Slusarczyk, Edwin L.
(Oct. 3, 1922 - Dec. 29, 2006)
Farm radio

Ludwig and Mary Slusarczyk, who came from Poland in the early 1900s, did not see it coming. Radio, as we know it, with a transmitter in one place and a listener in another, was unknown to them. They did not have a radio in 1930 on their dairy farm in Oneida County, New York, either because electricity was not yet hooked up to it or no radio station had a program they could understand. Everything was in English. Most of the New Yorkers who had dairy farms in Trenton township, where the Slusarczyk's bought a dairy farm and raised their children, had radios, and nine of the fifteen Polish families on neighboring farms did not.

The first clue the Slusarczyk got that their little boy, Edwin, would enter the field of radio someday was when he would be upstairs in his room and would talk about his pets through a hole in the ceiling to his parents and little sister downstairs. In the second year of high school, he got the taste of a radio career by reporting farm news to WIBX in Utica. In Holland Patent High School, 12 miles northwest of Utica, where he graduated in 1940, he announced the day's news over a loudspeaker.

Still a year and a half from Pearl Harbor, many of his neighbors commuted to Rome, Syracuse, and Utica to work in war plants, and until he enlisted in the Army on November 14, 1942, he did the same. After basic training and practicing amphibious landings, he got his first taste of war at Normandy, France, and was severely wounded in the battle of St. Lo. It was while he was recuperating at an army hospital in Martinsburg, West Virginia, that he spent thirty minutes a day on Station WNDB and gave scores of games, news, and whatever came to his mind.

When he was discharged, he enrolled at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, under the Gl Bill and traveled with the athletic teams from there to broadcast their games on WHCU Station. He graduated in 1949 with a bachelor's degree in Agricultural Economics. With his wife, Bernice Boardman, whom he married on May 15, 1947, he returned to Oneida County and did a program of farm news on WIBX. Over the years, they had four children. His wife died of breast cancer on June 16, 1990.

During his marriage, in 1956, when he made a name for himself and was active in the Polish community, the Democrats and Liberals of New York's 32nd Congressional District, including all of Fulton, Hamilton, Montgomery, Otsego, and Schenectady counties, picked him to run for a seat occupied by a former sheriff of Oneida County, William R. Williams, who was elected as a Republican to the Eighty-second U.S. Congress. On November 6, 1956, Williams received 95,681 votes; Slusarczyk, 70,837.

In 1958, while he was the County Clerk, the Democratic committee endorsed him to run again. Williams decided to retire, and Alexander Pirnie, born and raised at Pulaski, New York, was the Republican candidate. The two antagonists were graduates of the same college and veterans of the same war. In an example of Polish power, Slusarczyk lost the election in 1958 by 2,211 votes. The two faced each other again in 1960. The vote: Pirnie, 98,083; Slusarczyk, 79,153.

Despite these losses, Slusarczyk never forgot farm radio. In 1956, he established WREM, the first radio station in Remsen, not far from his farm, and ten years later he sold the station. He returned to the radio station in Utica and laid the groundwork for covering more territory. By 1976 he was heard on 11 stations in New York's farm belt. By 2002 his radio network included 144 stations from Maryland to Maine. He gave his listeners the most up-to-date information on market prices, animal diseases, and so on. He advocated farming reforms and was honored by his peers. He traveled to Poland more than 26 times to open an export-import business and help Poles move from collective farms to free markets. He promoted farm broadcasting and set up a radio network in Africa. It's hard in this place to list all his work.

Death at 84 stopped him. After funeral services at St. Mary's R.C. Church, New York Mills, he was buried in Fairchild Cemetery, Remsen. The Polish translation of Slusarczyk is the metal worker's son.

From: Edward Pinkowski (2009)