Sadowski, Edwin J.

EDWIN JOHN SADOWSKI: ALL AMERICAN BOY
by Edward Pinkowski
No matter where Polish communities sprouted on American soil, one thing was as true as 365 days in a year. When church bells rang and factory whistles blew, Sadowski families were invariably in the crowd. Although Poland has more than 39,000 persons of the same name, Sadowski and its variant, Sandusky, is the most famous Polish family in American history.
The full story of their lives is not always told in newspaper obituaries. To pick one at random, Edwin John Sadowski, who was born January 19, 1924, in Baltimore, Maryland, never followed in the footsteps of his grandfather, who came from Poland in 1890, and his father, who was born May 26, 1893, in Baltimore, to handle the cargos of ships on the Baltimore waterfront. His father, Alexander Aloysius Sadowski, signed up to fight in two world wars and was never drafted.
USS IOWA
When Edwin Sadowski was 18 years old, he enlisted in the Navy and was assigned to the USS Iowa, commissioned in Brooklyn on August 27, 1942, and pretty soon the crew nicknamed her "The Big Stick." In the summer of 1943 the ship was ordered to Newfoundland to scare the German battleship Tirpitz from the North Atlantic.

Afterwards the sailors of the Iowa were standing at attention when President Franklin D. Roosevelt boarded the battleship for a meeting with Winston Churchill in Casablanca, Morocco, and then the leaders of the United States and Great Britain traveled to Teheran, capital of Iran, for a four-day, round table discussion with Joseph Stalin on what to do to win the war. Little is known that Churchill brought a ceremonial sword and presented it to the Soviet leader just before a dinner in Teheran. Stalin held it with both hands, kissed the scabbard, and handed it to 62-year-old Marshal Voroshilov at his side. For whatever reason, Voroshilov dropped the sword at Roosevelt's feet. After the conference, the Iowa brought President Roosevelt, minus the sword, back to the United States.
Early in 1944, after Japanese ships lost a few naval battles, the Iowa headed to the Pacific to change the course of history. All on the Iowa didn't want Japanese bombers striking at Los Angeles, San Francisco and other cities on the West Coasr the way Germans struck at Warsaw, London, and other European cities.
The Allies took back one island after another, or chain of islands like the Philipines, New Guinea, and other places until the Japanese surrendered 15 August 1945. The Iowa was Admiral Bull Halsey's flagship during the final ceremonies on September 2 and the sailor from Baltimore had a front row seat to the historic signing event on the USS Missouri.
HOME AGAIN
The Sadowski families of Baltimore were glad the war was over. Obviously, the most popular place to see the men returning home from the war was the railroad station. I remember the B. & O. railroad station very well, with the side of trains painted with
the words "Home Again!" and watching reunions of families from the window of a train on my trips between Philadelphia and Washington. For the first time in three years Edwin Sadowski heard the bells of the Polish churches in Baltimore ring again.
As the older men returned to their old jobs, the younger ones like Sadowski, who went straight from high school into the service, had to look for work. Sadowski found a job with a dry cleaner. At the time the dry cleaning business was not as crowded as it is today, with more than 14,000 stores at 2676 crossroads in Maryland. Shortly after his marriage on October 3, 1952, to Berkley Elizabeth Krauss, with whom he had two children, he opened a business called Cape Cleaners, five miles west of the Cheasapeake Bay Bridge, Annapolis, and it was one of the first businesses of its kind on Broadneck Peninsula.
The people of Cape St. Claire, where Sadowski raised a family, realized they needed a fire company to protect their new community. They got together in the local yacht club on May 25, 1955, and organized the Cape St. Claire Volunteer Fire Co. They collected $1800, in small donations, to buy a 1936 Chevrolet fire engine and then received a small tract of land on which to build a fire station by themselves. Sadowski was generally the driving force in the community -- enlarging the fire station and buying new equipment, to mention a few changes. By the time of his death, the fire station, with five engine bays, was serving 25,000 people in a 64-square-mile area. For all that he did, he was inducted into the fire company's Hall of Fame. The area is still growing.
ACHIEVEMENTS
No account of Sadowski would be complete without mentioning two other organizations in which he was active. As many veterans know, the American Legion, started in 1919 by veterans of the First World War, is the largest service organization in the nation. American Legion Post No. 175, to which Sadowski belonged, has countless members who donate blood, display flags in front of their homes, volunteer at hospitals and nursing homes, and take their buddies to doctors' offices for treatment.
For many decades Sadowski's post in Severna Park, which in 2000 outnumbered Cape Saint Claire 28,507 to 8,022 residents and included Pat Sajak, host of the popular TV show, Wheel of Fortune, and Steve Wojciechowski, former basketball player and current assistant coach at Duke University, has been keeping patriotism alive and well. Veterans of past wars knew how much it meant to receive a letter or a package of goodies at Christmas time from Sadowski and other members of the American Legion. In addition, it provided scholarships to the children of service personnel killed in action to attend college and make something of themselves.
Sadowski was also one of the organizers of Elks Lodge 2608 in Arnold, one of the 27 communities in Anne Arundel County and adjacent to Cape St. Claire. In 1983, it started an educational program to prevent drug use by their children. More than 3,000,000 boys and girls in Maryland and other states took part in the Elks Hoop Shoot Contest. Like many Elk lodges, Lodge 2608 wrestled with drug and alcohol abuse in their communities. About five percent of the population was of Polish ancestry. Those of German and Irish ancestry were slightly higher.
HONORING A FAMILY
Edwin Sadowski was so much better off in Cape St. Claire than when he was the child of a stevedore in Baltimore. His wife and two children -- Berkley of Annapolis and Edwin Jr., with two children, of Chester, Maryland -- and five siblings survived him. One of his brothers and a sister -- Bill Sadowski and Elizabeth Borland -- lived in Arizona. Another sister -- Dolores Reichenberger -- remained in the Baltimore neighborhood of Locust Point where she grew up. Towson, in the suburbs of Baltimore, was the domicile of Leon and Charles Sadowski. No longer living were Cecelia Curran and Loretta Wilhelm.
Honoring this and other Sadowski families is long overdue. Next year, on the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first Poles at Jamestown, the National Polish Center, also known as the American Center of Polish Culture, will act as host for a reunion of all the Sadowski families and variant spellings in the United States at Washington, D. C. If anyone would like to receive an invitation to the big reunion and related activities, please send your name and address to Edward Pinkowski, 10212 S. W. 59th St., Cooper City, Florida 33328-6531.