Andrew Jarvis

Biography

Andrew Harry Jarvis (born Andreas Harry Giavis) was born in Magouliana, Greece, on April 7, 1890 and immigrated to the United States in the early 1900s. He arrived in New York and then went to Lowell, Massachusetts where he stayed with distant family while working in a mill to learn English at the pay of $3.50 a week. It is family lore that every day for lunch he would have apple pie because it was all he could order in English. Over the next ten years, he would become fluent in English and receive a good American education through night school. He then opened his first restaurant, the Jarvis Cafeteria, in 1913 in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Over the next few decades, he opened a handful of other restaurants and candy/ice cream stores in Portsmouth, Lawrence, Massachusetts, and Brunswick, Maine.

He was a lifelong Republican and served as mayor of Portsmouth from 1958–1959 and as a member of the Executive Council of New Hampshire from 1961-1963. He was encouraged to run for Governor but was self-conscious about his heavy Greek accent and decided not to. He was a delegate at the Republican National Convention in 1956. He met every Republican president from the early 1920s until his death and worked on the campaigns of Dwight D. Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and George H. W. Bush. Andrew Jarvis was a close personal friend of Senator Styles Bridges. In the early 1980s, his nephews took over his restaurant in Portsmouth, New Hampshire and Andrew Jarvis retired. He was a member of many organizations including Rotary International and his local Masonic Lodge. Every year in Portsmouth the Rotary Club holds the Andrew and Grace Jarvis Memorial Road Race in honor of him and his wife. Mr. Jarvis was a supporter of many charities. Mr. Jarvis is credited for helping to start the Strawberry Bank Historical Society which helped transform a seedy area of downtown Portsmouth back into a beautiful historic New England town by renovating the 18th century historic homes. He also helped bring the Pease Air Force Base to Portsmouth. Andrew Jarvis died in early 1990 one month before his 100th birthday. The Portsmouth Rotary club had planned a 100th birthday party for him. They instead held a celebration in his honor where his daughter gave a speech talking about his life and service to Portsmouth. After fearing that his daughter, Catherine (1924-2013), would become blind from sickness as a baby, Andrew Jarvis made a promise to God to help the blind in his native Greece. After World War II, Jarvis helped to found the American Friends of the Blind in Greece (AFBG) in 1946 which set up a school and museum for the blind in Greece paid for by donations by Greek-Americans. He was the president until his death in 1990 at which time his son-in-law took over until 2007.

Establishments formerly owned by Andrew Jarvis

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