At the rosy-fingered dawn of every day during planting season, people know just where Lou Birurakis will be.
Lou, who has been a community activist, WVU football player, ironworker and high school teacher during his epic life and times, will be tending to the rows of his garden.
That’s why his kids don’t necessarily worry when he fails to heed his ringing phone, come springtime and early summer.
No time for chitchat when you’re churning the soil.
The garden: It’s an expanse of verdant vegetation in the lot next to Lou’s house in the Morgantown area.
How does his garden grow?
Well, as his daughter, Cathy, opines, it’s almost as big as the dwelling itself — “And I’m not exaggerating.”
No one ever said Greeks didn’t know agriculture.
Home-grown
Back in ancient times, the naturally green-thumbed denizens of the Mediterranean country turned the ground into a Socrates-like graduate seminar.
Greece was where the soil-alchemists invented and perfected crop rotation, terracing, irrigation and other growing techniques still in use today among 21st-century farmers.
Meanwhile, in the time-tested annals of Morgantown gardening mythology, Lou, a proud son of Panayiotis and Athena Vezoniarakis Birurakis of Crete, just might be the Eighth Wonder of the World.
“Uh, I don’t know about that,” said Lou, who is already cultivating plans for his 97th birthday in March.
“Unless you’re talking about the squash, maybe.”
Make that, The Squash.
Nurturing a gargantuan gourd weighing in at nearly 70 pounds — 69.4 on the scale, to be exact — can only warrant its own capital letters.
Panayiotis and Athena sailed to these shores when they were young, eventually ending up in West Virginia and Scotts Run, where the soil yielded a different kind of crop.
A Greek patriarch went underground, to carve his purchase of the American dream in the seams of coal that ran lattice-like, under the very all of subterranean Appalachia.
The sojourning couple settled at the Liberty coal camp in Scotts Run, where Lou was born.
Liberty was where the Greek families resided, in the region’s Melting Pot for mining.
West Virginia was in the collective heartbeat of Lou and his siblings, but Crete provided the pulse.
Still does.
All of them are fluent in the homeland language spoken in that company house in Liberty.
As they grew older and gained the resources to travel, all have made ancestral visits.
There are still plenty of cousins over there to laugh with, dance with and break bread with — and that’s how Lou got into the squash business.
Cross-pollination (from across the pond)
A Birurakis sister from the Mountain State was visiting Crete, when a passel of squash seeds from a friend in Cyprus was gifted.
In turn, she dropped a handful into Lou’s palm when she got back home.
He, in turn, placed them in the soil of that garden next door, where they promptly made like a 1950s science-fiction movie.
Not all of them took root, but the ones that did, didn’t stop.
They grew and grew.
And then … they grew a little more.
No, a lot more.
Like a (not-so) mad scientist in one of those above drive-in flicks, Lou rubbed his palms and laughed (maybe just a little maniacally) at the Gourds Gone Wild.
Especially that certain 69.4-pound one.
“I kept watching it to see just how big it would get,” he said.
Root system
There’s a proverb from Plato that goes, in part: “Though the land be good, you cannot have an abundant crop without cultivation.”
Translation: Why not bloom — and flourish — where you’re planted?
Lou says his dad chose to stay at Scotts Run because WVU was right down the road.
The Birurakis kids were going to school there, the patriarch said, and that was that. All of them are graduates.
Birurakis amazed then-legendary WVU football coach Ira Errett “Rat” Rodgers when he walked on for the team in 1944, and promptly flattened several starters during his first-ever practice — despite having never played one down of organized ball to that point.
When he was drafted during the waning days of World War II a year later, his officers appreciated his language skills in Greek and his marksmanship abilities on the gun range.
Returning to the university in Morgantown under the G.I. Bill, Birurakis earned a letter in that sport that was once foreign.
With the ink barely dry on his diploma, he got a teaching job at tiny Hannon High School in Ashton, Mason County, where he was also the successful coach of a football team that had just one goal post on its home field.
Later, when he needed more heft in his paycheck for his family, he reinvented himself as an ironworker, helping build WVU’s Coliseum and Milan Puskar Stadium before he was done.
“It’s been a good life,” he said.
And, these days — while he’s still at it and we’re talking about it — a gourd one, also.
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