Switlik, Stanley
(Dec. 4, 1890 - Mar. 4, 1981)
ManufacturerThe origin of the surname depended on the letters Stanley Switlik omitted or changed in his lifetime. Had it been Swietlik, it meant it was the Polish word for firefly. The persons of the same name in Poland in 1990 totaled 107, compared to 7 for Switlik, and nearly all of their lik who entered at Ellis Island were Swietliks. It was spelled Swietlik in the 1910 census of Trenton, New Jersey, when Stanley Switlik was a varnisher in a furniture factory.
Exactly when he dropped the letter e in his last name is not clear, whether it was when he changed jobs, married Pauline Szymanski, or registered for the draft during the First World War. No matter when it was, he attended night school to learn English and business and by 1920 was listed as a real estate broker and insurance agent in the Trenton city directory. In the meantime, he had two children, Richard and Lottie, and moved his family to a series of Iow-rent homes.
Like his brother, Walter, who came from Galicia two years before him and opened a grocery store in Trenton, Stanley Switlik, with an open eye to enterprise, bought a crippled canvas factory, with a $500 he borrowed from his brother and a friend, and closed his real estate office. Nobody was more surprised than the previous owner to find the canvas factory back on its feet in the early 1920s. Switlik managed to turn the company around to a certain extent by manufacturing leather mail bags for the U.S. Post Office Department.
In 1925, in pursuit of more business, he visited Mc Cook Field, near Dayton, Ohio, where many famous aviators began their career, and met James Floyd Smith, who had invented the first parachute to use a rip cord. Following the meeting, Smith left Ohio, where he had been since 1919, and worked with Switlik to improve the parachutes on the market. Prior to this time, Leslie L. Ivin, who had a small parachute business in Buffalo, New York, was virtually the only manufacturer of parachutes in the country. Switlik and Smith tested different parachutes until they found the right "pack-on-the back" type - one that opened much more quickly and was fastened to a harness worn over the body. To find the right one, Switlik sent an employee to the nearest airfield to strap each parachute to a dummy and drop them from the sky. Each parachute was tested six times. No person jumped without these tests.
For the first time in 1927, Switlik sold a lot of parachutes to the Navy, and when aviators heard about it, the Switlik Parachute Co. was swamped with orders. As commercial flying increased in popularity, with Amelia Earhart taking up flying lessons in 1921 and others following in the footsteps of Richard Byrd, Wiley Post and Charles Lindbergh, the most famous aviators of their time, Switlik bought more equipment to produce leather flying suits, pilot safety belts and face masks. He placed want ads in the newspapers of Trenton, Philadelphia, and other cities for sewing machine operators. The success of the parachute business enabled Stanley Switlik to travel a good deal with his wife, Pauline, and their two children, separately and together, on luxurious ocean liners across the Atlantic until the outbreak of the Second World War. In the meantime, he bought a lot of land in Jackson Township, Ocean County, New Jersey, and built a summer home and a lake, which he named after himself, outside of Prospertown, a rural town of horse fanns and dirt roads. He built a 200-acre summer camp, named it Camp Wanda after his wife's middle name, and eventually turned it over to the Girl Scouts of New Jersey.
In 1934, at the suggestion of Amelia Earhart and George Putnam, whom she married in 1931, Stanley Switlik built a tower, 146 feet high, on his farm to train people involved in aerial transportation in parachute jumping. Switlik received a lot of publicity on June 2, 1935, when Earhart jumped from the tower wearing one of his parachutes, and again the following year when she landed at Newark airport, built in 1927, after a record-breaking nonstop flight from Mexico City. The photographers took pictures of her strapped to a Switlik parachute.
After Pearl Harbor, Stanley Switlik and other parachute manufacturers in the United States were called to Washington and ordered them to do the impossible - increase production 50-fold - and waste no time. But this did not phase the Polish parachute maker from Trenton. He bought more machinery, acquired more space, and hired hundreds of sewing machine operators, mostly Polish women from Trenton, Philadelphia, and surrounding areas. He sent his daughter, Lottie, to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and Valparaiso, Chile, to set up shops of parachute makers. Pretty soon Switlik got 2,500 parachutes a week out of his network. Throughout the war he supplied the U.S. armed forces with seventy percent of their parachutes.
Little is known of a secret project the Switlik Parachute Company took part in during the Allied invasion of Normandy, France, on June 6, 1944, a date known ever since as D-Day. It made parachutes for hundred of dummies that were airdropped onto the positions of German troops that stood in the way of a mighty armada at different beaches. When the dummies landed safely, the German troops heard the sounds of gunfire and did not know that they came from a tape recorder hidden in the canopy of a Switlik parachute. By the end of August 1944 the Nazi grip on northern France was broken.
Shortly afterward, Switlik received an application dated December 27, 1944, for membership in the Caterpillar Club from George H. W. Bush, who would become the 41st president of the United States. The club, founded in 1922 by the aforementioned Leslie J. Ivin, was made up of persons whose life was spared because of an emergency parachute jump from an aircraft. Switlik accepted Bush into the Caterpillar Club because on September 2, 1944, while he was a Navy pilot, he dove out of the cockpit of a torpedo bomber when it was hit by Japanese anti-aircraft on the Bonin Islands in the Pacific.
The Switlik Parachute Company was a complete success. When you think of the number of lives that were saved through the years by the products of the company - 5,000 by parachutes in one war alone - it was a miracle. The more you know its accomplishments, the more you see the differences between the father and son. Seldom, if ever, did Stanley Switlik take a backseat to his progeny. In addition to philanthropic activities, such as donating 200 acres of land in New Jersey for a Girls Scout camp, two elementary schools were built on land he donated, one in Jackson, New Jersey, and the other in Marathon, Florida, and were named after him. He died on March 4, 1981, at Marathon, Florida, where he spent his winters and gave money to charity, and was laid to rest in Riverview Cemetery, situated on a hill overlooking the Delaware River at Trenton, New Jersey. The Stanley Switlik School in Florida received a generous donation in 2003 from the daughter of the school's namesake to help students who are struggling and need special help.
Few, if any, of the Switliks would discuss the last cause of Stanley Switlik's life. It began in 1972 when he sold 750 acres of land in the woods and around the lakes of his estate 67 miles from New York City to a restaurant owner and theatrical producer, Warner Le Roy, who then planned to build a $100 million entertainment complex similar to, but smaller, than Disneyworld in Florida. The buyer agreed not to touch Switlik Lake. The trouble started in 1976 when the amusement park, which opened on July 4, 1974, at Prospertown, sold its holdings to another amusement company, Six Flags, which owed its name to Texas under six flags, and the new outfit wanted to hold a water ski show on Switlik Lake. Stanley Switlik got wind of it and went to court to prevent it, as was his right in the agreement between him and Le Roy, but Six Flags won the suit. Unfortunately Stanley Switlik, who once owned more land in Ocean County than any other person, did not have a golden parachute to pay the judgment against him. After his death, the judgment, with interest, rose to $4.6 million and on October 6, 1981, Judge Henry Wiley of the New Jersey Supreme Court ordered Richard Switlik, who inherited what was left of the family estate in Ocean County, to surrender the property to Six Flags or go to jail. Six Flags dredged Switlik Lake, changed its name, and built the ski show.
At 63, Richard Switlik still had a lot of life left to run the company he grew up with, and his wife, Irene Kanicki, with whom he had three sons and one daughter, stood by his side. Born in Trenton, he was a graduate of Trenton High School in 1935 and the University of Pennsylvania in 1939. He received an honorary doctoral degree from Alliance College, founded in 1912 by the Polish National Alliance at Cambridge Springs, Pennsylvania. During World War II he was a captain in the U.S. Army Air Corps and was inducted into the New Jersey Aviation Hall of Fame in 1996. Ironically, though the company's parachutes were used in the Korean War and other conflicts, it made the most parachutes while he was flying to defend his country.
Over the years, the company, now in the hands of Richard Switlik's three sons, continued the development of new products. It produced a life-saving vest for the Navy in 1947, and after that an inflatable one-man life raft. In 1951 it manufactured 20-man life rafts for the Air Force in 1951. The last Switlik parachute was manufactured in 1976. Richard Switlik died June 4, 2004, in a retirement community at Hightstown, 11 miles northwest of Trenton, where women still sat behind sewing machines as they did in his father's time, but no longer with Polish names. One of the last Polish women to work for the company was Stephanie Andrzejewski, who came from Philadelphia in 1955 and was a seamstress for thirty years.
From: Edward Pinkowski (2009)