He Wasn’t Your Garden-Variety Lotto Winner
There won’t be a gravestone for the man known to his friends as Louie the Greek.
If there were, a fitting epitaph might be:
Louis Asimakis,
1912-2001
He went first-class.
Asimakis died of pancreatic cancer last week, nearly nine decades after his birth and eight years after he won $11.2 million in the California Lottery.
I remember the day Asimakis, a retired oil driller who lived in a modest Ventura home and drove a ’79 El Camino, was identified as the winner.
Younger people hearing of his good fortune rolled their eyes. After all, what could an 80-year-old man--an octogenarian, for Pete’s sake--possibly do with $11 million?
The answer emerged quickly. He put a new roof on his house and bought a couple of Thunderbirds for himself and his wife, Geraldine.
But more than that, he went first-class.
A huge wall map in the Asimakis living room bears red pins on every shoreline Asimakis touched. The pins march across the hemispheres. According to his friends and relatives, Asimakis took 52 ocean cruises, most of them in his last years.
“He loved it,” said his friend Lela Graves, who accompanied him on several cruises after Geraldine died in 1998. “That was his life. He loved to sit at the slot machines on the ship and play them for hours. He’d get up from dinner and say, ‘Excuse me, time to get back to the office,’ and head for the slots.”
He never won, but it didn’t matter. Feeding the machine, pulling the lever, rolling with the great ship, telling stories about the old oil-field days--the same ones, in the same words, over and over: It’s not how everyone would use an annual windfall of $404,000, but it worked just fine for Louie the Greek.
Geraldine made sure charities got taken care of. And the couple’s grown children merely had to ask. But Louie--who kept his booty in a savings account--did have one pet cause of his own.
His ashes are to be buried beneath a fountain in what will be known as the Louie Asimakis Memorial Garden, an elaborate collection of medicinal herbs on a mountainside near Lake Casitas.
The memorial, which is to be dedicated today, is one of many gardens at the Center for Earth Concerns, a 270-acre preserve founded on an old cattle ranch by former developer John Taft.
Taft knew Louie way back when he was just a one-cruise-a-year man.
After his oil-field days, Asimakis raised thousands of birds of paradise, the orange-blossomed African plant, on a terraced canyon slope not far from downtown Ventura. For years, he fed them, watered them, nurtured them, cut them and, until the property’s owner sold out, drove them down to the farmers’ market in Los Angeles.
An amateur botanist, Taft was intrigued with the plants and the stocky, talkative guy who grew them.
Years later, an Asimakis family friend called Taft.
“You need some help up at your place? Louie’s at home now and he’s driving his wife crazy . . . “
Taft signed him on immediately.
At an age when most men lift nothing heavier than a 9-iron and a martini, Louie was hauling irrigation equipment up hillsides, digging trenches, building structures.
“This old man came in and, by George, he just started to put in pipe, paint things and do anything that had to be done, five days a week, year after year.”
Others urged Taft to let Louie go. He’d only hurt himself one day, they argued.
“I can’t let Louie go,” Taft told them. “What would he do? What would I do?”
On Jan. 9, 1991, those questions suddenly lost their relevance. At his corner liquor store, Louie bought a lottery ticket. He’d played the same numbers twice a week for seven years, but this time he had a machine spit out what turned out to be the bonanza of his lifetime.
After that, he didn’t work much on Taft’s garden. He heard the call of the sea and the slots, luring him to Alaska, Africa, Antarctica, all first-class.
But he was a frequent donor and kept in touch with Taft, asking how things were going with him, his wife, their plants, their parrot sanctuary, the gardens and the extraordinary plants blooming along their meandering paths.
“This garden will be the heart of the place,” Taft said. “I wanted to dedicate it to the memory of a man who loved plants and who loved us.”
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Steve Chawkins can be reached at steve.chawkins@latimes.com and 653-7561.
