Constantine's WWII draft registration card — Local Board No. 24, NYC, 11 days after SS Excalibur arrival (September 5, 1941)

Eleven days off the boat, he reported to his draft board. Constantine’s Selective Service System (D.S.S.) Form 1 registration card — Serial No. 3536, Order No. 2682A — filed at Local Board No. 24, Sherman Square Hotel, 200 West 71st Street, Room 22, New York City on September 5, 1941. Three months before Pearl Harbor, eleven days after his SS Excalibur arrival at New York on August 25, 1941, Constantine registered for military service.

What Constantine declared in his own hand

Registrar’s report (reverse): White · Height 5’10¾” · Weight 154 lbs · Eyes brown · Hair black · Complexion dark · Identifying marks: “Scar lip temple · scar lip under finger”

The registrar — Burrell J. Geddes, Local Board No. 24 — countersigned and stamped the card.

Why this document matters

1. Date of birth definitively confirmed as June 21, 1916 — written in Constantine’s own hand, on a sworn US federal document, just 25 years after the fact. This is the earliest US-government record of his birthdate and corroborates the date that later appeared on his 1947 Certificate of US Citizenship and his 1923 Mytilene baptismal certificate (Old Style 8 June / New Style 21 June). Resolves the date-of-birth drift that had complicated his Greek registry (see the 1957 Mitroon Arrenon re-issue).

2. Place of birth: MITILENE, GREECE. Constantine wrote Mitilene, the French/Italian-influenced spelling he’d been using on his Italian student documents. Note he did not write Soma — by 1941 Mytilene had effectively replaced Soma as his “official” birthplace, consistent with the Mitroon Arrenon re-registration his father had completed in Mytilene after the family’s 1922 displacement.

3. Country of citizenship: U.S.A. Constantine declared US citizenship to the Selective Service ten years after his father Lazaros’s July 9, 1931 naturalization, through which Constantine had derived US citizenship as a minor child. Six months earlier in Rome his Italian credentials had labeled him “nazionalità: greco” — see the 1937 Perugia foreigners’ card. The dual identity is captured precisely between these two documents: in Italy as Greek, in America as American.

4. Living with Takis at 28 W. 69th Street. Constantine’s brother Takis (Panagiotis) had been living in NYC since the family’s 1924 SS Themistocles arrival. The address 28 W. 69th Street — the family’s first US base — appears throughout the 1937-1947 records and was Lazaros’s last home before his 1939 death. The naming of Takis as the person “who will always know your address” is filial protocol — Takis was the senior surviving Jeannopoulos male in NYC.

5. Already practicing medicine at Flower and Fifth Avenue Hospital. Eleven days after stepping off the SS Excalibur, Constantine had already secured a position at Flower and Fifth Avenue Hospital at 105th & 5th Avenue (a New York Medical College teaching hospital). The Selective Service form let him list both: Fordham Hospital may have been his pending residency and Flower-Fifth his immediate clinical work. By November 16, 1942 he would receive his New York State medical license No. 041039 — fifteen months from this draft registration to the formal license.

The trajectory this card sits on

The trajectory is tightly choreographed:

Twelve days in New York to land at Flower-Fifth, eleven days to file his draft card, fifteen months to be licensed, two years to be commissioned, six years to receive the formal Certificate that ratified his derivative US citizenship in his own name. The September 1941 draft card is the first document in this American chain.