Publisher: Eckhartz Press, Chicago
ISBN: 978-1-971660–08-0
269 Pages
$29.95
Maria the Pappas is an autobiographical portrait of Maria Pappas that explains not simply what she has done, but why she became the person she is. The manuscript presents Pappas as a collection of apparent contradictions: a hard-driving politician and deeply emotional helper; a government reformer and flamboyant public personality; a Cretan Greek from West Virginia who became a fixture of Chicago politics; and a woman comfortable confronting powerful politicians while also spending enormous amounts of time with ordinary taxpayers, immigrants, clergy, community activists and people experiencing hardship. Pappas describes herself as bold, direct, and authentic, but says the fundamental values underneath that personality are faith, honesty, loyalty, and service.
Childhood and the origin of “Maria”
The foundation of the book is Pappas’s childhood in Wheeling/Warwood, West Virginia, in a working-class Greek immigrant community. Her grandparents came from Crete, her family was closely connected to coal mining, and her parents operated Ted’s restaurant near Wheeling Hospital. The restaurant became Pappas’s first classroom in human behavior. From an extremely young age, she delivered food to the hospital, talked with customers about sick relatives, and observed grief, poverty, illness, religious differences, and family problems. She says this taught her to listen to people and try to understand what they needed.
The manuscript’s most traumatic formative story concerns her mother. When Pappas was 11, her mother was hospitalized and subjected to psychiatric treatment, including medication and electroshock therapy. A doctor told the young Pappas that her mother’s condition was her fault. Pappas rejected that accusation and became determined to help her mother. The book describes the experience as fundamental to the adult Pappas’s instinct to challenge authority and search for people who need help. In her own formulation, she spent the rest of her life trying to “carry” other people over the line in much the same way she believes she did for her mother.
Her Greek heritage and Orthodox faith are equally important. Her grandfather, his prayer rope, Greek school, church, music, and the liturgy become recurring images throughout the book. Pappas grows up believing that cultural identity isn’t something to discard in order to become American; preserving language, religion, music, food and tradition is part of the American immigrant experience.
Ambition, music and discovering a larger world
Young Pappas is extraordinarily competitive and energetic. She works multiple jobs, plays piano, clarinet and organ, organizes a church choir, becomes a drum majorette and wins nine gold medals in baton twirling. Her famous opera-singer cousin Teresa Stratas gives her a glimpse of a much larger and more glamorous world beyond West Virginia.
Her father is simultaneously one of her great influences and a barrier she continually pushes against. He wants his daughter to be tough and self-sufficient but is skeptical of music as a career. One of his lessons essentially becomes a motto for Pappas: he intends to make his daughter capable of handling anybody, anytime, anything, anywhere.
That relentless independence eventually carries her out of West Virginia and toward education, psychology, social work, and ultimately Chicago.
Psychology, social work, and learning to “read” people
The middle sections of the manuscript are crucial because they connect the childhood stories with the politician Pappas eventually becomes. Her work with Adlerian psychology and social work teaches her to approach troubled people differently: rather than simply punish or lecture them, understand what is driving their behavior and determine what they need.
Her experiences at Altgeld Gardens and elsewhere in Chicago expose her directly to poverty, addiction, racial inequality, and people in crisis. These experiences reinforce something she believes she learned behind the counter of Ted’s restaurant: listen first, identify the real problem, and then intervene.
The manuscript repeatedly returns to Pappas’s ability to “read a room.” That becomes one of the explanations for her later political success. Politics, psychology, and customer service aren’t presented as separate careers—they are different applications of the same skill.
Becoming a Chicago politician
Eventually Pappas enters the notoriously rough world of Chicago and Cook County politics. She is elected to the Cook County Board in 1990, where she develops a reputation as an independent, aggressive, and sometimes disruptive reformer.
One of the manuscript’s most important political relationships is with John Stroger. Pappas backs Stroger at politically risky moments and becomes his friend and ally, despite their dramatically different styles. She portrays herself as unwilling to simply follow party instructions. When Stroger tells her that political leaders could potentially make her a U.S. senator if she would “play the game,” she essentially rejects the proposition—she wants to investigate, ask questions, and do things her own way.
As commissioner, she digs into government finances and bond deals and becomes suspicious of relationships between firms receiving county business and political contributions. That work evolves into the “Pappas Studies” and ethics-reform efforts. The manuscript portrays this period as the point at which her psychological instinct to question authority becomes institutional: now she can investigate government itself.
Transforming the Cook County Treasurer’s Office
The political centerpiece of the book is Pappas’s election as Cook County Treasurer in 1998 and what she says she discovered when she arrived.
She describes finding approximately $31 million in unprocessed checks, antiquated financial practices, questionable arrangements, ghost-payroll problems, and an office badly in need of modernization. She refuses to be sworn in until an auditor is brought in. Arthur Andersen conducts a forensic review. Pappas then begins rebuilding the operation—auditing, reorganizing management, changing banking practices, processing checks, improving investments and computerizing the office.
The results become one of the manuscript’s strongest arguments for her approach to government. According to the book, ending certain arrangements with mortgage companies quadrupled interest income; enforcement against large taxpayers increased collections by nearly 50 percent; and the changes produced a $14.5 million benefit for county and suburban governments during the first six months.
But Pappas’s conception of reform goes beyond accounting.
She decides government should be understandable and accessible to the people paying for it.
That leads to translated materials, multilingual outreach, cultural events, flags representing different countries, community appearances, and eventually an office that consciously reflects Cook County’s ethnic diversity. Pappas describes Chicago not as one homogeneous city but as a collection of ethnic neighborhoods. Her own experience growing up bilingual in an immigrant family makes her identify with taxpayers intimidated by government or struggling with English.
This becomes one of the manuscript’s strongest connections between childhood and public policy:
The little girl behind the counter at Ted’s restaurant eventually turns the Treasurer’s Office into another counter where people can come for help.
“The Maria Pappas Show”
The later chapters increasingly examine the unusual public persona surrounding Pappas.
There is the teased silver hair, striking clothes, boots, red lipstick, exercise, fashion, music, humor, and sometimes outrageous language. The manuscript doesn’t treat these as incidental eccentricities. They are part of her philosophy about communication: people have to notice you before you can reach them.
Her appearances on WVON demonstrate this particularly well. The show may begin with property-tax exemptions and refunds but routinely evolves into conversations about marriage, death, loneliness, religion, family, and personal problems. Journalist Neil Steinberg describes the show as simultaneously about helping people recover money and talking about their lives.
That relationship with Chicago’s Black community becomes another significant part of the later manuscript. Pappas presents herself as someone who can move naturally between Greek churches, ethnic festivals, government offices, and Black neighborhoods because she sees similar values beneath them: family, faith, work, struggle, community, and dignity.
Her partnership with Reverend John Harrell and Black Men United embodies this idea. The organization includes formerly incarcerated men and former gang members who work with young people and people at risk. Pappas sees in Harrell the same instinct she recognizes in herself: finding the person in the crowd who needs someone.
Maria the person
Parts VII and VIII move further away from conventional political autobiography. Food, exercise, clothing, friendships, aging, and death become central subjects.
This is important because the book ultimately isn’t trying to portray Pappas simply as a successful elected official. It wants readers to understand how she lives.
Her fashion and appearance express individuality. Exercise and food reflect discipline. Her friendships reveal fierce loyalty. Her experiences with death expose a much more vulnerable side of the otherwise combative public figure.
The manuscript also becomes increasingly spiritual as Pappas grows older. Death forces her to confront questions that government and politics can’t answer.
And that leads the book back to where it began:
God.
The Bucharest pilgrimage and the meaning of the book
The final pilgrimage to Romania provides the manuscript’s spiritual culmination. Pappas visits monasteries and the People’s Salvation Cathedral and meets Patriarch Bartholomew. She describes the consecration of the cathedral as one of the most profound experiences of her life.
While sitting inside the cathedral, she mentally revisits the entire journey: the little Greek girl in Wheeling; her arrival in Chicago; psychology and social work; Altgeld Gardens; political fights; John Stroger; the mess she encountered at the Treasurer’s Office; WVON; and Black Men United.
Suddenly those stories become parts of one story.
She concludes that her faith, career, failures, and victories were never separate things. They were one calling toward service.
One passage near the end effectively summarizes the entire manuscript. Pappas mentally sees herself as the child learning Greek liturgy, the frightened newcomer to Chicago, the social worker at Altgeld Gardens, the politician confronting powerful people, the new treasurer picking checks off the floor, and the public official working with Black Men United. She concludes that each experience demanded that she put aside pride and concentrate on the person standing in front of her.
The central message
If I reduced the entire 143-page manuscript to one idea, it would be:
Maria Pappas believes her life has been a lifelong search for the person who needs help—and that her childhood, psychology, politics, government reform, cultural outreach and faith are all different expressions of that same calling.
That’s what makes this more than a conventional political memoir. Politics provides the backdrop, but service is really the subject.
The book begins with a child confronted by suffering who wants to fix something. It ends with an older woman standing in an enormous cathedral realizing that she is still essentially doing the same thing.
And there is another important theme underneath it: Pappas never assimilates by erasing herself. The Greek identity, West Virginia upbringing, accent of the immigrant household, Orthodox faith, music, flamboyant clothes, bluntness, and unconventional personality aren’t obstacles she overcame to become successful. The manuscript argues that these are precisely the things that made her successful.
That gives the title Maria the Pappas particular meaning. The book isn’t merely asking, “Who is Maria Pappas?” It explains how Maria became MARIA.