I was not only introduced to gyros when I was a freshman at Georgetown University in Washington, DC in 1971, but I was also introduced to the submarine sandwich, by way of the Blimpie sandwich shop chain. When I came home to Central Illinois during a school break I introduced my family to them by buying ingredients at the supermarket and making the sandwiches at home. The ingredients weren't quite the same, but the results were good enough to make a favorable impression.


Raymond S. Wise
Minneapolis, Minnesota USA
E-mail: mplsray @ yahoo . com

Introduced later to the US, perhaps, but almost certainly much older than the hero. I say this based on the fact that essentially the same meat-on-a-vertical-spit dish is made in both Greece and Turkey, and those countries have hardly spoken to one another for 180 years.

According to www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAEgreece.htm there were 300,000 Greeks in the US at the time of World War I.
http://chnm.gmu.edu/greekam/timeline.html also gives a chronology of Greek immigration starting in the 1890s.
It seems likely that the Greeks brought the gyro with them when they came.

I disagree with you when you say that gyro served on a rolled-up pita is not a sandwich, but I agree with you that it doesn't look much like a hero, and fhat the gyro meat is unlike any hero/sub/po-boy/hoagie filling known to man. Well, maybe there's a faint, very faint, resemblance to the filling of a Philly steak sandwich.

John Varela
(Trade "OLD" lamps for "NEW" for email.)
I apologize for munging the address but the spam was too much.

Some more historical background, from the New York Times...

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/15/dining/15HERO.html?ex=1082260800&en=77dbdc3f69446949&ei=5070

Hey, Po' Boy, Meet Some Real Heroes
By ED LEVINE
Published: October 15, 2003
In 1936, Clementine Paddleford, the legendary food writer on The New York Herald Tribune, unwittingly named the sandwich, saying, "You'd have to be a hero to finish one."
Howard Robboy, a sociologist who is the co-author of two scholarly papers on the subject, says that the hero, then called an Italian sandwich, was first made in New York in the late 19th century, on the premises of Petrucci's Wines and Brandies at 488 Ninth Avenue near 37th Street. The site is now Manganaro Foods, which still serves O.K. heroes.

The Italian sandwich was mainly served, Mr. Robboy said, to southern Italian manual laborers who wanted a taste of home — a big one. And from this humble Hell's Kitchen start, the sandwich traveled to other Italian neighborhoods throughout the city: Greenwich Village and Little Italy in lower Manhattan; Carroll Gardens, Red Hook, north Williamsburg and Bensonhurst in Brooklyn; Astoria and Corona Heights in Queens; Belmont and Morris Park in the Bronx; wherever Italian cheeses, breads or pork products were sold.

Oh, I'm sure the gyro/"doner kebab" is centuries, maybe thousands of years, old. What I was suggesting was that the name gyro just might have been an imitation of AmE "hero". It all depends on whether the term "gyro" is used in Greece, and was so used before it was imported to Lamerica.
I can see how Greeks might want to rename doner kebabs using something nize and non-Turkish-sounding.

I dunno. The gyro doesn't seem to have made a dent on the public AmE consciousness until the late 'Sixties, precisely the time when Greek immigration to the US started really taking off. Sure, it's possible that Greek-Americans were quietly eating gyros for years before that.

OED scooped bwo ProQuest for "submarine" (sandwich):

L.A. Times, June 27, 1943:
A favorite hot sandwich for an outdoor fling, high in food value and low in ration points, is the picnic submarine. Made of juicy barbecued meat, the entire filling is prepared at home and kept hot in the pot, carefully wrapped in newspapers until time for serving. Place between split frankfurt buns to make submarines, and serve with a macaroni-cabbage slaw, carbonated beverages or cold milk and jelly filled cakes. The preparations are simple, the equipment nominal.
Not quite the "sub" of later (?) years, but the common idea there is the visual similarity of the sandwich to a submarine, due to the use of "frankfurt buns" or the like. The way this article is written, it almost sounds like "submarine" was a known style of making sandwiches (one where you'd use buns "to make submarines").
I'm also reminded of something Kirsh said about how up there in the Peninsula the hot dogs are all wrong because people use hard rolls rather than normative frankfurter rolls. Maybe this has long been the Californian way wrt hot dogs.
I found an article by Clementine Paddleford, whom I believe Zimms mentioned, in the August 7, 1949 L.A. Times, describing "subs" in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware.
It's a monster contraption, the double submarine that nosed into sight along the East Coast late in the war.
She states that "long, soft finger rolls" were the proper sort of bread to use, with "French flute bread" or "long Italian hard rolls" as a substitute. The ingredients of the sub are:
three thin slices of pressed ham arranged overlapping, two thin slices provoloni (sic) cheese, four crisp leaves of lettuce, four half slices of tomato. Sprinkle with thyme, celery seed and salt; drizzle over olive oil. Add a medium-sized onion cut into thin rings; overlay with four one-half-inch-thick slices of dill pickle and a few sliver slices of hot pickled peppers to set a fire in the mouth.

New York Times, August 21, 1950:
Speaking of the Italian cuisine brings us to incidental intelligence from our good friend, Paul A. Schack, grocery buyer at Macy's. He writes that those mammoth Italian-style sandwiches referred to recently here as "grinders" also are known as "submarines".

"The exact definition," Mr. Schack says, "is a sandwich prepared on a loaf of submarine-shaped Italian bread that has been split lengthwise.