In 2013, Seattle’s U District neighborhood lost one of its most cherished businesses. The Continental Greek Restaurant and Pastry Shop, owned by the family of the Jackson School’s Taso Lagos, sat on University Way for nearly 40 years before closing its doors that June. Lagos looks back on the restaurant and what it meant to his family in a memoir due to be released this fall.
In a new book, Taso Lagos of the UW Jackson School studies the rivalry between Aimee Semple McPherson and Robert “Fighting Bob” Shuler, two California-based performer-preachers who had the country’s rapt attention in the 1920s.
It’s a challenge to write a biography of a man who was functionally illiterate and whose papers were mostly destroyed, but UW lecturer Taso Lagos has achieved it with his new book, “American Zeus: The Life of Alexander Pantages, Theater Mogul.”