To say that Rose Sabatino Voulgaropoulos overcame immense challenges in her life is an understatement. Born to Italian immigrants in New York City in 1934, only 14 months before the death of her mother, Annunziata, Rose was the youngest of five children. Left with five children, Rose’s father, Alphonzo Sabatino felt he couldn’t raise the daughters on his own. He placed Rose and her sister, Concetta (Connie) in the New York Foundling home. She and her sister lived in the New York Foundling until a family who had met Annunziata in the hospital managed to arrange to foster the two Sabatino girls. Rose and Connie were raised by that compassionate ‘mixed’ Constantine family: a Greek man married to an Italian woman. Rose would later say that her family experience led her to prefer Greek men, which played out in her ultimate marriage to Emmanuel (Manny) Voulgaropoulos.
Rose would always assert that it was not her, but her husband who had done amazing things: he was the doctor who sought out challenging public health projects, he was the artist and art collector, he was the music aficionado…he was even, according to Rose, the better cook. Much of what she said about him was true, but Rose was exceptional—courageous, even—in her own right.
Precise, focused, competitive and ever-interested in meeting new people and learning new things, Rose was a presence. Her intense focus served her well in both of her favorite avocations: tennis and contract bridge. Her drive to find “the best way” to do pretty much everything compelled her to meet new people all the time: she would chase down a stranger to ask who did their hair; introduce herself to a new next door neighbor by asking them to teach her to cook the food because she could smell the delicious aromas; ; or simply solicit advice from strangers on a variety of subjects while in line at the grocery store. Some of her best friends to this day include a couple to whom she introduced herself simply because she heard them speaking Italian in a drugstore. And, even though Rose had no interest in having a dog, she knew the names of all of the neighborhood dogs, carrying dog treats in her pockets whenever she took her daily walks.
Despite being both born to and fostered by struggling immigrant parents, Rose managed to work her way toward success, ultimately earning a scholarship to study nursing at Brooklyn Hospital , where she then practiced nursing until she made a huge move in 1959. In that year, 24-year-old Rose began a trip around the world that never stopped. The first stop in her life of exotic travel was to be Southeast Asia. Her future husband, met her at the airport in Hong Kong in order to accompany her for the rest of the journey to Cambodia, where they would marry and work together. Years earlier, Rose had spotted Manny, a surgical resident in the Brooklyn Hospital cafeteria. She wrangled an introduction and he won her heart instantly.
When Manny decided to leave his residency to join Tom Dooley’s MEDICO and open a hospital in Cambodia, he told Rose that perhaps she might consider joining him later. Later came, at which time he wrote to her asking her to come to Cambodia to be both his wife and his nurse. She did, and they married in 1959 in a Buddhist ceremony that was attended by nearly all of the 9,000 residents of Kratie, the village where he had started the hospital, as well as by Cambodian heads of state and U.S. consular officials. The couple spent the following five years working for MEDICO and USAID in Cambodia and Vietnam, where both of their children, Dimitri and Andrea were born.
In 1965, the young family of four was evacuated from Vietnam as the war escalated. Upon their return to the United States, they lived in Maryland while Manny earned his Master’s degree in Public Health at Johns Hopkins University. They then moved to Honolulu where Manny headed-up the university’s International Health Department, and Rose worked as the coordinator of the Breast Cancer project at a major hospital system. Posts in Indonesia and the Philippines interrupted life in Honolulu, but Rose’s facility with languages made it possible for her to manage a full life whether they lived in Jakarta, Bali, Manila or elsewhere.
When they retired in 1995, Rose and Manny returned to Honolulu, where they enjoyed retirement together until his death in 2006. An avid tennis and contract bridge player, she remained in Honolulu until 2013 when she moved to Tucson, which Rose claimed was her favorite place to live.
Rose Sabatino Voulgaropoulos is survived by her son, Dimitri Voulgaropoulos, in Tucson, Arizona; her daughter, Andrea Voulgaropoulos, in Pasadena, California; and her sister, Connie Ruma, in Daly City California, as well as two grandchildren, Katharina Voulgaropoulos, in San Francisco; and Paolo Robles, in Irvine, California. A memorial service for Rose will be held on Saturday, October 8th, 2022 at 10:30am at East Lawn Palms Mortuary & Cemetery in Tucson.
In lieu of flowers, please consider making a donation to Planned Parenthood in Rose’s name to honor Rose and Manny’s past work in population control as well as her commitment to Planned Parenthood of Arizona.
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