A Long Post About My Grandfather

My immediate family members are aware that, after a lifetime of general ignorance about the genealogy of my maternal grandfather, Stanley Pilakowski, we now know quite a bit. And we well know that recent knowledge is due to the work of my sister Roberta and of a second cousin in California, Diane, that none of us knew existed as recently as a couple of weeks ago.

My mother, who was the youngest of six children, has always claimed to know practically nothing about her father's history. She knew he was an orphan and that there was some connection with the Cleveland, Ohio area, perhaps that he was born there, and that his formal education ended after the fourth or fifth grade. My sister Rosemary says that our mother speculated her father may have been sent west on one of the orphan trains that relocated as many as a quarter of a million youngsters from the east to the midwest from the 1870s through the 1920s. That would fit with a story I have heard my mother tell more than once. As she put it, orphan children were often parceled around to work at various labor intensive farm jobs, no doubt especially at harvest time. As she told the story, at lunch time, when all the workers went to the house to eat, her father, the orphan teenager was told to eat in the barn. The veracity of the story is not the issue. What strikes me is that is the only story I have ever heard her tell about her father's history.

We now know, and again I can't stress enough our obligation to Roberta and Diane, that my great grandparents, Anton and Francisyka Robaskewiec Pilakowski were married in Poland in 1869. We have a copy of their wedding registration. We know that in 1873 they sailed out of Liverpool (!) on the City of Antwerp, arriving in New York City, and that Francisyka was six-months pregrant at the time. They settled in Berea, Ohio where there first three children were born, and where my Anton was naturalized. It is apparently not clear if Francisyka became a citizen at the same time, but she may have. (He was naturalized only three years after their arrival. I guess he must not have looked like a terrorist.) Later they moved to Howell County Nebraska, where my grandfatther was born in 1883. Three years later, Anton and Francisyka both died of tuberculosis, and my grandfather was an orphan, about the only thing my mother had right.

We know that the guardians of Stanley and his even-younger brother Vincent after the death of his parents were a couple named Peters. This jumped out at all of us, because we have always known that my grandmother's maiden name was Peters. Much as I wanted the Victorian-novel effect of my grandfather having married the daughter of his guradians, Roberta assures me it was a different Peters family. He married the niece of his guardians, rather than their daughter.

No doubt life as an orphan was difficult, and there even may be some element of truth in the story about eating in the barn that my mother remembers her father telling, but Diane has evidence that the Peters family did a good job of looking out for the interests of the Pilakowski children, even forestalling a foreclosure at some point on the family property. I look forward to learning more about this from Diane at some point.

My grandfather died in 1960 a few days before my 15^th birthday. Obviously I didn't know him well. Even if I had thought at the time that I knew him well, which I never did, I would have been wrong in the way that teenagers are wrong about almost everything. So this is not an attempt to define or explain my grandfather, even if it might give that appearance at times. This is just some of what I remember about him and perhaps some of what I've constructed in my mind about him based on those memories. I know it isn't the real Stanley Pilakowski.

One of the surprises that I've had as a result of this genealogy research is the discovery that Stanley and Josephine both died in their mid-seventies. I have always believed them to have died in their mid- or late- eighties. In fact I would have sworn it. As a kid I had no sense of adult ages. There were only three ages: my own, my parent's and my grandparent's and everyone had to fit roughly into one of those groups. I remember that in some of those large Catholic families there were nieces and nephews who were older than their youngest uncles and aunts. More than anything else, I think this offended my young sense of order in the world.

We lived on a corner lot in Genoa, Nebraska and I remember grandpa parking on the side street nearest the back door of our house and my siblings and I would all run out to his car to get the candy bars we knew he had brought us. In the summer, he also would bring us watermelons that he had grown. I never saw his watermelon patch, but I think it was some distance away from his house, across the highway and close to the Loup river in a location that had very sandy ground, which I believe is a particularly good soil for raising melons. I know people used to steal his melons, but I have the sense he never got very upset about it.

I don't think he ever got out of his car when he came to drop off our treats. We would go to get whatever he had for us and he would leave. Sometimes he would drop my grandma off and she would “visit” with our mother until he came back to pick her up. I have no visual memory of him ever having been inside our house.

My grandfather and grandmother lived on a farm five or six miles outside of Genoa, Nebraska on the road to Fullerton, the County Seat of Nance County. The farm had two houses. My uncle Bob Pilakowski and his family lived in the bigger of the houses and my grandparents lived in the smaller.

The only other vivid memory I have of my grandfather has stuck with me for 55+ years because of its painful awkwardness. One summer day when I must have been about ten years old, my father drove to Fullerton and dropped me off at the Pilakowski farm on the way, to play with my cousin Ray, who was my age.

My father probably just pulled off the highway into the farmstead, dropped me off and continued on his way.. (There was no long driveway. The highway actually bisected the farmstead; some buildings were on the opposite side of the highway from the houses.) Neither of us knew that Ray wasn't at home. Somehow or other I ended up sitting with my grandfather in his car, in front of his house. Why we were in his car instead of somewhere else, I don't recall. He must have invited me into the car, but I don't remember. Perhaps he arrived home in his car more or less at the same time my dad dropped me off. Maybe he was one of those men who just liked sitting in his car and he was already there when I arrived.

At any rate, there we were, with nothing, and I mean nothing, to say to each other. The clumsiness of the moment was palpable. I probably tried to make a comment or ask a question, because even now I am one of those people who is somewhat uncomfortable with prolonged silence. I have no idea how long it lasted, but I remember how it ended. He said “Ray's home now. You should go play with him.” The odd thing about it is that we were sitting in front of his house, which was next to the road. Any car that arrived with Ray inside would have had to pass us when it turned in off the highway, and I would have been just as aware as grandpa that Ray was now home. Still I apparently didn't know how to extract myself from this awkward situation; I needed him to release me.

Related to that taciturnity I mentioned, I have no memory of Stanley hanging around and shooting the bull with the guys. I don't know who his friends were. When he died, the pallbearers were six of his grandchildren, so I can't get any clue from his funeral. If someone has his funeral notice, it may include a list of honorary pallbearers, which would at least indicate who were his friends. I can picture my grandmother chatting in Polish after church with some of her old lady friends, and I can almost make myself believe that I can see her laughing. But I can't do that with Stanley. I knew he was a nice guy with a good heart; he brought candy and watermelons after all, as well as quarters of beef when a steer was butchered. But I always saw him as extremely serious. I genuinely wondered in those years if he actually new my name or the name of any of my siblings. I knew that he knew my cousins' names, the children of Bob Pilakowski, because they all lived on the same farmstead. Since that thought occurred to me, it must be because at some point I searched my memory and decided I had never heard him call us by our names.

Stanley died in 1960 of prostate cancer. That was in the era when nobody talked about imminent death. The doctors would sometimes tell the family that a loved one had cancer, but they wouldn't tell the patient. And of course the family never told the patient either, supposedly to protect him/her from the bad news, but I now know it was just as much, or more, to prevent themselves from the need for awkward conversations.

I don't know who knew what or when they knew it. Certainly my siblings and I knew nothing because, I assume, we were not considered reliably discreet, no doubt correctly. Presumably Grandma and her adult children knew Grandpa had cancer, but how long they knew it, I have no idea. Prostate cancer is normally a very slow-growing malignancy, but not always. Perhaps Stanley had the more aggressive type. At any rate, I remember a conversation after he died in which I learned that the family had presumed Stanley did not know he had cancer, only to discover from a doctor in Omaha that Grandpa had been making secret trips to Omaha without telling anyone. He knew he had cancer and was keeping it from the family. Now I wonder if his mortality was on his mind that day four or five years earlier when we had nothing to talk about in his car.

This is already far too long for a blog post, so I will end for now. I still want to write more about that laconic quality that almost personifies my grandfather in my imperfect memory, and which all of his children seem to have inherited in spades. But that can all wait for later.