Franczyk, Stanley B. (May 14, 1930 - Jul. 13, 2006)
political leaderThe annals of Buffalo, New York, are filled with Polish political leaders. But few have worn as many hats as Stanley Franczyk in an editor's chair, radio station, city hall, the state capital, and in the Polish community. He passed on his love of politics to two sons, who have not yet retired from political life, and made the people of Buffalo as familiar with their names as priests do their parishioners.
It was a strange destiny that pursued the patriarch of the Franczyk family in Buffalo. Born August 27, 1886, in the village of Lacko, where most of the people made a brandy from plums as far back as 1698, Thomas John Franczyk did not care to grow plum trees and sell the fruit to the local distillery. When his sister, who was married to Andrew Szczepaniak, invited him and another sister to come to Meriden, Connecticut, where they had found work, they wasted no time. They bought tickets from the North German Lloyd Line at Bremen, Germany, and on September 11, 1906, when they arrived in New York on the steamship Grosser Kurfurst, they still had a little money. Not much. One had ten dollars and the other a little more.
Thomas Franczyk got his first taste of industrial America when he went to work in a lamp factory. Within two years he married Stella, who also came from Galicia, with whom he had five children in Connecticut, born between 1914 and 1920, and then moved to Buffalo. Stanley, the youngest of eight children, said the family had a goat and tobacco farm before moving to Buffalo, where he was born. In Buffalo, Thomas Franczyk worked in a planing mill, and thought his youngest son would become a Franciscan friar when he went to St. Francis High School at Athol Springs.
Stanczyk dropped out of the school, however, and got his first taste of leadership at the age of 18. He was elected a steward in a Westinghouse plant, where he was a stockman and coilwinder, and paid dues to Local 1581, Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers (AFL-CIO), until he entered the U.S. Air Force during the Korean conflict. As a staff sergeant and senior information officer, the Air Force prepared him for writing and editing work, first at Dziennik dla Wszystkich, Buffalo's Polish daily newspaper, when Matthew Pelczynski was general manager. When Everybody's Daily was published no more after the August 12, 1957, issue, Pelczynski, still in his forties, started Am-Pol Eagle to report in English once a week the activities of the Polish community. Franczyk was its first editor. When governors, senators and other politicians came to Buffalo, they would invariably stop at the newspaper office to talk with Pelczynski, who was a Republican, and Franczyk, who was a Democrat, and seek their support.
Actually Franczyk volunteered to work in Harry Truman's campaign for president in 1948 and ingratiated himself with everybody at Democratic headquarters in Buffalo. In 1955, after he was out of the Air Force and was married to Alina Smolarek, he received a reward for his political activity, first as an assessor and later chief of staff to the Buffalo Common Council. He played an important role in the presidential campaigns of Edmund Muskie, whose mother was born in Buffalo, and George McGovern. A change of governors in Albany led to an appointment as deputy executive director of the State Insurance Fund in the early 1980s. He wrote the annual reports of the agency that distributed millions of dollars to workers out of work and injured on the job.
Throughout his life he never lost interest in newspaper and radio work. He reported news in Polish on two radio stations and wrote a column, mostly political opinion, for the Polish American Journal when Henry Dende, whom seven presidents invited to the White House, ran the newspaper in Scranton, Pa. Almost forgotten is Polish American Voice, put out in Buffalo by a bunch of ambitious young journalists. It competed primarily with the Am-Pol Eagle and the Polish American Journal for readers and advertising in the early 1980s. Vaguely, though not fully, aware of Henry Dende's desire to sell his newspaper in 1983, Franczyk let Mark Kohan, then only 23 years old, know that Dende wanted to sell his newspaper. The rest is history. In the closing years of his life, however, Franczyk wrote a column. Pole to Pole, in Am-Pol Eagle. To the very end he never forgot many people he met along the way. When he died, the editorial in Am-PoI Eagle was entitle, "Thanks Stan."
From: Edward Pinkowski (2009)
Stan Franczyk
Journalist, executive, consultant
Born May 14,1930, Buffalo (NY), U.S.; son of Tomasz and Stanislawa (Walenta); married Alina (Smolarek); children: David, Thomas, Nancy.
Career: journalist, Polish - American newspapers and periodicals; deputy executive director, New York State Insurance Fund; chief of staff, Buffalo City Council; owner, Krystan Communications, Buffalo; consultant, Foundation for Local Democracy in Poland, and U.S. Catholic Bishops Conference, 1991 -. Retired.
Author: columnist, "Pole to Pole" in American - Polish Eagle.
Member of: board managers member, Erie County Medical Center.
Honors: Bronze Star for Korean War; President Jimmy Carter's official delegation to the investiture of Pope John Paul II, 1978.
Served with: United States Air Force (USAF), Korea, senior information specialist, 1951-52.
Affiliation: Democrat. Roman Catholic
Languages: English, Polish
Home: 119 College St., Buffalo, NY 14202
From: "Who's Who in Polish America" 1st Edition 1996-1997, Boleslaw Wierzbianski editor; Bicentennial Publishing Corporation, New York, NY, 1996