Kolasheski, Frank J.
(Jan. 27, 1899 - Dec. 16, 1970)
Editor and publisherWriting about Frank Kolasheski, the editor and publisher of the last Polish newspaper in Shamokin, Pennsylvania, is very difficult, both for lack of records and because most of his readers are dead. Like the discovery of coal "up" in the mountains, as outsiders called the hard coal fields of Pennsylvania, Kolashefski caught a glimpse of Shamokin on June 11, 1925, when he married Eleanor Dzienkiewicz, a graduate of Shamokin High School and the daughter of a Polish coal miner, in St. Stanislaus Bishop and Martyr Catholic Church, founded in the early 1870s by the Polish families of Shamokin and Coal Township. He returned four years later to establish a Polish weekly newspaper, Shamokin Rekord, which was to him what a coal mine was to the first coal company of Shamokin in 1840.
Little did he know, because they were little read, that Polish newspapers were never successful in Shamokin. In 1874, Michael Twarowski, a Lithuanian - oriented Pole, still in his twenties, set up a print shop in Shamokin and wanted to start the first Polish or Lithuanian newspaper in Pennsylvania. Neither the Lithuanian and Polish priests in Shamokin nor their flock in the surrounding coal patches would support him. As a matter of fact, the Irish zealots of St. Edward's Roman Catholic Church, erected in 1873, where the Reverends Peter Koncz, the first Polish priest ordained at St. Francis Seminary in Wisconsin, and Joseph Juszkiewicz, the first Polish priest in Chicago, said Mass for Poles and Lithuanians, hurled rocks into the quarters of the two priests until they fled, Koncz to Baltimore and Juszkiewicz to Nanticoke. Twarowski then began to print an English - Lithuanian dictionary, and vice versa, but a fire broke out and destroyed his shop. The only pages of the scarred dictionary he salvaged were later found in Lithuania.
According to reliable sources, Twarowski moved to New York City and started Gazeta Lietuwiszka, the first Lithuanian newspaper in the United States, on August 16, 1879, for 132 subscribers. He published 16 issues and folded. Although histories of Lithuanian immigrants in America spelled his name Mykolas Tvarauskas, as is typical of Lithuanians, Michael Twarowski, as I found it in the 1880 census of New York, started another weekly newspaper, Unija (Union), and published it in Lithuanian and Polish for six months in 1884-85.
Hoping to do better, Jan Szlupas, who came from Lithuania in 1885, followed in Twarowski's footsteps until he settled in Scranton in 1894. No matter where he started a newspaper - Shenandoah in Schuylkill County, Wilkes Barre in Luzerne County, or Scranton in Lackawanna County - Szlupas spread religious disbelief until he died in 1944. In the years I spent in Mount Carmel, anyone who opposed religion was called a "szlupas." Toward the end of his life, Szlupas practiced medicine in Scranton, as he was trained to do, and remained active in the Lithuanian community.
Prior to Kolasheski's time, Shamokin, laid out with irregular streets that began at small streams and snaked to outlying coal patches, had another Polish newspaper, Przyjaciel Gornika (Miner's Friend). It was produced by Frank Stanley Witt, who was born in Coal Township, August 7, 1880, one of nine children of John Witt, who came from the German partition of Poland in 1864, and Anna Czernik, who came from Poland in 1873. He received his elementary education in Shamokin and made amazing strides in the building of his own career. At nineteen he was a typesetter. In 1912, three years after he married Emma Zimmers, he worked in the Shamokin post office in the daytime and set type in the evening. After he opened a printing shop on Arch Street in Shamokin, a shoemaker, a barber, a tire salesman, and a butcher shop, to name a few, opened businesses on the same street. It is interesting to note, though not hard to understand, why shoes, haircuts, and tires were more important than a Polish newspaper to the people of Shamokin. The Miner's Friend ceased publication for lack of readership.
Right now it wouldn't hurt to study a few statistics. Although church records listed about 300 Lithuanians and 5,000 Poles in 1891, the 1900 U.S. census reported 2,223 persons from Poland in Coal Township, compared to 492 persons in Shamokin, which means that the American - born children of Polish immigrants were making them gleam like marble. Until 1910 Lithuanians were not counted separately in the census, and many were still listed as Poles in 1920 when 1,561 of the 17,574 persons in Coal Township, an area of 26.5 square miles, were from Poland, compared to 574 Polish immigrants in Shamokin. As the mines in Coal Township were considered slaughterhouses, thereby taking away the breadwinners in many Polish families, their widows were kicked out of company houses to make room for a miner and his family. By 1930, with the attrition of the old folks and the exodus of the young people, the number of Polish immigrants dropped to 854 in Coal Township and 326 in Shamokin.
As the figures show, Shamokin was past its golden years and the years ahead spelled trouble for Kolasheski's newspaper. Exactly how many read the Shamokin Rekord is not to be known. But it still found people who could read Polish, as nuns taught Polish at St. Stanislaus school until 1949, and depended on advertisers for the most part to support the newspaper. The Shamokin Rekord reached its highest standard of excellence and influence under Kolasheski's able guidance. He was a fine example of a citizen. Born in Chmielow, Poland, the son of John F. Kolaszewski and Mary Hodurski, Frank Kalisheski, as he preferred to sign his last name, dreamed of a better life in the United States. When he was 14 years old, he sailed to the United States and spent eleven years in Chicago, where he graduated from Wicker Park College in 1923 and attended Northwestern University for two years. In 1925, when Wilkes-Barre was his address, he met Eleanor Dzienkiewicz. After their marriage, they formed the Rekord Printing and Publishing Company. In addition to the Polish weekly, they printed the Shamokin Citizen, a weekly newspaper in English from 1949 to 1954 for John H. Shroyer, one of Shamokin's leading manufacturers of women's dresses.
Frank Kolasheski was instrumental in organizing the United Polish Societies of Northumberland County in 1934 to promote the welfare of the Polish people and was active in the Democratic Party. He continued to run the printing business at 710 North Shamokin Street until he was stricken ill in his home, over the printing shop, and died in the Geisinger Medical Center at Danville. After his death, Eleanor Kolasheski operated the printing business for awhile. She died in a nursing home at Mount Carmel, eight miles from Shamokin, on January 29, 1993.
Outside of Frank and Eleanor Kolasheski, the person who had much to with the Rekord, in terms of typesetting, writing, and good will, was Victor Carr. In 1901, just before President Mc Kinley was assassinated in Buffalo, his father. Frank Karmilowicz, who came from the Suwalki voivod in Poland when McKinIey was inaugurated and found work in a coal mine of Coal Township, brought the rest of the family to the coal country. Victor was five years old when he came to Shamokin with his mother. After one year at the Polish school in Shamokin, his father sent him to a German boarding school in Trenton, New Jersey, where he read every book he could get and fell under the spell of Polish writers. When he grew up, he found pleasure in writing poetry instead of going to saloons. He married a girl who had come to Shamokin with her parents from Poland and to earn a living he painted houses and hung wallpaper until Frank Kolasheski taught him to operate a linotype machine.
In addition to poetry, Victor, who changed his last name because he got disgusted with the way people pronounced Karmilowicz, wrote and set in type the stories of Polish businessmen in Shamokin. He translated Poe's The Raven into Polish. His political satires were popular. Sometimes when people came to Shamokin Street to pick up a copy of the Rekord they thought he owned the printing business.
When he succeeded Kolasheski as president of the United Polish Societies, he conducted a campaign to change the name of Oneida Street in Coal Township to Pulaski Avenue. Ironically, Frank Witt, the owner of the previous Polish newspaper in Shamokin, was born and raised on Oneida Street. Carr also collected clothing and sent it to Poland. On March 30, 1962, when I met him, the Rekord was no longer in existence, and he worked in the maintenance department of F & S brewery in Shamokin. One wonders what happened to his papers and poetry.
From: Edward Pinkowski (2009)