Obituary: Gregory Lima, 88, Journalist and Author
By Contributor // January 24, 2014 in Obituaries
A New Yorker, Gregory Lima went to Tehran, Iran, in 1958 to start
Kayhan International, which became, in its heyday, the leading
English-language newspaper in the Middle East. He remained with
Kayhan, first as editor, then as special correspondent and critic,
through its demise in the revolution of 1978-79.
Gregory Lima
He was born in 1925 on his mother’s kitchen table in Brooklyn, the
first of six children. His mother was a seamstress and a shop steward
for the ILGWU. His father owned a fruit-and-vegetable store. They were
immigrants from Sicily.
Though he lived his life in three continents, he came of age as a
child of Depression-era New York.
His first job, delivering groceries for his father, `meant exploring
all the cellars in the neighborhood, for deliveries were made from the
cellar through a dumbwaiter system,’ he wrote in his memoir, a work in
progress. In those cellars he found the tenants’ abandoned books and
began to build his eclectic library.
An early poem, `Ferry to Hoboken,’ now lost, caught the eye of
teachers and administrators at Edward Stitt Junior High School, and he
was made editor of the school’s literary magazine, Laurel Leaf.
He went on to DeWitt Clinton High School, where he shared a circle
with the poet Emile Capouya and the writer James Baldwin. He dropped
out during his senior year to enlist in the U.S. Army.
>From basic training in North Carolina and Cape Cod, to waiting for
action in England, to the `seasick landing at Utah Beach in the
Normandy invasion,’ and as a soldier laying out telephone wire in
France, Belgium, and Germany, his war was a time of exploration and
discovery. Officers read soldiers’ outgoing mail to make sure they
weren’t divulging sensitive information. Gregory was bemused to find
that his letters to his mother – and to girls he met in Europe – were
serving to improve the prose of those officers’ own correspondence.
After the war, he set out for college on the GI Bill, graduating with
honors from Syracuse University and going on to do graduate work at
the New School for Social Research. He continued his studies – and his
adventures – at the University of Toulouse and in Heidelberg and
Würzburg in Germany. In his little Volkswagen he explored the postwar
continent.
Noticing that GIs returning home in droves would need civilian
clothes, he started American Designs, and made good money selling
suits and outsourcing the work to Asia. Hee kept writing, however, and
soon he was called to Iran by the forward-looking publisher of one of
the Persian-language dailies, Kayhan. The invitation came with a nice
check, and he went.
The new daily, Kayhan International, was a success, read by
Western-educated Iranians and the growing community of expatriates.
Gregory said there were 70,000 Americans in Iran in the 1970s; in a
series of articles about Iran’s minorities, he included one titled
`The Yankees.’
He married a member of another minority, the Armenians, in 1962. An
insatiable reader, he was knowledgeable about Armenian history and
culture by the time he met her family. Karina Arzooian’s family
embraced him as one of their own, and he treated her younger brother
Razmik as his own son. Gregory and Karina soon had two sons of their
own, Vincent and Eric.
He started a firm, International Communicators, that helped a range of
companies establish their businesses in Iran.
He wrote The Revolutionizing of Iran (1973), a volume about the shah’s
reforms, the so-called revolution from above. As part of those
reforms, in lieu of mandatory military service, young Iranian men with
an education could join the Literacy Corps, a campaign to spread
literacy in Iranian villages. An article Gregory wrote about
healthcare delivery in an Armenian village cluster in central Iran
inspired the establishment of a parallel Medical Corps.
His second book, The Costumes of Armenian Women (1974), richly
illustrated by the photographer Peter Carapetian, was sold out
instantly.
Though he now spent less time at the paper, his feature stories
remained a fixture of Kayhan International’s weekend edition. In them,
he took readers along with him on his voyages of discovery – on an
archeological dig in the Caspian region, to an arts festival in the
city of Shiraz, and well beyond Iran’s borders to Japan, Australia,
South Africa, and across the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf.
He stayed in Iran through the revolution of 1978-79 but left soon
after the raid on the U.S. Embassy. Back in the country of his birth,
he might have capitalized on his deep knowledge of Iran. Instead he
returned to the New School to earn a master’s degree in international
relations and to help him gain perspective on the upheaval he had
witnessed. Years later, on his eightieth birthday, a friend from Iran
gave him a glass sculpture on which he had etched the apt encomium,
`The beautiful American.’
Now established in Patterson, New York, in the summer home his father
had bought when his fruit-and-vegetable business was thriving, he
started exploring the Hudson Valley. He described his findings in long
letters to his elder son, who, with Gregory’s reluctantly granted
permission, had chosen to stay behind in Iran for a few years.
Before long, though, Gregory’s mind was back in Europe and he was
traveling to Albania – home of his good friend Nua Shala – and to
Kosovo, Montenegro, and beyond. In 2012, he published two books on the
Balkans: The Amerikani and Journey to Macedonia. The latter volume
reproduced an influential report he had written after a 1998 trip,
where he interviewed the Albanian political elite and members of the
Kosovo Liberation Army.
He made his first trip to Armenia in 2005. For some years after that,
he lived a few months a year in Yerevan, the capital, where he was
able to spend time with his granddaughters Noor and Arev – and
contributed feature stories on Armenian art and artists to his son’s
newspaper, The Armenian Reporter.
Less than a month before his death, over Christmas, he spent a few
happy days gathered with his wife, children, and grandchildren. They
looked back on a joyful year, during which his son Eric became the
proud father of a son, Milo, established a successful Invention
Factory at the Cooper Union, and earned tenure as a professor of
mechanical engineering there.
He said he was enjoying his life: Karina’s inspired cooking, their
garden, their grandchildren, as well as his projects and works in
progress.
Gregory died peacefully – a day after experiencing a massive stroke –
in Danbury, Conn., in the company of his wife of 52 years, his sons,
and his daughter-in-law. At the time, he was working on the sixth
chapter of his memoir, The Way it Was.
http://www.armenianweekly.com/2014/01/24/gregory-lima/