Euterpe Dukakis

Euterpe Dukakis, who came to this country 90 years ago from Greece in search of the American dream and lived to see her son become the Democratic Party ' s nominee for president, died Wednesday at Spring House, a retirement facility in Boston. She was 99.

" People were coming to the United States in droves from everywhere then, because this was the Promised Land, " Mrs. Dukakis told an interviewer in 1988 when her son, former Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis, was running for president.

Then 85, Mrs. Dukakis was one of his best campaign workers, flying all around the country, speaking to groups of senior citizens and in her native tongue to Greek-Americans, getting up before dawn for yet another voter event, working the crowds, being interviewed, and giving very quotable answers.

" She seemed born to it, " said Kitty Dukakis, the governor ' s wife. The campaigning, the elder Mrs. Dukakis told people, " gave me a great infusion of energy. "

His mother amazed even him, Michael Dukakis said recently, recalling how she unexpectedly rose from her chair at a major campaign event in Chicago and " started moving among the crowd. "

" Yaya was the quintessential optimist, " said granddaughter Andrea, of Denver, using the Greek word for grandmother that many nonrelatives also used to address her.

" ' Get my body, ' she would say about getting old, ' but don ' t take my curiosity. ' "

In 1921, when her family was living in Haverhill, Mass., it was her passion for knowledge and intellect that got Euterpe Boukis to Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, giving her a place in Greek-American history, according to Northwestern University professor Charles Moskos.

In his book " Greek-Americans: Struggle and Success, " Moskos cites Mrs. Dukakis as " the first Greek-American woman in the country to go away to college. "

Mrs. Dukakis graduated from Bates in 1925 with a major in English and history and a Phi Beta Kappa key.

She was born Sept. 4, 1903, in Larissa, in central Greece, the second youngest of four daughters and two sons of Michael, a bookkeeper, and Crysoula Boukis. Her parents named her Euterpe for the Greek muse of lyric poetry and music.

The two Boukis sons, Nick and Adam, were the first to come to the United States, settling in Haverhill ' s Greek community and working in the shoe factories along the Merrimack River.

In 1913, the Boukises, with money Nick and Adam sent them, set out with their four daughters aboard a converted coal freighter from Patras, Greece, for New York City. Euterpe was 9 years old.

Mrs. Dukakis retained vivid memories of the family ' s arrival at Ellis Island how immigration clerks " turned up my eyelids " during the physical exam looking for disease; how she and her sisters were offered a fruit they had never seen and started to eat the bananas offered them unpeeled.

When the young Euterpe enrolled in school in Haverhill, she was put in the first grade because of her lack of English. She was a fast learner, and by the end of the year was promoted to fifth grade.

After graduation from college, Mrs. Dukakis got a job teaching junior high in Ashland, N.H., and then in Amesbury, before marrying Dr. Panos Dukakis, a graduate of Harvard Medical School and the first American-trained, Greek-speaking doctor in Boston.

They first lived in an apartment on Huntington Avenue, in the same building as the office where he practiced for 50 years. His wife often assisted him.

When their second son was born, they moved to a two-family dwelling in Brookline and then to a house on Rangeley Road in South Brookline, where Mike Dukakis grew up.

Mrs. Dukakis lived there until 1995, when she moved to Spring House.

In 1994, Mrs. Dukakis gave Bates College $1 million for the permanent endowment of the Euterpe Boukis Dukakis professor of classical and medieval studies.

In addition to her son and three grandchildren, Mrs. Dukakis leaves four great-grandchildren.