Word: bakalar
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Friends and observers agree that her husband's presidential defeat was an emotionally crushing blow to Kitty. An energetic and ambitious woman, she had thrived on the demanding schedule, tumult and attention of the campaign. Sandy Bakalar, a close friend, says, "Kitty was going 1,000 miles a minute. Then on Nov. 8 it was suddenly over. It was a terrible loss." Her husband, meanwhile, handled the loss in his usual stoic fashion. "Kitty had to do the mourning for both of them," says Richard Gaines, editor of the Boston Phoenix, who has long reported on the Dukakis family...
...senior people already thought of as the Inevitable Michael. He was president of the honor society, good at sports, a trumpeter in the band. "Whatever it was, he ran for it," according to his mother. When he was rated only as the equal of his girlfriend, Sandy Cohen (Bakalar), in French, Michael found out this was because of her superior accent, and he practiced his pronunciation. He did not like losing, even to friends. He signed her yearbook, with a parting flourish, in French. The accent had been conquered...
...within this autobiography is the portrait of a family that belies easy ethnic stereotypes. By the time Dukakis was born, in 1933 (three years after his brother Stelian), the family was living comfortably in the prosperous Boston suburb of Brookline. The Dukakises were, by all accounts, demanding parents. Sandy Bakalar, Mike Dukakis' high school girlfriend, remembers Panos as "scary." She recalls, "He had high standards for the boys, strict high standards. They had a very structured life at home. They had specific responsibilities...
...ethnicity. Dr. Nicholas Zervas, a close friend of Dukakis', describes Euterpe as a "really patrician woman. She would have made a wonderful Brahmin." Unlike many immigrant families, the Dukakises were not religious, supporting the Greek Orthodox Church primarily for cultural reasons. If anything, the family was governed by what Bakalar calls the "quintessential Protestant ethic. Whatever gifts you received, you had to give back. They really believed that money corrupted...
When Sandy Bakalar arranged a date for Dukakis with her friend Katharine Dickson, she felt compelled to explain, "She's Jewish, divorced and has a son by her first marriage." The two clicked immediately. "I found him very sexually attractive," Kitty Dukakis laughs. "People don't think of Michael that way. That's why it's fun to talk about it." Friends say Dukakis' parents were initially resistant to the match, and suggest that his marriage to Kitty in 1963 may have marked his true break with his Greek immigrant roots...