PORTLAND – One highlight of Mildred Doukas’s life was her first trip to Greece.
”She met her parents’ relatives and could finally use the Greek language she was forced to study at Greek school,” said her sister Aphrodite Roumell.
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She went with her sisters Virginia Doukas and Despina Athans. Virginia Doukas said they visited their mother’s family, who still lived in their grandmother’s original home.
”We met (our mother’s) brothers that we’d always heard stories about,” and saw their aunt barefoot in the yard feeding the family’s chickens, she said.
Mrs. Doukas enjoyed many other trips to Greece, and visited Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Paris and Israel. Her sisters said she loved to travel, and learned about various cultures along the way.
Mrs. Doukas died Sunday. She was 84.
As a stellar athlete at Portland High School, she was a cheerleader and a varsity tennis player. Even in her later years, her nephew William Doukas remembers, she dominated a pickup soccer game that the family played on the front lawn at their cottage at Higgins Beach in Scarborough.
”There were three generations of people, all playing soccer in the front lawn,” he said. ”She was controlling the soccer field even in her 70s.”
He said she looked forward to the times when the family gathered at the cottage. Her nieces and nephews would visit, so she could catch up with them, but she also enjoyed just lounging on the beach, he said.
”Walking along the beach at sunset was a wonderful thing. She just enjoyed the beauty of it,” Roumell said.
”She was a sensitive person, sensitive to her surroundings,” she said. ”Beauty, art and pretty objects gave her great pleasure.”
While she lived in Detroit and in Portland, she took classes in découpage, ceramic decorating and watercolor painting. Roumell said Mrs. Doukas’s watercolors were mostly landscapes. She also frequented lectures at the art institutions in the places where she lived.
With three nieces and two nephews surviving, she always kept in touch with them. William Doukas remembers that when he had parties at the cottage with his friends, his aunt always made it a point to make an appearance.
”She seldom missed a party,” he said.
Mrs. Doukas taught her niece Lisa Roumell, Aphrodite Roumell’s daughter, how to read stock market and finance reports. Aphrodite Roumell said her daughter now works in the financial industry in New York City.
”Mildred always took credit for Lisa going into the financial world,” and was proud of it, her sister said.
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