Honed by hard work, 91-year-old creates delicate art

Orphaned at 14, alone and working a man's job on a farm in a tiny Polish village, sleeping in a barn with the livestock and saving his only pair of shoes for church, American-born Joseph Matusik knew how to make the best of the bleakest situations.

"When they (the cows) make a poop, they were warm and I was barefooted, so I put my feet in it to keep warm," Matusik says with a sly grin as his daughter, son-in-law, grandchildren and great-grandchildren wince and laugh at the story they've heard many times and coax him to tell again.

Born in Chicago on St. Patrick's Day in 1919 to Polish immigrants who ran a dairy farm on the city's South Side, Matusik was a year-and-a-half old when his homesick mother persuaded the family to return to her homeland village of Dombrowka, Poland, near Krakow. Three of his eight siblings died as babies. Matusik was the second-youngest child working on the family farm when he watched his mother die of tuberculosis on Nov. 7, 1933. His father had a stroke soon after and lingered for a few days before dying on Dec. 1.

Some of his older siblings returned to the United States. Matusik stayed with a married sister for a bit, and then set off that winter to live and work at other farms in the community.

"I worked like a grown-up man," says Matusik, who never finished elementary school, but learned to read and write.

His first night on the job at a neighbor's farm, he made his bed on top of the brick stove still warm from the day's cooking.

"You could sleep on top and it was nice and warm. But something was running over me in the night. It was cockroaches," Matusik says. "So the next night, I slept in the attic. I took some straw and made my bed, and it was cold as hell."

On the third night, he moved to the haymow in the barn.

"I slept above a few cows and a couple horses, so it was nice and warm," he remembers.

The following spring, in celebration of the May 3 Polish Constitution Day, Matusik carried his only pair of rubber sandals over his shoulder to keep them nice on the way to church.

"I was kind of lonely," he recalls. "Everybody was happy and singing, and it hit me: I have nobody. I'm an orphan."

The boy cried for the first time since his parents died. But he worked on farms for more than two years, making $13 a year, until his older brother, Ted, invited him to live with his family in Chicago.

In 1937, Matusik sailed to New York on a Polish ship ("That boat was later sunk by the Germans," he says.) and took a train to Chicago. His name shortened from the Polish Matuskiewicz, Matusik found himself an immigrant in the land where he was born. He joined his brother in a factory making jukeboxes and arcade games, but the work was sporadic, so Matusik found new jobs.

He made 25 cents an hour at a mattress factory, but quit because it was dirty, smelly and gave him lice. He worked for a cabinetmaker, sanding wood and doing small jobs. When the U.S. joined World War II, Matusik poured hot steel in a foundry for a crane company making parts for battleships. The Army drafted Matusik, but he earned deferments because he was too valuable at the factory where he worked long hours and was granted only one day off a month.

He also took a night class to learn English.

"We didn't go so much to learn. We went to fool around with girls. So I met my wife there," Matusik says, adding that he really began learning English when he finally was drafted into the Army in 1943. "You learn quick when you have to."

As a combat engineer ("We blew up the bridges, destroyed buildings, lay the mine fields.") in Gen. George Patton's Army, Matusik soon found himself marching through France and into Germany.

"I was on the front nine months," he says.

Once, a German shell exploded near his squadron, but the men, all carrying backpacks heavy with gear, escaped serious injury.

"A couple of days later, I got my raincoat out and there were five big holes," says Matusik, who kept the quarter-sized pieces of shrapnel as souvenirs. He also mailed home an assortment of Nazi war medals, bayonets and stiletto knives sporting swastikas.

"I got them from the Germans," Matusik says gently. He used an assortment of colored pencils he "liberated" from a German village to draw flowers and other artwork on his letters home to his fiancee, Emily Malanowski.

There were married in Chicago on Nov. 28, 1946, the day President Truman declared as the first national Thanksgiving Day holiday. The couple later bought an apartment building in Harwood Heights and a hardware store on the Northwest Side, but they couldn't conceive the baby they wanted. They came close to adopting, but the nun who showed them the baby behind a glass window seemed to think the couple wasn't suited for a redheaded infant.

"It took us 12 years, until I got that little redhead," Matusik says, nodding toward the couple's only child, Patricia Ann, a miraculous surprise when she was born to her 39-year-old mother and 40-year-old father.

Perhaps it was his upbringing, or lack of an upbringing, that instilled Matusik with the fearlessness required to try new things. He ran the hardware store, even though he knew nothing about hardware. After a nice vacation in Florida, he bought the small ma-and-pa hotel where they stayed.

Then there is the artistry he started displaying as he neared 80. He's learned how to master delicate woodwork and fashion stunning crosses, clocks and even desks.

"I didn't learn," Matusik corrects. "I just started from my old, stupid mind."

His son-in-law, Daniel Gomez, who has his own story of how he was born in Colombia and became an American, marvels at the way Matusik has mastered woodworking.

"He always studies things and that's how he learns," Gomez says.

The old man lingers over patterns in a catalog before he begins to cut his pieces in the wood shop of his Prospect Heights home. An intricate cathedral clock took him six months to make. The desk took him a year to craft.

"I never really expected him to do it," laughs daughter Patricia Gomez, who has learned never to underestimate her father in anything from his art ability to his determination to renew his driver's license so he can drive his hybrid Prius.

His daughter, who met her husband when they were both high school kids working the Christmas season for the Sears catalog, lives next door to Matusik. Emily Matusik, who once worked for Western Electric and suffered with Alzheimer's the last years of her life, died in 2003.

The Gomez children, Nicole, 30, (a Mount Prospect hospice nurse married to Paul Dappert with sons Derek, who turns 5 next month, and Sean, 3; Sarina, 28, (a dancer in Arizona); Joseph, 22, (who just graduated from the University of Illinois with a chemistry degree); and Nathan, 20, (a student at the University of Illinois) all call their grandfather a term of endearment that sounds like "Jah-Jee," but is actually how they pronounced the Polish word for grandpa, dziadzia, when they were little.

Matusik's greatest accomplishment in his difficult life might be crafting such a close, loving, American family that spans four generations and three continents and helps him enjoy his old age.

He did that the same way he managed to survive his lonely youth, learn a new language, come home from the war, run businesses, manage properties and build magnificent heirlooms from sheets of Baltic birch.

"I start from bottom," Matusik explains. "Not from top, from the bottom."