Rhea (“Lula”) at sixteen — her Julia Richman High School yearbook portrait, 1942.
Rhea (“Lula”) with her mother Eftyhia — the only mother-daughter portrait of the two of them in the family archive. Rhea looks to be in her late twenties, dating the photo to the early-to-mid 1950s — the NYC years before her 1964 move to California with Leonidas. She was the only one of Eftyhia’s seven children born American.
Rhea was the only Jeannopoulos sibling born American. October 1, 1926, in New York City — five years after the family had stepped off the SS Themistocles, three years before the Great Depression that would dominate her childhood, and the only one of Eftyhia’s children for whom the word Soma was someplace from family stories rather than someplace she could remember. In the family she was always Lula.
She attended Julia Richman High School in Manhattan — a large Upper East Side public school known in the mid-twentieth century for educating bright daughters of New York’s immigrant working class — and then graduated from Hunter College, New York City’s tuition-free women’s public college, the academic anchor for first-generation immigrant daughters in the Bronx through the mid-20th century. Sometime around 1950 she married Leonidas P. Econom, a fellow New York-born Greek-American.
California, 1964 — Econom Tax Service
In 1964, Rhea and Leo moved across the country to California, where they opened Econom Tax Service. The family settled in Northridge in the San Fernando Valley north of Los Angeles. Rhea ran the practice with her daughters as the business grew, eventually succeeded by her youngest daughter Kim. In 1977, she and Leo opened a restaurant in Las Vegas with their friend and client Jack Tucey.
Family
She and Leonidas raised six children: Peter, Jo Ann, Cathy, Christine, Stephanie, and Kim. By the time of her death in 2012, Peter and Jo Ann had both predeceased her.
She outlived all five of her brothers and her sister Mary — Takis (Nov 20, 1976), Constantine (Nov 8, 1980), Achilles (Jan 22, 2004), John Lazare (Jan 31, 2004), and Mary. When she died on July 14, 2012, at age 85, she was the last of Lazaros and Eftyhia Karamitrou’s children. Her husband Leonidas survived her by eleven and a half years, dying April 5, 2024 in Northridge at age 98.
Her funeral services were at St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church in Northridge, followed by interment at Oakwood Memorial Park in Chatsworth, California. Her published obituary described her as “loved by all who met her…a second mother to a lot of them.”
