Dr. WILLIAM L. GRALAWhen Dr. William L. Grala was growing up in Hazleton, Pennsylvania, where crippled coal miners were a common sight, scarcely a week passed that the daily newspaper, now called the Standard-Speaker, didn't have sad accounts of deaths and injuries in the coal industry. In 1907 alone, there were 708 deaths in the coal mines of Luzerne and surrounding counties -- nestling up in the mountains over 450 square miles of northeastern Pennsylvania -- and William Grala knew what mining was like from his father.
All men who worked underground in the Pennsylvania coal fields risked their lives due to explosions, falling rock, gas, water, and fire. His father, Peter Grala, who set foot on American soil at Castle Garden (Ellis Island was not yet open), New York, on May 5, 1885, when he was 22 years old, first descended the coal mines in Scranton and moved later with his wife, Mary (nee Morciniek), whom he married in Scranton's first Polish church, and son William to Hazleton where he could make a better living.
William Grala dreamed early in life, while he was going to public school in Hazleton, that he would help the people who needed medical care. But his father did not have the money to send him to medical school. After graduating from high school, he went to work at the First National Bank in Hazleton to earn money to go to college. He graduated in 1914 from a college at Bloomsburg, across the Susquehanna River in Columbia County, and in 1919 from Temple Medical School in Philadelphia.
After he served as an interne at St. Agnes Hospital in Philadelphia, the nation faced a crisis with the return of millions of war veterans from France, ten percent of whom had been treated for shell-shock, gas poisoning, wounds, and other sicknesses, and still needed the attention of all kinds of doctors. What could Dr. Grala do? In 1920 he took a post with the Bureau of War Risk, as it was popularly known, a scandal-riddled agency of the Harding administration, and it led to a sordid chapter in his life. On June 30, 1919, the Bureau provided beds for 3,174 patients; the number of patients skyrocketed to 23,170 by Dec. 10, 1920.
The agency grew like Topsy in Uncle Tom's Cabin. Charles R. Forbes, whom President Harding appointed as head the agency, turned it upside down. It was so corrupt and mismanaged that it was abolished. The Veterans Bureau succeeded it. On top of this, Forbes was picked by Harding in 1921 to serve as the first director of the Veterans Bureau, and Dr. Grala was dispatched to work under Forbes Grala stayed in Washington, D. C. six months and moved back to Hazleton, where he started to see patients in his office and married Magdalena Suffran, who was raised in a poor family of coal crackers, on September 26, 1922. Scandals continued to rock the Harding administration, and Forbes himself resigned on Febuary 15, 1923. The following year the U. S. Senate found that he stole millions of dollars from the Veterans Bureau, for which he was convicted and sent to prison.
After the deaths of his wife on September 29, 1923, three days after the birth of their child, William L. Grala, Jr., and his parents, Dr. Grala took over as head of the family. Living with him in one of the finest mansions in the city were not only his son, a sister, Mary, and two brothers, John W. and Anthony, both of whom owned a furniture store, but also his in-laws, Jacob and Mary Suffran. He was proud of them as they were of him.
The son grew up seeing his father engaged in many benevolent endeavors. In addition to the Kiwanis, Elks, and medical societies, Dr. Grala did a lot of volunteer work with crippled children, miners and their families. He spent some time finding what he to do with his life. After graduation from Wyoming Seminary, a private college preparatory school, in 1939, and Haverford College, grounded in Quaker values, in 1943, both in Pennsylvania, he fought with the 29th Infantry Division in Europe. After the Great War, he found his metier with one of the world's leading drug makers and became the editor of its employee magazine in 1948.
The drug maker, known as Smith, Kline, and French, or SKF, drew headlines in the newspapers when I lived in the center city of Philadelphia and witnessed its move to a new headquarters in my neighborhood. Since 1830, when John K. Smith founded the company to sell drugs, paints, varnish, chemicals and window glass, it moved at least to half a dozen places in Philadelphia, and in his time Bill Grala, to distinguish him from his father, spoke for the company when it merged with another drug maker and changed its name. He became the director of public relations in 1966. No doubt we passed by each other at the time without knowing it. In 1987 he was elected chairman of the Smith Kline Beckman Foundation.
On November 22, 1963, he married Babette Liversidge and raised four children in the suburbs of Philadelphia. When he retired, he and his wife moved to Buffalo, a city of 3900 in the northwest corner of Wyoming, where he enjoyed hunting, fishing, and visiting the ghost towns in the foothills of Big Horn Mountains. Upon his death on October 19, 2004, he was laid to rest among old frontiersmen of Wyoming at Willow Grove Cemetery in Buffalo.
Nobody knows much about the family name, whether it was derived from the Biblical word, graal, Hebrew for Holy Grail; Grall, a German first name; or a Polish nickname for a musician. Although there were of 2739 Grala and 282 Gralla names in Poland in 1990, the history of the name hangs in the air like a heavy cloud. If you look in the new dictionary by the Kosciuszko Foundation, you will find that gra means play. You ask yourself, "Would grala mean player?" Then again, it's not necessarily Polish, for Italian and Spanish families also have Grala names.
Whether they came from Poland, Italy, Spain, or some other place, the 1900 United States Federal Census had 53 Grala names; 1910, 124 names; 1920, 254 Gralas. It's not easy keeping track of all the Grala families in the United States.
Sources: Ancestry.com; Google; Hoffman, William F., Polish Surnames: Origins and Meanings; Rymut, Kazimierz, Slownik nazwisk wspolczesnie w Polsce uzywanych (Directory of Surnames in Current Use in Poland; Who's Whp in Public Relations; Billings Gazette (Wyoming), Nov, 5, 2004;
From: Edward Pinkowski - e-mail: [email protected] - (2011)
Grala, W. L.
Physician. Member of Pennsylvania Medical Association and numerous other professional organizations. Residence: 101 Church Street, Hazleton, Pa.From: "Who's Who in Polish America" by Rev. Francis Bolek, Editor-in-Chief; Harbinger House, New York, 1943