Muskegon Chronicle – MLive.com, Michigan
Jan 1 2010
Norton Shores woman’s New Year’s Day birthday marks 89 years of an
intriguing life
By Susan Harrison Wolffis
January 01, 2010, 5:33AM
NORTON SHORES – Today, New Year’s Day, Ida Cecchini turns 89 years
old. Her family already has held one party for her at the United
Methodist Church of the Dunes in Grand Haven where she worships every
Sunday morning.
But there will be more cake and candles to blow out today, and
presents to open, and phone calls to take from friends and family who
live out of town.
And as always, there will be time, plenty of time, for telling stories
– because the story of Ida Cecchini’s birth is like few others.
`That’s what people say,’ she said.
Her story starts on a dark and distant New Year’s Day in 1921,
someplace outside the ancient boundaries of Armenia, her homeland, the
country her parents were forced to flee on horseback.
`True,’ she said. `It’s all true.’
By some miracle, her father and mother, Koran and Agavnie Rahanian had
survived the 1915 Armenian genocide, an ethnic-cleansing during which
an estimated 1.5 million Christian Armenians were killed by Muslim
Turks. Koran Agavnie had been a leader in a volunteer Armenian army
who fought the Turks, and a leader in his village.
In 1920, there was danger not only from the Turks who had invaded
Armenia, but also from the Bolsheviks, a radical group that had
overthrown Nicholas II, the Russian czar who claimed Armenia as part
of his empire. Anyone who was considered sympathetic to the czar was
in jeopardy.
`Evidently my father had done the czar a favor sometime,’ Cecchini
said. `My father said there were Bolsheviks everywhere. They had to
go. It was too dangerous.’
Sometime in December 1920, the Rahanians and about 40 others from
their village escaped, most on horseback and buggy, some on foot. They
traveled only at night, lest they be discovered, heading toward Europe
for safety.
It was dangerous travel for them all, but especially for Agavnie
Rahanian, who was pregnant.
She knew all too well the dangers of staying behind. Her first husband
had been killed by the Turks, leaving her to raise two sons alone
until she remarried. One of her sons stayed with her late husband’s
family; the other left with her for the United States.
Agavnie Rahanian had to go, but the stress and travel proved too much
for her condition.
On Jan. 1, 1921, she gave birth prematurely to a baby, a little girl
she named Lucia, which translated from Armenian into English means
`liberty.’
That baby would grow up to be Ida Cecchini.
Cecchini knows few details about her birth, other than the date and
that her mother was assisted by an elderly woman who acted as midwife.
`Where I was born,’ she said, `they weren’t giving out birth certificates.’
Her mother was too ill to nurse her, and there was no milk to be had
anywhere along the way. But Cecchini’s father had brought a container
of honey with him. For the first 12 days of her life, the little baby
named Liberty was swaddled in a blanket, carried in her father’s
saddlebag. When she whimpered for food, he put a little honey on her
lips to calm her and keep her quiet.
`I’m hearing history,’ said her daughter, Vicki Reis of Norton Shores,
with whom Cecchini lives. `When I hear this, I hear history.’
The Rahanians eventually ended up in Liverpool, England, where they
boarded the Pannonia, a ship on the Cunard Line, a British-American
shipping company. When Koran Rahanian died in 1968, Cecchini found the
boarding pass, kept for posterity among her father’s possessions. At
the bottom of the pass was a series of punches – each one a record of
when her father bought his newborn some milk.
The Rahanians had their daughter baptized by an Assyrian Orthodox
priest aboard the Pannonia, and on March 13, 1921, they arrived in
Boston, Mass., holding Liberty in their arms.
They had family in Lynn, Mass., with whom they lived. Cecchini’s
father found work, but her mother never recovered from the journey.
She died when Cecchini was just 9 months old. The young family
survived with the help of relatives there and in East Providence, R.I.
In 1925, when Cecchini was 4 years old, her father announced they were
moving to Detroit where he could get work for $5 a day at the Ford
Motor Co. They moved in with relatives, then found a boarding house
run by an Armenian woman on the southwest side of Detroit.
Cecchini started attending classes at a community center run by a
Presbyterian church where she went to Sunday School and took English
lessons. In the beginning, one of the teachers asked the little girl
with the big brown eyes and ribbon in her hair what her name was.
`Lucia … Liberty,’ she answered.
The teacher asked her to repeat it, which she did, several times.
Either the teacher didn’t understand her, Cecchini said, or didn’t
like the name she carried from the old world.
`She said from now on my name was going to be Ida. It was short, three
letters,’ Cecchini said, `and that’s how I got to be Ida.’
She also went to what she calls Armenian School after regular school,
where she learned to read and write Armenian, a complicated language
with 36 letters in the alphabet.
`My father wanted me to go so I could read the letters to him from the
old country,’ she said. He could read the Armenian language in print
form, but not in cursive.
Eventually, her father remarried an Armenian woman Cecchini loved and
calls mother. Her blended family included three siblings whom she
`never called half-brothers and sisters,’ and her mother’s son from
her first marriage. The other son, left behind in Armenia, they called
`the boy who was lost.’ But against all odds, in the 1960s, they found
one another. He had been raised in an orphanage in Lebanon and made
his way to live and work in Paris.
Cecchini’s father worked 42 years as a coremaker at Ford, and she did,
too, during World War II. The bosses asked to see her birth
certificate. When she couldn’t produce one, they took her father’s
good word – and work ethic – as a reference.
She, too, married an Armenian – Emmanuel Evranian, who died in 1974 at
the age of 56. They were married 24 years and had two children, a son
and daughter. Cecchini supported them, working in a series of
accounting jobs. In 1979, she married Nino Cecchini whom she had met
at work. Together, they decided to retire to St. Petersburg, Fla.
Photos of young Ida Evranian Cecchini and her family are displayed at
her 89th surprise birthday party along with her inspection card that
was used to travel in 1921 to the United States.
For 30 years, Florida was Cecchini’s home. She was active in the
Armenian American Society there, just as she was in Detroit, and proud
of her heritage. Armenia is the first nation to adopt Christianity as
its state religion in 301 A.D., she is quick to tell people. It is
also the site of Mount Ararat, where, according to the book of
Genesis, Noah’s ark is believed to have landed.
She’s never visited Armenia, once the smallest nation in Communist
Soviet Union, which declared its independence in 1991. But she still
speaks and writes the language of her parents. She has a granddaughter
in college who is studying it, calling grandma often to check out
pronunciations and spellings, and she still has a few
Armenian-American friends with whom to visit.
`I’ve had a wonderful life,’ she said.
In July, Cecchini moved back to Michigan to live with her daughter and
her husband, Don Reis. She fell and broke her hip within the last
year, but with therapy – and a spirited class of Tai Chi she takes at
Tanglewood in Norton Shores – she no longer uses a walker or cane.
Gradually she’s making friends at church and in exercise class, people
drawn to her elegant manner and sense of decorum, even before they
hear her story: Her stunning survival, despite the desperate
situation, so many New Years ago.
`I can’t complain,’ she said, `besides, whenever I did, my father
always said: You’ll live through it. You’ve been through worse.’
ssf/2010/01/womans_new_years_day_birthday.html
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
