Peter’s elementary class at Mount Saint Michael Academy in the Bronx, 1950 — Peter is one of the boys in the back row. He was seven.
The following year, 1951 — Peter age eight in the formal class portrait at Mount Saint Michael.
Peter Constantine Jeannopoulos was born in New York City on October 14, 1943 — the eldest of Constantine and Sophie’s three children, and the first Jeannopoulos child born American. He earned an MA and made his career as a New York City public school teacher, now retired. On July 6, 1968 he married Mireille Lebrun in Queens — the union that joined the Jeannopoulos and Lebrun lines, the Greek-Asia-Minor and French-Caribbean branches of what would become Alex’s family — and they raised their two sons, Alex and Christopher, in New York before retiring south. They now live in Hollywood, FL.
In 1972 Peter earned his master’s degree at Hunter College in the City University of New York — with a thesis on the catastrophe that had displaced his own father fifty years earlier. The title was “The Plight of the Anatolian Greeks: The Role of Smyrna in Allied Diplomacy, 1919.” The 1919 Allied diplomatic decisions are precisely what led to the 1922 Asia Minor catastrophe; the catastrophe is precisely what made his father Constantine a Smyrna refugee. He had been studying his own family’s history without naming it that. The thesis is catalogued in Georgios Giannaris’s Bibliography of Doctoral Dissertations and Master’s Theses about Greece (EKKE, Athens, 1973–74), where it appears under the surname “Peter G. Jeannopoulos” — the G middle initial slightly mysterious (family memory has him as Peter Constantine).
Toddler-era family story — “No more!”
His cousin Aline (John Lazare’s daughter) recorded a family-folklore moment from when Peter was a toddler, watched by his grandmother Eftyhia:
“Nene was very proud of keeping her pots and pans super shiny. Our old apts had dumb waiters that went straight to the basement incinerator. One day she was watching your Dad when he was little and she couldn’t find her pans when it was time to cook. And she was frantically looking around and looking at Peter who pointed to the dumb waiter and said ‘No More!’ I actually remember her telling the story in Greek and then saying ‘no more’ in English and cracking up laughing!” — Aline Pepe, 2026-05-24
Toddler Peter had thrown the entire set of Nene’s freshly-polished pots and pans down the apartment dumb waiter to the basement incinerator. The “No more!” became a permanent line of family-folklore comedy. Nene retold the story in Greek for decades — the punchline always being her grandson’s clipped two-word English explanation.
Bronx Zoo press photo
In April 1952 he appeared, age 8, in a Wide World Photos syndicated press photo at the Bronx Zoo Children’s Zoo, holding a baby pig. The photo ran in newspapers across the country — confirmed appearances in the Richmond Times-Dispatch (Sun, April 27, 1952) and the Des Moines Tribune (Thu, May 1, 1952), with the caption “Pigs are no novelty to Iowa children, but to Peter Jeannopoulos of New York City, holding a baby pig is quite an experience.”
