collector’s edition of Olympic stamps from the Chinese postal service, and the bottles of sake. All are gifts from the grateful parents of students he has helped.

“I know every one of these students that come in,” Sam says.  “You’d be surprised how many call me ‘Papa.'”

He remembers one student, now studying nuclear physics at Berkeley, who brought him copies of acceptance letters to seven top California schools. Sam says he asked the student whether he had shown the letters to his parents.

“My parents didn’t help with this, you did,” Sam says he told him.

Flora’s is a labor of love, not a necessity. And prices are reasonable, especially for DVC students, who get an additional 15 percent off.
 
“It keeps me young,” Sam says. “I just don’t want to die on the damn couch.”