Zarodkiewicz, Francis
(Oct. 10, 1929 - June 10, 2008)
Aircraft worker

Very few people would guess that the aircraft industry attracted Frank Zarodkiewicz, who came from Poland in 1917, to Farmingdale, a village of 354 persons on the Long Island Railroad, 28 miles from New York City. Little is known of their early history. In 1930, there were only two Zarodkiewicz families listed in the census of the United States - one in Detroit and the other in Farmingdale. The family in New York included Helen, whom Frank Zarodkiewicz married about 1923 when he was 25 and she 16 years old, and four children, all under five years of age. It was not the first Polish family in Farmingdale. Among the Polish settlers were Clement Slawski, who dealt in Polish books and wrote for a Polish newspaper, and Michael Wojnarowski, who had a cigar store in the village.

While these families were quietly raising their children, Alexander de Seversky, who lost his right leg flying for Russia in the First World War, and other aircraft manufacturers came to a flying field at Farmingdale to test their new weapons. The one who made the greatest impact on Farmingdale was Leroy Grumman, who in 1929 formed a company, which became best known as Grumman Aerospace, and put up a plant in the village and later another one in Bethpage to produce single-seat fighter planes for the Navy. As the number multiplied, the Grumman company and the Zarodkiewicz family prospered. During the hard times of the 1930s, the firm employed more than 500 workers. In the first two and a half years of World War II, Grumman produced 1,971 F4Fs, popularly known as the Wildcats, and then, in August 1943, started to send F6F Hellcats to the U.S. Navy. Over the next two years, 12,275 Hellcats, mostly made in Farmingdale and Bethpage, destroyed 5,156 planes - more than half of Japan's air force - and not many Hellcats were lost.

Grumman, who stepped down as head of the company in 1946 because of his eyesight, always praised his 25,000 workers, including the Zarodkiewiczs, and, as his biographer wrote, "He was a familiar figure on the production floor, usually in short sleeves, and always with a pipe in hand." "The premier manufacturer of aircraft for the Navy in the twentieth century," as William M. Leary called him, "won the acclaim of several generations of naval airmen for his rugged and dependable airplanes." Leary also disputed an obituary of Grumman in the New York Tlmes that he became blind.

The second generation of the Zarodkiewicz family with the company in the postwar years was involved in more products than airplanes. Then it employed 33,500 workers and was the largest employer on Long Island. If the Polish names were known, it would make quite a story of their contribution to victory over Japan in World War II. Without other findings, the story of Francis Zarodkiewicz, who spent 43 years with Grumman Aerospace, is a good starting point.

When he got out of school in Farmingdale, Francis Zarodkiewicz did not go to work at Grumman because after the Second World War it laid off thousands of workers. He joined the U.S. infantry and served in the Korean War. Before he found a job at Grumman Aerospace, he worked part time in a liquor store and other places. In 1954, after starting to work on planes at Grumman, he winked daily at a cafeteria worker named Doris and finally, in 1961, asked her to go bowling with him. The following year they were married at St. Kilian's R.C. Church in Farmingdale and were blessed with three children. Unlike other aircraft workers, he would not stop at a bar after work but go straight home. "He came home at the same time every day," his wife said, "knowing dinner would be on the table by five o'clock." Rarely did he take a dip in the backyard pool. He sent three children to college for master's degrees, and on Sundays ushered at his church for 41 years.

In 1990, after the children were on their own, Francis and Doris Zarodkiewicz moved to Foxfire Village, near Pinehurst, North Carolina, where he died of kidney disease in a nursing home. He was buried at Trinity Cemetery in Amityville, New York.

From: Edward Pinkowski (2009)