Peter Constantine Jeannopoulos was born in New York City on October 14, 1943, the eldest of Constantine and Sophie’s three children. He earned an MA and made his career as a New York City public school teacher, now retired. He married Mireille Lebrun in Queens on July 6, 1968 — the union that joins the Jeannopoulos and Lebrun lines. They have two sons, Alexander and Christopher, and live in Hollywood, FL.
In 1972 he earned his master’s degree at Hunter College in the City University of New York, writing a thesis on his own family’s history: “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 event that made his father Constantine a Smyrna refugee. 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 mysteriously (family memory has him as Peter Constantine).
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.”
