Romalewski, Anthony T.
(Aug. 27, 1921 - May 2, 2008)
DraftsmanWhen he was growing up in Corona at a time when the neighborhood in Queens borough, Long Island, New York, was predominately filled with Italian families, Anthony Romalewski listened to his father's stories about crossing the Atlantic on a brand new steamship, SS Yorck, in January of 1907 and working as a bricklayer on large buildings, including a shipyard in Baltimore, for Irwin and Leighton and other construction companies. He was the youngest of three children of Anthony and Stanislawa Romalewski. Corona was the site of the 1939 and 1964 World's Fairs.
After serving in the U.S. Navy during the Second World War, Anthony T. Romalewski and his wife, Helen A. (aka Linda), whom he married in 1943, moved to Baldwin, one of the fastest growing communities in the country, where they raised their four children. Baldwin, always in the thick of things, was named for a family of the same name that built an elegant stop on a stage coach line from New York to Amityville. During the First World War, trains left plumes of coal smoke over Baldwin on their way to military camps on the eastern end of Long Island. By the 1950s a trolley line and most of the farms on both sides of Sunrise Highway (State 27 A) had all but disappeared as well as trucks bound for New York with loads of potatoes, cauliflower, and ducks. Small houses sprang up like mushrooms.
When the Romalewski family moved to Baldwin, it found an attractive Catholic church. St. Christopher's, waiting for them. Ushering in the church occupied Anthony Romalewski for a long time. Several other activities reflected the breath of the family's interests. In addition to Boy Scout activities, Anthony Romalewski belonged to the Polish Falcons and the Casimir Pulaski Post of the Polish Legion of American Veterans. He began to work at the polls in 1992, and his wife, who dabbled in Polish affairs, kept the transom open to The Polish American World, an English-language weekly, and ran it to please readers. Thomas Poster, an able newspaperman, and a few friends launched the English-language newspaper out of his home in Baldwin in 1959.
Like Poster, who commuted to Gotham to work on a tabloid Romalewski commuted to Long Island City, where he worked in the design department of Waldes-Kohinoor, a manufacturer first of zippers, buttons, and hooks for the clothing industry, and then parts of chain saws. In time he sent his son, Stefan, to SUNY at Stony Brook and Columbia University to study urban planning. On September 11, 2001, when terrorists struck the World Trade Center in New York, the Pentagon in Virginia, and were blown out of the sky in Pennsylvania, the New York Public Interest Group in downtown New York, where Stefan Romalewski worked, was shut down. His wedding was set for September 15. Should he call it off? Stefan, 39, and Hallie Bozzi, 29, of Pittsford, N.Y., were engaged in a restaurant at the top of one the towers that the terrorists struck. Their families and friends didn't want them to stop the wedding. Jim Covington, a Unitarian Universalist minister, married them.
Anthony Romalewski died after a brief illness and was buried in Greenwood Cemetery, Brooklyn.
From: Edward Pinkowski (2009)