Chris Stefanakos, florist and Five Towns fixture, dies at 92
Chris Stefanakos outside Stefan's Florists, which he built into a successful business over the decades, helping make him a fixture of Five Towns. Credit: Steven Stefanakos
As a child, Chris Stefanakos was hungry for food and a better life, possessing a work drive that helped him bloom into a Five Towns fixture as he grew Stefan's Florist.
“To retire is to expire,” he would say whenever someone suggested taking it easy in his senior years.
Work he did — cutting high school for odd jobs, learning a little Yiddish for his large Jewish clientele and making centerpieces almost around the clock many days, and then coming home for a few hours to freshen up, family and friends said.
Stefanakos of Hewlett died of heart failure Oct. 14 at age 92, having visited his shop in Lawrence every week since his 2013 retirement until shortly before his death.
“This guy was a force to be reckoned with,” said one of his sons, Steven Stefanakos of Massapequa. “He was 100 miles per hour and you could never keep up.”
In his eulogy, Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman described Stefanakos as a storyteller, a man with an “innate ability to assimilate” and someone who had a photographic memory.
“If it was a sin to be boring," Blakeman said, "this guy was a saint."
Stefanakos was also a loyal friend in good times and bad, according to Blakeman.
"When you win, you have a lot of new friends. When you lose, you have very few friends," he said. "Chris was one of my very few good friends.”
Stefanakos built connections in religious, business and political circles by helping people and getting things done, sometimes just by the force of his personality, those who knew him said.
When Rabbi Zev Friedman was overseeing the building of his Rambam Mesivta, a high school in Lawrence, Stefanakos visited regularly to check on the progress and saw that it needed landscaping. “I’m going to call my guys and take care of it,” Friedman recalled him saying. Stefanakos got a landscaper to put in greenery in time for the opening ceremony.
“When Chris calls someone up for a favor, it’s done,” Friedman said.
Born in Manhattan to Greek immigrants, Stefanakos grew up during the Great Depression on the Lower East Side. His father pushed a hot dog cart, while his mother worked in a Long Island factory.
To his mother’s chagrin, Chris kept skipping school as a teenager to earn money, whether it was from washing cars or driving delivery trucks.
“They were hungry,” said son James Stefanakos of Hewlett, of his father's family.
One time, as the family story goes, Chris Stefanakos was working plucking feathers from chickens when his mother came into the shop and he ducked. But she saw him and ordered him back to school.
He also worked at a florist shop in Manhattan and, realizing he could do the job, bought his cousin’s Central Florist shop in Five Towns for $500 when he was in his 20s.
Without any formal business training or a college degree, Stefanakos grew his floral business from a few workers to about 50 at one point, his children said. He added a showroom and more delivery trucks, they said, and hired people from various ethnic backgrounds in an era when minorities had a tough time getting jobs.
Knowing the area had a large Jewish community, he educated himself on Jewish culture. He networked before the concept became popular, his children said, and would tip off people about jobs, such as telling a caterer about an event, earning their loyalty, those who knew Stefanakos said.
On top of that, Stefanakos tried to stand out in the florist business by adding props and backdrops to florist sales, according to his family.
“Whether it was a big party or a small party, he never turned people away and he made sure they got more than what they paid for,” Steven Stefanakos said. “He treated his customers like family.”
His hard work enabled him to buy cigars, tailored Italian suits, fine British shirts and whatever he wanted to eat.
During his retirement, the child of the Great Depression would ask James Stefanakos’ wife, Joanna, daily, “What are we eating tonight?”
“He loved eating,” said Joanna Stefanakos of Hewlett. “He loved that we were all eating as a family together.”
Besides his two sons, Chris Stefanakos is survived by a daughter, Danae Stefanakos of Atlantic Beach. Stefanakos was predeceased by his wife, Vickie, and his three sisters.
A funeral Mass for Stefanakos at the Greek Orthodox Cathedral of St. Paul was followed by burial at St. Charles Cemetery in East Farmingdale.
