Hermes Pan

Hermes Pan (born Hermes Joseph Panagiotopoulos, December 10, 1909 – September 19, 1990) was an American dancer and choreographer, principally remembered as Fred Astaire's choreographic collaborator on the famous 1930s movie musicals starring Astaire and Ginger Rogers. He worked on nearly two dozen films and TV shows with Astaire. He won both an Oscar and an Emmy for his dance direction.

Born in Memphis, Tennessee, as the son of a Greek immigrant and an American woman from the South, Pan moved to New York City with his family when he was 14. He started dancing in amateur productions and speakeasies. He was first paid to dance at age 19 and worked in several Broadway productions. In 1930 he moved to California, where he met Astaire in 1933 and began working with him; he choreographed 89 films.

Pan was born Hermes Joseph Panagiotopoulos in 1909 in Memphis, Tennessee, to Pantelis Panagiotopoulos, a Greek immigrant, and Mary Aljeanne Huston, a Southerner of English and Scots-Irish ancestry dating to colonial times. His father was a confectioner by trade, and from a prominent family in Aigio, Greece. His family had opened the first theater in the city.

In 1895, at the age of twenty-seven, Pantelis Panagiotopoulos was chosen to represent Aigio at the Tennessee Centennial and International Exposition in Nashville as a "Greek Consul to the South." Initially intending to return to Greece, he stayed in Tennessee after meeting Mary Huston of Nashville in 1900. Her family had roots in the South dating to colonial times. The couple married in 1901. His brother Alkis also immigrated to the US, initially living in Nashville.

In 1903, Pantelis became a United States citizen, he and Mary moved to Memphis, and their first son Panos was born. Their daughter, Vasso Maria, was born there in 1906. Both children were named after Panagiotopoulos's parents. Pantelis became president of the Eutrophia Company, which owned the Eutrophia Hotel and Cafe in Memphis, and the family was well-off. Hermes, their second son and last child, was born in Memphis in 1909.

In 1911, two years after the boy's birth, the family returned to Nashville. Panagiotopoulos opened up his own restaurant. Hermes was interested in music and dance from an early age. In 1915 "Aunt Betty" Clark, the children's African-American nanny, took Hermes to her neighborhood, a black enclave of Nashville, to introduce him to jazz music and tap dance. He was greatly influenced by this.

Hermes befriended Aunt Betty's son, Sam Clark, who also worked for his family. Sam, a talented dancer, taught the boy many of the era's popular dances, and Hermes practiced on his own.

His father died of tuberculosis in 1922 in San Antonio. Upset at being excluded from his brother's will, his brother Alkis held the widow Mary, and her children Vasso and Hermes at gunpoint. He burned all their shares and money, saying that if he could not have them, no one would.^{[citation needed]}