From Amanda Cokinos (grand daughter)

My favorite memories of my Papou usually involve sandcrabs, salt water, and the beloved beach house in Bethany Beach. When we were little, he would amaze us and our beach friends by "swallowing" the sand crabs he plucked out of the sand as we all watched wide eyed in amazement. As my grandmother says, "Your grandfather lived to embarass his grandchildren." So as we got older the fun times would continue with a teenaged granddaughter and an unsuspecting male lifeguard. I bet the lifeguards did not know what was awaiting them when they talked to one of the Cokinos granddaughters. My own story involved me and my friend Paige when we were 15 years old. I guess Papou caught us checking out the lifeguards with the binoculars from the deck as they did their morning jog down the beach. Later that day as we were playing in the ocean... Papou comes up to us and grabs each one of us by the wrist and starts marching down the beach towards the lifeguard stand. We laughed and tried to wiggle free, but that man had the strongest grip we had ever seen! We arrive to the lifeguard and he confidently yells up, "Lifeguard?! If these girls drowned would you save them?" The lifeguard looked a little confused and mumbled out some sort of yes because it was his job. Papou nodded in agreement and said, "Good, because these girls are lusting after you!" With that he turned around and walked back to his chair to resume his sunbathing. We stood there stunned and eventually walked back to our house very quickly with our heads staring at our feet, and spent the rest of the day inside hiding from the lifeguards. There are other lifeguard stories like when Papou interrogated a lifeguard who was taking cousin Chryssa to the lifeguard ball and told her to have her home by 9pm as he poked him with a rolled up newspaper. Or for my sister Alyssa, he managed to get a lifeguard up the stairs and into the living room to meet his granddaughter, and who knows how he managed that! Looking back these memories are some of the best we have, we may have been embarrassed at the time but Papou was always after a good laugh from us and usually managed to do so!