The unlikely life of Theodosios T. Tzantarmas began in 1936 in Thessaloniki, the second-largest city in Greece and one with a lively reputation for challenging the government: it was the locus of the original Young Turks, who started the revolution that ultimately overthrew the Ottoman Empire. Not everyone born in Thessaloniki becomes a revolutionary, but neither does everyone born there become a boxer, a pipefitter, a tavern owner, and a thorn in the side of city government. In his 81 years, T.T. Tzantarmas, known as "Saki," did all of those things.
Most of his Portland friends knew Saki Tzantarmas, who died in Portland on July 20, as the owner of the New Copper Penny Bar & Grill, a rambling establishment devoted to drinking, betting, and celebration that until last year dominated the interchange of Interstate 205 and Foster Road. Even people who never stepped inside recognized its sign as a Portland landmark, with its copper-colored profile of Abraham Lincoln in the style of a one-cent piece. Why a penny and not a dollar? Mr. Tzantarmas came to this country, he said, without a dollar -- but he did have five pennies in his pocket.
By 1960 he had made his way to Portland, where he was working as a pipefitter, and the stories began. He told friends that he had boxed professionally, and an image from 1965 shows Saki with noted Mexican welterweight Gaspar Ortega - but his boxing record at boxrec.com identifies him in just one match, with Don Marshall at the Portland Armory, which he lost in a technical knockout.
Boxing was not Saki's future, though he retained the fighter's stance and build the rest of his life. A few years after his boxing match he bought a rundown tavern, which he named the Copper Penny. When the business was forced to relocate in 1973, he moved the tavern to Southeast Foster Road just east of 92nd Avenue, renaming it the New Copper Penny.
Saki himself lived a life of contradictions. Expressive verbally, he disliked writing. Elegant in dress when he wished -- he could make a purple tie look impressively masculine -- he could also appear in the New Copper Penny looking like a patron who was about to be thrown out, instead of as the owner who even in his late 70s could still do the throwing. Thrifty in business -- some might say tightfisted -- he was personally generous to friends and family, quietly helping friends in need. Even his family name carried its own puzzle: nominally Greek, it might have derived from the Italian surname Zantani, or from a similar Turkish name.
As he expanded his business onto the entire block on Foster Road, he built the contradictions of his own life story into the New Copper Penny. The oldest part of the business was a clean plain room with a concrete floor, stark like the Greece of his youth. A middle section contained the off-track betting parlor and video poker machines, a nod to the practicalities of running a tavern in Oregon. And a dilapidated passage with fraying carpet led to the elegant Pantheon Room (pictured here), a classically-decorated banquet hall, with Greek pillars lining the walls, reminiscent of the ancient glory of his homeland.
Under pressure from the Portland Development Commission to get out of the way of gentrification, Saki sold the New Copper Penny site, and the tavern, club, and banquet hall closed last year to make way for apartments.
An old story tells of the man who came to this country with nothing, started a business, became a success, and sent his son to college to become an accountant. After graduating, the son examined the father's books and told his father that he couldn't tell from the books what the father's profit was. The father said, "I came to this country with five dollars. Take five dollars out of the till. Everything else you see is the profit." When Willamette Week interviewed Saki Tzantarmas in 2014, he pulled five copper pennies out of his pocket and showed them to the reporter. The five coins were what he had brought to America sixty years ago. Everything else -- his family, his friends, his property, and his story -- was the profit that he shared with the city that he adopted. It would be a fitting memorial to T.T. Tzantarmas if, somewhere in the foundation of the monolith that is replacing the New Copper Penny, the developer would embed five copper pennies.