George Poulos hadn’t been feeling well lately. Even though he was hospitalised, he begged to return to The Rio.

“He needed to go back and open his business,” says Nik Poulos, his son who found him dead inside his milk bar last Wednesday.

“The business was his whole life. He’d be open until 10 o’clock at night sometimes just for one person to come in and get one drink,” Nik adds.

“It just kept him alive; he didn’t make any money from it. He literally worked until the last day.”

The Rio, a small milk bar adjacent to the old Summer Hill movie theatre, however, was a little gold mine through the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s.

“We used to open until 11 o’clock waiting for the picture show to come out,” says Nik Poulos.

“They were three deep there waiting for milkshakes. We had the old-fashioned seats there.

“We had people like Johnny O’Keefe and Lionel Long (come in) … I was the f– Fonz before the Fonz was even thought of.

The best milkshakes in the whole of New South Wales were made by my Dad.”

George Poulos was a Sydney urban legend. He had a strong presence in the local community and everyone knew him.

He might not have had as many customers as back in the day, but he undoubtedly made the richest milkshake in NSW.

“He remained with the shop, the things that he knew; he knew that he was a recognisable character within his urban scene,” says Macquarie University historian and curator Leonard Janiszewski, who, with his colleague Effy Alexakis, interviewed Poulos for their project In Their Own Image: Greek-Australians.

The northern Greek who sailed into Sydney in 1952 on the Cyrenia – the former troop carrier converted into a migrant vessel – had fought in World War II and the Greek Civil War before migrating to Australia to join his uncle, Chris, and his father Philip, who’d already been in Australia for more than a decade cutting cane in Queensland.

Soon after he moved and started working, he sent for his wife, Stavroula, son Nik and daughter Aphrodite, while his younger daughter, Margaret, was born nine months after his wife came to Australia.

“My father still lived like he was in Greece,” Nik Poulos remembers.

“After Stavroula died in 1998, a female in-law would send him letters at Christmas. He refused to open them because she was a married woman.

“That’s how old-fashioned my Dad was.”

RIP George.

Source: Sydney Morning Herald