MALECKI, Rev. LAWRENCE ALOYSIUS
(July 14, 1881 - July 14, 1934)Priest. The story of Father Malecki is an interesting one. As he was born July 14, 1881, the year the Polish family came from the old country, it meant that his mother, Frances nee Plewinski, carried him in her womb on the steamship across the Atlantic Ocean and delivered him in Franklin, the seat of Venango County in Northwestern Pennsylvania, where oil was discovered in 1860, one of nine children she would have with Thomas Malecki. The exact number of children she brought from Poznan is between three and four.
After Lawrence Malecki was born, the family moved to LaSalle, Illinois, where the Polish people had their own church and school and jobs in coal mines and a zinc mill offered more pay. Lawrence Malecki received a good education in LaSalle, where Polish nuns taught him in grammar school, and Detroit, Michigan, where Polish priests did the same in high school, college, and seminary. When he was ordained on June 29, 1910, these institutions, each known by a different name but all under the control of Father Joseph Dombrowski, were no longer at Detroit but at Orchard Lake, Michigan. In the meantime, his parents moved to Wisconsin, first to a farm in Little Suanico, in Oconto County, and then, in their old age, to the village of Pound, in Marinette County, 16 miles from Oconto, where St. Leo's Catholic Church was nearby since 1902. The village -- called Nowy Krolewiec in Polish -- also had a Polish Baptist Church that a Baptist who came the Romanowska parish in Krolewiec and other Protestants built. Pound and Coleman, almost adjacent to it, were named after Thaddeus Coleman Pound, the grandfather of the noted poet of the same name, who cut lumber in the area and served in the U. S. Congress from 1877 1883. As it turned out -- a little ahead of the story -- Father Malecki was laid to rest in the family plot at St. Leo's Cemetery in or near Pound.
After ordination he became the administrator of St. Stanislaus' Church in Fall River, Massachusetts, and then, in April 1914, pastor of Our Lady of Czestochowa parish at Quidnick (West Warwick), Rhode Island, where he made a hall in the basement of the church for activities of the parishioners. He built a rectory in 1915. On November 11, 1917, he was transferred to St. Joseph's parish in Central Falls and opened a grade school the following year. He brought four Bernardine Sisters from Mount Alverno, near Reading, Pa., to conduct it. He completed the construction of a brick church on July 6, 1919. For three years the Sisters lived in a rented house near the school. In 1920 Father Malecki bought a two story mansion and converted it into a convent. He bought another mansion on the same street and converted it into a school. He added four classrooms to it. He had a string of priests to help him in his pastoral duties.
When he died in 1934, his body was shipped to Pound, Wisconsin, for burial with other members of his family in St. Leo's Catholic Cemetery.
Author: Edward Pinkowski