ALTAMONT — Anne Vlahos was “a wonderful, one-of-a-kind woman, possessed of an irrepressible, effervescent personality and sense of humor,” wrote her son, Harvey Vlahos, in a tribute.

On Friday, Oct. 19, she “left us to join her husband, Charlie (Constantine), in the next world,” her son wrote. She was 97 years old.

Mrs. Vlahos and her husband were the longtime owners of the Altamont Manor restaurant.

“In keeping with her unbounding selflessness and generosity,” her son wrote, Mrs. Vlahos made an anatomical gift of her body to Albany Medical College, just as her husband had when he died, in 2009.

“That’s just one of those things where it just ... helps medical progress,” said Harvey Vlahos.

Even in hospice care at the end of her life, her son said, Mrs. Vlahos would make others feel special.

When one of her health aids had a birthday, Harvey Vlahos said, “My mom told me to go out and buy her a cake and bring it back. I mean, she’d never met her before. It’s just, ‘Oh, it’s your birthday, you should have a cake.”

The daughter of Xenophon and Oraine, Mrs. Vlahos was born on July 10, 1921, in British Columbia, Canada. She was the oldest of three.

“Her family story is typical of immigrant families of the time both in the United States and Canada,” Harvey Vlahos wrote.

Unfortunately, Mrs. Vlahos’s mother, Oraine, had, like so many immigrants, been taken advantage of, said Harvey Vlahos. “There was someone in New Jersey, and he went back to the old country and talked to some of the people, and said, ‘You know, I can take your daughters back [to New Jersey] and we’ll ... give them a new life and find [them] husbands.’”

Once in New Jersey, without any money or knowledge of the English language, Oraine was exploited for her labor. “So, my grandfather’s brother was coming over to visit and he stopped in New Jersey, and saw my grandmother and understood the situation,” said Harvey Vlahos. Xenophon Brigis’s brother made his way to California and explained the situation to Xenophon, who decided to return to New Jersey and “rescue” his future wife, said Harvey Vlahos.

Mrs. Vlahos’s father owned a series of small businesses.

“Anne and her late brothers, John and Nick, would balance school with work and make a valuable contribution to the family business,” her son wrote.

“With a twinkle in her eye, she relished stories about the days they would load up a wagon with linens from the restaurant and take them to be laundered,” Harvey Vlahos wrote in a tribute. “One would pull, while another would sit atop the huge pile to keep them on the wagon. Of course, the ‘puller’ would try and unseat the ‘sitter’ to change jobs.”

As a young girl, Mrs. Vlahos exhibited the generosity that so many would come to know her for, said her son.

“It was somewhere in Canada, I forget which town now — either Calgary or Lethbridge,” Harvey Vlahos recounted, his mother had met a young gypsy girl — the Romani, like a lot of minority groups, experienced prejudice. “People were told to stay away and so forth,” said Harvey Vlahos.

His mother, and the doll she was carrying, did not stay away.

“My mom … rather, she wound up talking to this little gypsy girl … And she realized that [the little gypsy girl] really didn’t have much, and, so she gave her her doll,” said Harvey Vlahos. “She took a little bit of heat for it from the adults … But that’s what she did; she was very kind-hearted like that.

With each change of business fortune, Harvey Vlahos wrote, the Brigises’ next opportunity moved the family further east from Vancouver, to Calgary, to Lethbridge, and to St. Catharines in Ontario.

On a trip from St. Catharines to Wellsville, New York, to visit relatives, the Rigas, Anne Brigis met her husband-to-be.

Constantine Vlahos graduated from high school in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and then moved to Wellsville to live with relatives when his father returned to Greece. Constantine’s aunt had married a man named George Raptis, who was partners with Jim Rigas in the Texas Hot Restaurant, one of the country’s longest continuously operating family restaurants.

Constantine Vlahos began his long restaurant career at the Texas Hot.

“I just heard this story — I don’t know — several months ago,” recounted Harvey Vlahos. “Someone else had actually come down to visit and, apparently, they had heard that there was a lovely daughter. And they came down to visit and they brought their son with them, in the hopes that they could have arranged a match — but she fell in love with dad.”

“It was love at first sight and lasted for 68 years,” Harvey Vlahos wrote of his parents’ marriage. “Long-distance courtships were not easy in those days, and was compounded by an old-fashioned parental attitude that required either of her brothers John or Nick to accompany them on dates.”

The couple married twice — in September 1940 and again on May 4, 1941 — which Mrs. Vlahos told The Enterprise, in 2009, was “the real wedding date.”

She had gotten advice from a friend of hers in St. Catharines to marry at least six months before the actual wedding so they could be together after May 4.

“My friend had married a boy from the United States during the war and she could not come to this country after the wedding,” said Mrs. Vlahos, in 2009. “She had papers and legal things to go through. She could not join her husband for six months.”

Still, after all the preparation, there was a hitch for the Vlahoses.

“When we crossed the border after we were married, we thought all the legality was over. But an immigration officer said to Charlie, ‘You have to pay a head tax on your wife.’ It was $8.”

“Charlie said to me, ‘You know how much your head is worth.’ He had a great sense of humor,”said Mrs. Vlahos, in 2009.

The couple moved to Fort Smith, Arkansas, before Mr. Vlahos was shipped off to war.

After Mr. Vlahos returned from serving in the Pacific during World War II, he worked at the Texas Hot, his son said, and then he had the opportunity to buy his own restaurant.

“They purchased a restaurant in Bradford, Pennsylvania, in the late ’40s and early ’50s, before there was a TV in every house,” wrote their son. “Social life extended more outward from the home.”

The restaurant was open 20 hours a day, from 6 a.m. to 2 a.m.

His parents’ restaurant served “only great food,” Harvey Vlahos wrote in a tribute. “They didn’t even have a liquor license to draw in late-night customers. It was a hard, hard grind but they made a success of it.”

The couple would come in together for the breakfast rush, their son said, and in the afternoon, his mother would go home and take a nap, and then she would relieve his father who would then get some rest. Over the years, Harvey Vlahos said, his parents would dial back the hours that the restaurant was open, from a midnight closing to 10 p.m.

The loss of the restaurant’s evening business coincided with the rise of household television ownership. “It changed the lifestyle of America,” Harvey Vlahos said of the television. “I mean, the social impact it had on families … And how it affected businesses … Back then, you would go out at night, walk around — stuff like that — instead of sitting at home and watching TV.”

Unfortunately, in 1962, the landlord would not renew the Vlahoses’ lease on their restaurant; he wanted their space for a department store. “They had to sell the equipment for pennies on the dollar and try to find a place to start all over again,” Harvey Vlahos wrote.

The family moved north, and Mr. Vlahos found work in the Hotel Van Curler, which today is known as Elston Hall, one of the main buildings of the Schenectady County Community College.

Mrs. Vlahos worked at the Van Curler as a cashier.

“In 1965, they opened the Altamont Manor, which became one of the top fine dining restaurants in the Albany area,” Harvey Vlahos wrote of his parents’ restaurant. “They would perennially be at or near the top of the ten-best-restaurants list.”

Anne and Constantine Vlahos on their wedding day.

The couple were a perfect match, their son said. Mr. Vlahos worked best behind the scenes, while Mrs. Vlahos had a “bright personality” that made her “a natural to be the face of The Manor.”

“She developed a remarkable memory for names and faces,” Harvey Vlahos wrote of his mother. “In 1964, The Manor was ‘in the boondocks’ and many customers were once- or twice-a-year special-occasion guests. It was fun to see the amazement on guests’ faces when she called them by name as they arrived.”

“Know affectionately as Mrs. V, she and Mr. V not only created a fine restaurant, but did it fostering a genuine family-like work atmosphere. Many of the employees worked the full 17 years that they owned it, and many of their children followed,” Harvey Vlahos wrote in a tribute. “A few years after retiring, in 1982, they began holding well-attended staff reunions with the last one held just two years ago, 35 years after selling. A remarkable testament to the affection in which they were held.”

In retirement, Mrs. Vlahos became active in the community.

She volunteered for many years as a coordinator for Community Caregivers; she served as Grand Matron of the Order of the Eastern Star, a female counterpart of Freemasonry; and was active in the Altamont Reformed Church.  

Also in retirement, the Vlahoses bought a recreational vehicle and traveled, their son said.

“They did a loop around the country,” Harvey Vlahos said of his parents’ RV travels. “They went down the southern route through Texas, and Oklahoma, and Arizona. To the Grand Canyon. Up the coast of California, Oregon, and Washington. And then, they actually went up into Canada and visited a lot of the places.”

The Vlahoses traveled to Greece as well.

“And believe it or not,” her son said, at one stop in Canada, at her family’s old store, Mrs. Vlahos, in her 70s, met a woman in her 90s, who remembered Anne when she was a small child.

Mrs. Vlahos was a large part of after-school care for her grandson, Konstantin; she would always welcome his friends from Altamont Elementary School.

“All the kids called her Yiayia as well,” Harvey Vlahos wrote.

She would teach them Greek words and phrases.  

“In keeping with her love of all things chocolate, M&Ms were used as incentives and rewards to learn,” her son wrote, and, later in life, she kept her grandson’s college roommates fully stocked with an endless supply of home-baked cookies.

The Vlahoses enjoyed cooking and entertaining for their many friends; she would continue to hold the get-togethers until this past August, when she got too sick to do so.

“Legendary at those get-togethers was Anne’s penchant and uninhibited enthusiasm for telling jokes, good, bad, and everything in between,” Harvey Vlahos wrote. “She was a fervent believer in the adage, ‘Humor is the best medicine.’”

“At 97, who’s to argue?” he asked.

The “price of admission” to Anne’s get-togethers was a joke to share with all the other guests.  

“It was infectious and what, at first, on the surface, seemed a corny gesture, soon turned into a rollicking good time,” Harvey Vlahos wrote of the “price of admission” to his mother’s get-togethers. “People began to come ‘armed’ with not just one joke, but several. Even in her last weeks, a source of comfort was to read her jokes from one of her many joke books.”

Asked his favorite joke that his mother used to tell, Harvey Vlahos recounted the story of Falling Rock and Running Water.

There were two Native American boys, Falling Rock and Running Water, Vlahos said, and they stay out like any young men would, until one day they didn’t return. Finally, days later, Running Water returned but Falling Rock did not. “So, they went looking for him, and looking, and looking, and couldn’t find him” he said. “And that’s why, to this day, when you drive down the road, they’ll say, ‘Watch for Falling Rock.’”

“You can see where you’ve got to build into that one,” Harvey Vlahos said with a laugh.

“There’s a vivid memory of one dinner party where she was on a roll, telling one ‘groaner’ after the other, her enthusiasm undeterred by the rolling of eyes. In spite of themselves, the guests’ laughter began to build all around,” he wrote. “Timing and delivery are everything. She must have saved the best-worst for last, as one of the guests, laughing uncontrollably, barely managed to get out, ‘That's the stupidest joke I ever heard,’ the guest said as he wiped his eyes.”

“Somewhere in heaven,” Harvey Vlahos wrote of his mother, “I’m sure she’s still cracking them up, in spite of all their eye rolling and attempts to stifle the laughter.”

****

Anne Vlahos is survived by her son, Harvey, and his wife, Donna Abbott-Vlahos; and her much loved grandson, Konstantin, all of Altamont.

She is also survived by her sister-in-law, Zoe Brigis of Queens, New York; and by many generations of cousins, nieces, and nephews in the United States, Canada, and Greece.

Her husband, Constantine, died before her, as did her brothers, John and Nick, and her parents.

A celebration of her life, open to all, will be held on Saturday, Nov. 10, at the Altamont Reformed Church from noon to 3 p.m. A memorial service will be held in the sanctuary following the reception.

Memorial contributions may be sent to the Altamont Reformed Church, Post Office Box 671, Altamont, NY 12009; or to Community Caregivers, 2021 Western Ave., Suite 104, Guilderland, NY 12084.

—Sean Mulkerrin