The business card of Nick Pappageorge.
Nick Pappageorge installed quite a few restaurants in the Philadelphia area.
My sister asked me if I knew how he got into this business.
I do not know, but a pattern in the restaurant business was this:
A young Greek boy comes to the U.S looking for a job.
A friend or relative knows a Greek that has a restaurant that needs a dishwasher.
The young boy gets the job and learns quickly and watches. After a while he is promoted to a line cook, usually because the present line cook didn’t show up for work for one reason or another.
After working as a cook for a while he begins to have aspirations of opening his own restaurant some day.
He talks to other Greeks and finds that it is fairly easy to borrow money from purveyors and services, like the bread man, the milk man, the juke box and ciggarette supplier, the laundry company and so on. These people are always looking to find new accounts to expand their business. He borrows the money and either starts a new restaurant of buys an existing one.
I imagine that the same scenerario took place in all of the trades.
Young Nick Pappageorge probably got a job with some one in the carpentry trade and after he got a little experience he went out on his own.
You will notice that on his card there is a line that reads Financing Arranged.
It was difficult for a young Greek restauranteur to borrow money from a bank so they often looked to secondary sources. Nick would probably lend money to those who he considered a good risk and most likely at a much higher rate than a bank would charge.