I met Nana Tsilepis about five years ago when I went to her Capitol Hill store to have some pants taken in. It is likely she was sitting at her sewing machine, a 1975 Singer. As long as something still worked, Nana saw no need to replace it. This is the logic of a pragmatist. Accordingly, Nana had no problem recycling other company’s notepads to record her customers’ names and phone numbers and was proud of her ability to make the old new again.
“I don’t buy quality when I can sew,” she told me once, and tugged on her pants leg. “This one here, I got for $12.99 at Sam’s Club. Then I fix to make look expensive. I’m not stupid.”
She probably had a cigarette burning in the ashtray. Nana was an unrepentant smoker, and that kept some customers away, which is too bad because it meant never experiencing a Nana story or Nana laugh or Nana scolding.
It was for these as much as her artistry and speed with scissors and thread that people came to her shop on East 13th Avenue between Sherman and Grant streets. She was honest without being rude, generous without being indulgent. A longtime customer once called her “the grandmother of the street.”
Why did I want to take my pants in? she asked me after I put them on for her. “They fit nice now,” she said. “If I take them in, they’ll be too tight.”
She laminated the column I wrote about her, but only after crossing out every reference to “seamstress” and replacing it with “tailor.” How could I not love her?
Nana died Sept. 24. She had had coffee with her grandson, Nick. Her son, Demetri, had come by to mow the lawn. She went to the grocery store, had taken the bags into the kitchen and lit a cigarette. “It looked like she turned around to go get the bleach she left on the driveway and just had a massive heart attack,” Demetri says. She died three days before her 68th birthday.
Nana had had a heart attack about 16 months earlier. She closed her shop and moved the business to her home. She wasn’t as busy there, but she was as happy as her children had seen her in a long time.
“She was the happiest when she cooked for people,” her daughter, Katina, tells me. “Just a week earlier, she had a dinner party for 15 people. That Tuesday, she had another dinner party. She loved that. She would go and go and go, baking all the time.”
Nana’s husband, Nickolaos, died a few years ago. “Life is hard for all of us,” Katina says. “You could never tell by her. She was always with her smile.”
I once asked Nana how her family ended up in the United States.
“Oooh, that’s a story,” she said. “My grandpa’s brother was here in 1912. He was working in the mines. His first wife died and he went back to Greece after 50 years to find another wife and he brings her back here. When he gets sick, my father sent my sister to come and help. She meets her husband at the funeral and she stays here. My other sister, she comes here when they have a baby. She meets her husband and she stays, and my brother, he comes for their wedding and he meets his wife. Soon, we are all here.”
Nana was 27 when she left Greece. Her passport photo remains one of her children’s favorites. She looks into the camera with a slight smile on her face. She could not know how successful she would become, that she would run a business and raise a family and love and be loved by countless people who would come to her with an item of clothing. “Can you . . . ?” they would ask. Yes, she would say. Or no.
She could not know how much they would miss seeing her at that old sewing machine, smoking her cigarettes, telling her stories. But Nana Tsilepis is in that picture as she was for the remainder of her life: steady and unafraid.
Tina Griego writes Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Reach her at 303-954-2699 or tgriego@denverpost.com.
