Albosta, Donald Joseph
(Dec. 5, 1925 - )
Farmer, politician

Congressman. Stanley Albosta, who came from Poland in 1885 and became a coal miner in Pennsylvania and Michigan, never expected that the people of Michigan, mostly farmers of mixed ancestry, would send one of his grandsons to Washington to represent them in the U.S. House of Representatives. Nobody knows where he worked in Pennsylvania, whether it was in the coal mines at Mount Carmel, Wilkes-Barre, or Scranton in the hard coal fields, when he heard that a coal company in Saginaw, Michigan, offered better wages to coal miners than the mine bosses in Pennsylvania. Still in his twenties, Stanley Albosta took his wife, Josephine, whom he married in 1888, to Saginaw, where he found employment in a mine, and they had eight children between 1889 and 1900. The living ones, seven in all, were Vincent in 1889; Benedict, 1892; Florian, 1893; Anna, 1894; Paul, 1895; Louise, 1897; and Rose, 1899. It meant that the family produced nine of the nineteen known Albosta names in the United States in 1900. Michael Albosta, who came from Poland in 1883, remained a coal miner at Mount Carmel. By 1930, the number of Albosta names grew to 66 in six states.

When the coal mines in Michigan were closed, most of the people who had lost their jobs turned to farming and other work. Donald Joseph Albosta was born December 5, 1925, in Bridgeport Township, so called because of a bridge over the Cass River at the village of Bridgeport, the third of four children of Paul Albosta and Laura Bennett. The proximity of the village to Saginaw, where several Polish churches stood, made it possible for the family to go there to attend church, shop, and do other things. Bridgeport did not have many stores. After a stint as a factory inspector, Paul Albosta bought a dairy farm on the banks of Misteguay Creek in Albee Township, in the lower reaches of Saginaw County, and sent his children to the nearest public school at Chesaning, on the Shiawassee River, 25 miles from Saginaw. Because of the distance he had to travel, he dropped out of a college in the Saginaw Valley to devote more time to his family and farming. On February 12, 1951, he married his wife, Dorothy, the daughter of Polish immigrants, by whom he had a boy and a girl, and spent more time in agricultural pursuits.

Then an astonishing thing happened. The Polish farmer who would become the congressman from the district was elected Trustee of Albee Township, an area of 36 square miles, where at this writing 5.8 percent of the 643 families are of Polish descent. The percentage of Poles in the 809 square miles of Saginaw County was approximately eight percent. He was elected commissioner of Saginaw County in 1970 and a member of the Michigan House of Representatives in 1974. Two years later he opposed the incumbent congressman, Elford Cederberg, who was first elected on the Republican ticket in 1950 from Michigan's 1Oth congressional district, and lost. He ran again in 1978 and unseated Cederberg, who traveled more to foreign countries than to Michigan and was a hero of the Normandy invasion and a former mayor of Bay City, and Farmer Dan, as President Carter addressed him in the White House, advanced the cause of farmers more than other congressman in Washington. Every weekend he flew back to his district to learn what was on the mind of farmers. It was the same routine from January 3, 1979, to January 3, 1985. He lost to William Schuette, an attractive, 31-year-old lawyer from Midland, Michigan, where Republican voters outnumbered Democrats, and retired from public life.

Unlike Cederberg, who remained on the banks of the Potomac after he was defeated, and Schuette, who lost the election for U.S. Senator from Michigan in 1990, Albosta returned to his old farm in Saginaw County, Michigan. The value of his crops grew from thousands of dollars in the 1950s to the millions in the first decade of the 2000s. At 83, he still climbed on a tractor at his 3,000-acre farm, known as Misteguay Creek Farms, or supervised his son, a nephew, and other workers, and grew corn, soybeans, and other crops. It was not unusual. More than ninety percent of the farms in Saginaw County were operated by a family or individual, His age was different. The average age of farmers in his county was 54 years. In the years to come, he intended to sit down and write a book about his life. He had boxes of personal papers hidden on his farm.

While in Congress, he was chairman of the House Committee on Human Resources that investigated charges that Ronald Reagan was involved in a conspiracy to delay the release of 52 U.S. hostages in Iran until after the presidential election in 1980. On January 20, 1981, minutes after the inauguration of Reagan, the hostages were let go after 444 days of captivity. Although the committee found evidence that Reagan used dirty tricks in the campaign against Carter, three books were written to argue that there was a plot to interfere with the presidential election. Albosta's side of the debate has yet to come out. The subcommittee's final report in 1984 was not the full story.

Most people wonder about the origin of Albosta. Spend a few moments with the records of the Albosta families and you will see that, unless the name was spelled differently in Poland, they virtually changed countries. Not one today among the family names in Poland and 446 at this writing in the U.S. Public Records Index. One of them was a congressman from Michigan. As census records prove, the first ones of the same name came from Poland.

Source Edward Pinkowski 2009

From: Edward Pinkowski (2009)