Kozlowski, Walter Joseph
(Sept. 13, 1880 - Jan. 27, 1945)
Chief burgessIf Joseph Kozlowski didn't wait in the voivod of Suwalki for his wife to deliver a baby, the child, Walter, who would become chief burgess of Mount Carmel, Pennsylvania, would have been born in Excelsior, a coal patch in Northumberland County, where, one by one, the shoddily built company houses were filled by Polish families. Without realizing it, Josephine Gwiazdowski, a midwife, began an exodus of Polish families in 1885 to Mount Carmel, a few miles away, where her services were in more demand. Because of its beautiful setting in the mountains, 88 miles northwest of Philadelphia, Albert Bradford, who came from Philadelphia to build a saw mill and sell lumber, named the site Mount Carmel after the sacred mountain in Palestine. In 1900, when it was surrounded by coal mines, 1,665 of the 16,233 persons in Mount Carmel were from Poland, although the name was not on the map, and 435 of them were married women who ended their child-bearing years in Mount Carmel with large families. There were more boarders than that looking for women to marry. No one is sure how many of the 11,572 native born persons in Mount Carmel were born to Polish immigrants. No doubt Josephine Gwiazdowski and other midwives delivered thousands of babies with Polish names.
In the Kozlowski family, for example, Joseph Kozlowski had two children with his first wife and twelve children with his second wife, compared to his son, Walter, with only three children, and his mother. Mary, who raised four of seven children. The family emigrated to Excelsior in 1881 when Walter was six months old. In the 1880s and '90s Joseph Kozlowski and his second wife, Agnes, ten years younger than he was, lost half of their babies.
When he was nine years old, Walter Kozlowski went to work in a coal breaker, supposedly at the nearest colliery to his home, and eventually when he went into the darkness of the underground to shovel coal other collieries were involved. Exactly when he got into politics is not certain. In 1920, the citizens of the Fourth Ward, Mount Carmel, where he lived with his wife and children, became fully aware of him when he went door to door to take the census for the federal government. Soon after, in 1921, he was elected the chief burgess of Mount Carmel and served until 1929. No more than six boroughs across Pennsylvania then had Polish burgesses.
Engaging as censuses are, Walter Kozlowski was different from the other census takers of Mount Carmel in 1920. He was familiar with Polish names and spelled his own and others perfectly, but the other census takers misspelled the names of his grandmother, father, uncles, and siblings. Even with his intelligence he couldn't help it when a family mispronounced its name. In 1930, after Kozlowski's years as chief burgess were over, the census takers got the same spelling for all of them, owing no doubt to the fact that the name of the Polish chief burgess was often in big type of the Mount Carmel Item.
In all the years that Walter Kozlowski lived in Mount Carmel, he never owned his own home. He rented a modestly built two-story house at the corner of Fifth and Vine streets, which probably had a saloon on the first floor of one side, and in 1930, when my mother, sister, and I moved from Massachusetts, my father rented a house from the same family that owned Kozlowski's home. The two houses stood on the same lot. Ours, however, was split in half and occupied by two families. The saloon was closed by the passage of the prohibition law in 1920. In time Walter Kozlowski's brother in law, Wally Vallish, who had a furniture store on Oak Street, ran a grocery store where the saloon was. My mother sent me to it, especially on the day before my father had to go to work at Reliance Colliery, to get what he needed for his lunch the next day in the mines. Each item was listed in a book that the grocer and the customer each kept. On payday, my father, still with a tin lunch bucket dangling on a rope over his shoulder, stopped at the store and paid what he owed.
As I was the same age as Alex Kozlowski, we hung out together at the intersection of Fifth and Vine, across from the store, with other boys who lived in the same neighborhood. The oldest son of Walter Kozlowski was the leader of the gang. Occasionally he would take us to the next corner to pick a fight with a rival gang. After a few punches were thrown, he would run away and leave us to do the best that we could with our fists. His brother, Joseph, two years younger, stayed out of the gang.
Catherine Maciejewski, whom Walter Kozlowski married, was born and raised in Mount Carmel. She had three children and died August 24, 1926, at the age of 31. After I left to seek an education and a job, the youngest Kozlowski, who had better opportunities than I had, spent years as a newspaper reporter and a school teacher in Mount Carmel.
From: Edward Pinkowski (2009)