Jesiolowski, David
(July 27, 1950 -- Jan. 23, 2004)One never failed to find customers lined up in Szypula's Bakery in Philadelphia every morning to buy loaves of pumpernickel bread hot out of the ovens. Each Easter and Christmas it ran out of babkas, poppy-seed pastries, and chrusciki before it did customers. One wonders how the bakery at 3050 Richmond Street got started in the heart of Philadelphia's largest Polish parish.
It all started in the early 1920s when a Polish baker took his wife and children to live in Poland and left a void in the Polish neighborhood of the city's 25th ward. Martin Szypula, who had a little bakery in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, jumped at the chance to build a larger one in Philadelphia. It was valued at $50,000 in 1930. Actually, the sale of babkas and fluffy ribbons of fried dough built it. When he died, his son, Matthew Szypula, who was born in Pottstown, where a small Polish enclave grew in the early part of the twentieth century, took over the business and hired men to deliver bread and Polish pastries to stores and homes in the Philadelphia area.
Among the people who worked at Szypula's Bakery, first during school holidays and summers, was David Jesiolowski, whose paternal grandfather came from Poland in 1904 and spent the rest of his life in Philadelphia, working at various trades and raising a family of five children. After graduating from North Catholic High School for Boys in 1968, David Jesiolowski earned a bachelor's degree in business at what was Philadelphia College of Textile and Science and continued to work at the bakery when he could. At the same time, Szypula lost some of his best customers in the 1960s when Interstate 95 was constructed parallel to Richmond Street, across the street from the bakery, and the baker himself moved to Collingswood, New Jersey.
When Matthew Szypula died in July 1987, David Jesiolowski bought the bakery and his mother, Eleanor (nee Rozycki) Jesiolowski, gave him her recipe for "bow-ties," as a lot of people called chrusciki, nothing more than light, twisted ribbons of fried dough with powdered sugar sprinkled over them. In an episode of Huck, shown on CBS on Feb. 7, 2004, was footage showing the owner selling "bow-ties" -- oops, chrusciki -- to David Morse.
Another side of David Jesiolowski that the public seldom saw was his daily delivery of left over baked goods to St. John's Hospice, three miles from the bakery, where homeless people were served two meals a day, to churches, and Ronald McDonald houses. He also gave money and time to other worthy causes. He died of heart failure. He was the beloved son of Edward and Eleanor Jesiolowski.
Author: Edward Pinkowski (2008)