Kolinski, Raymond
(Feb. 16, 1928 - June 6, 2004)The lower peninsula of Michigan is shaped like a mitten and the small town of Petoskey, where picturesque summer homes dot the shores of Little Traverse Bay and Lake Michigan, takes up the space in it where one would find the little finger of a left hand. Like Sandusky, Ohio, it was once a lonely hole in the wilderness where fur traders dealt with Indians from the backwoods. Things changed rapidly when the first train arrived on November 25, 1873. Then, twelve days later, the booming village got a post office. It took the name of a mulatto who lived in a log hut on Bear River, half French and half Indian, who was named Ignatius Petoskey by Jesuit missionaries, and, because of the similarity of names, Raymond Kolinski, who was born and grew up in the town, found himself the butt of wild rhymes. The town has a statute of the Indian chief.
Little is known of Raymond's father, John Kolinski. His mother, Bernice Gray, moved to Gladstone, Michigan, when her second husband, John Mokszyski, died October 1, 1992, in Petoskey, and she passed away on April 2, 1997. The first Kolinski in Petoskey worked in the roundhouse of the Chicago and Wrstern Michigan Railroad.
On June 18, 1946, shortly after graduation from Petoskey High School, Raymond Kolinski joined the U.S. Army and served in Korea and Alaska during a three-year tour of duty, Then, looking for work, nothing was at his beck and call in Petoskey. He ended up in Johnstown, 60 miles east of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where the Bethlehem Steel Corporation operated furnaces 24 hours a day and produced railroad freight cars. As 7.7 percent of Johnstown's population was of Polish ancestry, it stands to reason that the company had about the same number of Polish steelworkers. At its peak the steel plant had 13,000 employees. Kolinski worked around the furnaces 33 years and retired in 1983.
In his senior years he lived with his wife, Helen L. Unger, whom he married June 18, 1954, and their three children in Boswell, a borough of 1,364 souls, where the last coal mine was closed in 1939, and attended Laurel Trinity Evangelical Lutheran Church in neighboring Jennerstown. For a number of years he was a member of Boswell Borough Council. Unlike the typical mining town, the houses in Boswell were built with brick. He loved hunting, fishing and gardening. When he died, he was buried in Maple Spring Cemetery in the neighboring town of Jenner.
From: Edward Pinkowski (2008)