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JOSH MELTZER / The Roanoke Times
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John Liakos and his dogs on the grill at the Roanoke Weiner Stand. "Some people like them cooked more than other people," Liakos says, "and I always give them what they want." He keeps pace with the lunch crowd, reaching into the bun steamer as fast as the orders come in for hot dogs "all the way," "without," "mustard only" or "plain."
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By BETH MACY
THE ROANOKE TIMES, 1/21/2001
He was born in a two-room stone cottage in southern Greece. The oldest of nine children, he slept on the floor next to his brothers and sisters.
His family grew vegetables to sell at the farmers market five miles away in Kalamata. He quit school at the age of 10 and picked olives and figs to help the family get by. "It was a hard, hard life," he recalls in a voice made hoarse by decades of cigarettes and shouting. "We was poor, very poor. Sometimes we would go two, three days without even food."
John George Iliakopoulos was 19 years old the day he boarded the ship, the New Greek, with his dreams of American luxury: an indoor job, a bed of his own to sleep in. It was March 5, 1955, a sunny day. The ship pushed off at 2 p.m., and he remembers his mother crying on the dock.
He planned to live in America about 10 years. He'd work, send money home, save a little and then head back to the farming village of Loutro.
Now 64, he still carries his black-and-white passport photo, stuffed into a wallet full of grandson photos and his relatives' 13-digit telephone numbers in Greece. He was a handsome teen-ager with deep-set eyes and bushy eyebrows. He weighed 156 pounds. He had never tasted a hot dog.
He came to Roanoke to live with a cousin. His first job was frying chitterlings and pig's feet for a restaurant in Gainsboro called Nick's Place.
In 1960, his buddy and fellow Greek, Gus Pappas, was working the counter at the Roanoke Weiner Stand. The place was already a downtown landmark in 1960, when "one with" -- that's the standard hot dog with mustard, chili and onions -- cost 15 cents. Pappas' uncle, Harry Chacknes, had bought the restaurant in 1926 from a cousin who'd opened it in 1916.
A few workers were out sick, and Pappas asked John if he wanted to fill in on the grill. His weekly wage would be $25.
"I said I'd try it for one week," he says.
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The second time he found himself on a boat was the night of Nov. 4, 1985. Election Day. The flood of '85. Water had filled the Roanoke Weiner Stand earlier in the day as rainwater from overflowing Roanoke River and Lick Run swept east on Campbell Avenue. By 4 p.m., the tide had changed and the water swept west. It was 42 inches deep. "Tony from Thomas Market had to come and get us on a boat," recalls John, who's been called Johnny for years and whose last name was formally changed to Liakos when he became an American citizen in 1960.
But the next day he was back behind the counter at his usual spot -- on the customers' right -- cleaning up the mess. For 40 years now, Johnny Liakos has been the right-hand man to Roanoke's Hot Dog King, current owner Gus Pappas, whom he calls "Boss Man." He has only missed work once (hernia surgery) and goes in to clean up on Sundays and other days off, including Christmas. He rests only on these occasions: When the Redskins are playing on his living-room TV. At midday Sundays, when Boss Man drives him to the Olive Garden and they order heaping plates of spaghetti and meatballs. Pappas, who emigrated from Greece a year before Johnny, is the only person in Roanoke Johnny can stand to speak Greek to ("These Greeks who were born here, they don't talk it right"). When he breaks after the lunch rush to eat his own meal of "two with" plus extra mustard, French fries, a Coke and a Little Debbie Devil Creme. And every half-hour at work, when he stops for a Bailey's cigarette. All but one of the employees smoke, and they take turns breaking behind the one-way mirror that looks straight into the south-facing counter (so watch yourself). Those things you can count on, like a bun perfectly steamed and an Oscar Mayer wiener that is just slightly burned. Like Johnny Liakos' nasally, hot dog-hawking voice: "ANYBODY WANT A HOT DOG?!" "ANYBODY NEXT FOR A HOT DOG?!" "ANYONE WANTS A HOT DOG - COME THIS WAY!" "They don't make no more like Johnny, that's for sure," Boss Man says during a recent Sunday spaghetti dinner. And when he says it, in an accent still clipped in Greek, he is speaking nostalgically about a long-gone downtown Roanoke. When farmers from Bent Mountain to Blue Ridge drank Weiner Stand coffee and ate hot dogs at dawn. When the counter hands all performed separate tasks: Boss Man grilling the hot dogs, Johnny working "second" as the hot-dog wrapper and money-taker; the "third man" taking orders. "Back then you didn't have to fool with no trays," Boss Man says. Johnny nods. "You just handed it to 'em on wax paper," he adds. "You didn't have all the rules and stuff then. We didn't even sell French fries then. Things change. It ain't like it used to be. Right boss?"
Now everyone does all the tasks - except make the chili. That recipe is for family members' eyes only. Young Gus Chacknes, nephew to Gus Pappas and heir to the crown of Hot Dog King, assembles the secret spices from bulk bins in an upstairs storage room.
Johnny may only be the right-hand man to Roanoke's Hot Dog King - the Duke of Dogs, perhaps - but his daughter, Virginia Koch, says he's recognized far and wide. "I bet more people know him than know the mayor of Roanoke," she says.
At the Olive Garden, he's recognized every week. At a mall in Greensboro: "Hey, you're the wienie stand man, aren't you?" Co-worker Tonia George took Johnny's family to the West Virginia State Fair in Lewisburg last year, and three people spotted him there. "Probably because he always wears his uniform shirt," she says. "He's got other clothes, but he only wears his Roanoke Weiner Stand shirt out." Riding the city bus from his Southeast Roanoke home to work, Liakos is besieged daily by strangers calling, "Hey, hot dog man!" He had a car once, a 1955 Chevy. But it drowned in the flood of '85. "They gave him $500 for it - and it was only worth $200, so he thought he'd better quit on cars while he was ahead," Gus Chacknes says, smiling. Johnny met his wife, Mary, in 1970. She rode the bus from her cafeteria job at Crossroads Mall home to Southeast and had to wait to switch buses downtown. "I used to go to the wienie stand every day for a Coke, and we just got to talking," she says. They have two grown daughters and two grandsons, all of whom live with them, plus Mary's sister. The grandsons, ages 5 and 8, wait for "Paw Paw" every night on the wide front porch overlooking downtown. "He takes us walking and gives us dollars and quarters and stuff," says Jeffrey Koch, 5. They have never gone on a family vacation. "He can't stand to leave work," Mary says. Johnny was planning to visit his family in Greece this year or next, but three months ago he got a phone call. His mother, age 84, had died. "I feel very bad that I never saw my mother again," he says. "But I came here to live a better life, and I love my job. Boss Man has been very good to me." He has no plans to retire, says he'd get depressed if he veered from his routine. He starts every day by peeling 50 pounds of onions - he's done it for so long, he no longer cries. And then it's over to his wiener-assembly station: First he plops the wiener into the bun; then, with a paint-stirring stick, he slathers the mustard. He finishes a "one with" by adding a spoonful of onions and then a ladle full of chili - all in less time than it took to read this paragraph. Across the street in the market building, you can buy sushi and eggrolls, falafel and lemon-grass soup. But here at Roanoke's oldest eating establishment, the Roanoke Weiner Stand, a Roanoker visiting his folks will still be lured inside by the smell wafting onto Campbell Avenue and the familiar hawking of the Duke of Dogs. "ANYBODY WANNA HOT DOG?!" Johnny Liakos yells. "WHO'S NEXT FOR A HOT DOG?"
And standing at the counter, eating his "two with" and fries, that visitor will breathe in the secret-chili smell and know, for a fact, he is home.
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