GALLAS, STEVE X. (July 8, 1918 -- Dec. 29, 2000)Sculptor and carver. He was no ordinary son of Greek immigrants. Steve X. Gallas, who had a tradition of riding his horse at the head of the Armed Forces Day parade in Reading, Pennsylvania, for many years, was best known for chiseling Greek letters and dates on tombstones of prominent Greek settlers in the country.
He was born in Reading on July 8, 1918, and was the son of Xenophon Gallas, who called himself a grinder, a native of Mytilene, Greece, and Athanasia Daledakis, a native of Smyrna, Turkey in Asia Minor. His parents, who came to the United States in 1904 and 1905, respectively, were married in 1908. After graduation from Reading High School in 1937. Steve X. Gallas studied sculptoring at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, under Philip Aliano. Like his father, who learned the trade at the age of eleven from a great uncle, he found the greatest demand for his artistic work was in cemeteries.
As chairman of the Sadowski Memorial Committee, I gave Gallas a $1,000 contract on March 11, 1969, to carve an image of Anthony Sadowski, a noted Indian trader and peace maker, on a big hunk of Vermont granite to commemorate the 300th anniversary of his birth. Sadowski was buried in 1736 at a cemetery in Douglassville, Pennsylvania, now known as St. Gabriel's Episcopal Cemetery.
We started from scratch because no one had ever drawn a picture of Anthony Sadowski during his lifetime, although Arthur Szyk, Arthur Waldo, and others produced fake illustrations of the Polish frontiersman. I turned over to a New York artist, Henry Archacki, who was also secretary of the Sadowski Memorial Committee, a collection of photographs of male descendants of Anthony Sadowski. Then, in 1969, I turned over a composite drawing of the first Sadowski in the country to Gallas. The work of the two artists was unveiled at St. Gabriel's cemetery on April 20, 1969. It showed a man with a beaver hat and raccoon tail, shot pouch, and muzzle-loading rifle in bas relief on a four-and-a half-foot die of granite.
Linking Anthony Sadowski to Gallas was almost unbelievable. In addition, Jeffrey Wilson, a 11th generation descendant of Anthony Sadowski, unveiled the memorial in front of a crowd of 1800 and the officials of St. Gabriel's Episcopal Church played no small part in the planning and execution of the program.
When he sold the Steve X. Gallas Monumental Works, Gallas fell in love with life in Springettsbury Township, York County, with his wife, Mary Louise Distasio, whom he married in 1940. Now and then he played his violin, as he did with the Reading Pops Orchestra, and became old with a crown of white hair around the baldness on top of his head. He died at a hospital in York. None of his three children followed in his footsteps. After funeral services at the Greek Orthodox Church of the Annunciation at York, he was buried at Gethsemane Cemetery in Reading.
From: Edward Pinkowski assisted by Thomas J. Duszak - e-mail: [email protected] - (2011)