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Boguszewski, John J.
(Nov. 5, 1921 - Jan. 24, 2007)

The venerable St. Stanislaus, Bishop and Martyr, Catholic Church is gone, as are the Roper stove works and Koehler furniture factories that employed more people than any other industries in Kankakee, Illinois. But John J. Boguszewski, the tail end of seventy Polish families that left a German parish in 1900 to build the Polish church in Kankakee, astride the Kankakee River, fifty miles south of Chicago, had no idea that he typified the end of a Polish settlement in Illinois. Half of the population of Kankakee today is black.

John J. Boguszewski was born and raised in Kankakee, the son of John and Antoinette (nee Kanoski) Boguszewski, German-speaking Poles, who were among the families that asked the archbishop of Chicago for a Polish priest. The bishop sent a young and energetic priest, Rev. Max Kotecki, in the fall of 1900 to Kankakee, now in the Joliet diocese, to organize a Polish parish. The Polish people not only built a church but also opened a school with a lay teacher. The Boguszewski family attended Masses at St. Stanislaus until it closed and then attended them in St. Martin of Tours Catholic Church, founded in 1951, and increased its membership to 650 families.

John J. Boguszewski served during Second World War in the U. S. Navy and brought to Kankakee Ruby Stone, whom he married April 1, 1949, in Pocahontas, Arkansas, and raised their daughter, Sue, in a rapidly changing community. He joined American Legion Post 85, one of the oldest in the country, and played on its athletic teams. He devoted 43 years of his life to the Roper Corp. in Kankakee. He was the last of four brothers, now all in Mt. Calvary Cemetery, to bear the Boguszewski name.

From: Edward Pinkowski (2008)

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