The Grasinski Girls. Mary Patrice Erdmans
praying and sitting quietly. The Poles celebrated the day of rest by setting up stages in Richmond Park for polka bands and bringing out kegs of beer.28 Grand Rapids historian Z. Z. Lydens writes, “Later the west side took Poland’s sons and daughters to its bosom. The Poles were Slavs, Catholic, and given to fun even on the Sabbath day. The Hollanders were Teutonic, Protestant, with a more rigid religious behaviorism. The kinship therefore was thin. . . . The children had their taunts: ‘When the angel rings the bell, Polacks, Polacks go to hell.’ The taunt was automatically reversible and as effective one way as the other.”29
It was the Poles’ religious devotion that eventually saved them from the Christian Reformers’ tongues of fire. Reflecting on their ability to build magnificent parishes, a Grand Rapids historian writes, “The Poles might live in tiny frame houses, might labor at hard dirty jobs, might be slandered as drab and no-account, but through their faith they asserted glory and found radiance for themselves. For this, the core of their life and community, they would sacrifice.”30 And they did sacrifice, saving enough money from meager wages to build three magnificent churches near the areas where they worked. Prussian Poles founded St. Adalbert’s Church in 1881 near the furniture plants on the northwest side, and the parish community became known as Wojciechowo (the St. Adalbert District).31 St. Isidore the Plowman was organized in 1897 on the northeast side of Grand Rapids near the brickyards.32 The densely populated neighborhood, referred to as Cegielnia (the Brickyard District), was composed of small, inexpensive single-family homes.33 The third Polish parish, Sacred Heart, founded in 1904, was located in a neighborhood of Polish immigrants and second-generation Polish Americans which became known as Sercowo (the Heart District).34 Reverend Ladislaus Krakowski, the organizer and first rector of Sacred Heart, was himself a second-generation Polish American who had been born in Hilliards.35
The immigrants living in Sercowo were more likely to have recently arrived from the Austrian and Russian partitions and often worked in the nearby gypsum mines.36 This community, however, became home to many economically mobile second-generation Polish Americans.37 The houses were larger and more expensive than those in Wojciechowo or Cegielnia. Many were built of brick and cement, had leaded-glass, beveled windows, large front porches, and bordered the green expanse of John Ball Park (newly developed by the architect Wencel Cukierski, superintendent of city parks from 1890 to 1908). One section near John Ball Park was even referred to as the Polish Grosse Point.38
The community grew rapidly at the beginning of the century. By 1913 there were three hundred families in the parish and twelve societies; in 1925 there were five hundred families, and most of the newcomers were second-generation Polish Americans. The number of baptisms swelled between 1915 and 1923, with an average 116 baptisms annually marking the initial growth of the parish, and then peaked again between 1947 and 1959, with an annual 125 baptisms consecrating the community’s third generation of Polish Americans.39
. . .
The grandiose twin-spired church of Sacred Heart Parish was dedicated on New Year’s Day, 1924. Joe and Helen arrived in Grand Rapids six months before the first peal of its four large bells. According to the 1923 city directory, “J. Grasinske” rented a house at 1058 Pulawski Street, two blocks from Sacred Heart Church, and Helen’s older brother, also named Joe, roomed with them.40 Their first daughter, Caroline Clarice, was born on June 1, 1923 (forty weeks and two days from the date of their wedding). The following year they moved into Wojciechowo, four blocks from St. Adalbert’s Church. Over two-thirds of the families on their block were Polish.41 In 1926, they moved again, this time a half mile west to a neighborhood of Dutch, Germans, Lithuanians, and Poles (only three of fifty families had Polish names on the street). They remained in St. Adalbert’s Parish and “Jozef Gracinski” is listed in the church directory.42 At this time, Helen’s brother Valentine boarded with them; meanwhile, Joe and Helen had two more daughters, Genevieve Irene (1925), Frances Ann (1928), and then a son, Joseph Stanislaus (1930).
On July 11, 1930, Helen F. and Joseph Stanley Grasinski took out a mortgage of $3,400 with The Industrial Company for a home in Sercowo.43 They moved their three daughters and two-month-old son into a new three-bedroom stucco house at 215 Valley Avenue, less than a hundred yards from Sacred Heart Church, and only a few doors down from Helen’s brother and his wife (who bought a lot next to her father) (see map 2).
The Grasinski house was elegant for that time and their people: it had a fireplace with a wooden mantel and ornate mirror above it, stained-glass windows, glass doorknobs on heavy wooden doors, and a solid brick porch. Caroline, the eldest daughter, describes the neighborhood:
That was a godsend because in the Depression with no money, no nothing, and we were in a beautiful neighborhood, in the park and near the church, so it was just very nice. It was Polish, pure Polish. Father Karas was the one that baptized me and then there was Father Kaminski, and Father Kozak, he was a nice priest. And I still remember all the people that lived around there. I can go right down the line. Grupas lived there, and Girsz, Bobby Girsz was a lawyer, and Snow, he was a judge, and then Czechanski and Uncle Joe and Aunt Florence and her mother, father, and her brother, sister, and on the other side of the street were Paczkowskis and Borutas and Bochanek. Every day I went with this big bag of groceries. I ran to Lewandowski’s grocery store and I remember a priest, we had an assistant pastor at that time, his name was Francis Kozak. And he always stood there with a nickel so I would buy him a cigar. [laughter] So I was always buying a cigar on top of them groceries. I was running all the time.
The ethnic homogeneity of the neighborhood produced a sense of comfort that comes from knowing one belongs, while the economic heterogeneity (the judge lived next door to the machinist, who lived next to the lawyer) stabilized the neighborhood, at least in the early years of the Depression.
Map. 2 Valley Avenue in the Sercowo neighorhood of Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1932
The older Grasinski Girls remember the time with great fondness: the access to the swings in the park, strawberry pop, Mom in the house cleaning and singing “Genevieve, Sweet Genevieve,” the young girls waiting on the porch for Dad to come home from Jarecki’s factory, daily trips to the grosernia and buczernia, neighbors who were relatives and others whom they knew by their first names.44 Most likely, Joe got his hair trimmed at Polska Balwiernia on Butterworth Street, bought coal from Stanley Gogulski, and read the Grand Rapids Press.45 Helen had Lillian Rybicki set her hair in tight rollers with egg whites and shopped downtown at Woolworth’s. The oldest Grasinski Girls, Caroline and Gene, were among the 880 students enrolled in Sacred Heart’s elementary school.46 In church they sang “Serdeczna Matko,” and on Christmas they sang, among other carols, “Dzisiaj Betlejem.”
They lived in a vibrant hybrid community that was becoming increasingly Americanized. Even when Polish Americans were listed in public documents with their Polish names, their neighbors called them by their American translations: Sniatecki was Snow, Paczkowski was Bell, and Rybicki became Fisher. While the Polish language was used in churches, schools, social clubs, and businesses, American-born Poles were more likely to speak English at home. The oldest Grasinski Girls rarely heard their parents speak Polish, and then it was only to each other and not to their children. Caroline, Gene, and Fran learned Polish in school and at mass: they learned to pray the Ojcze Nasz (Our Father) and the różaniec (rosary), and they sang “Twoja Cześć Chwała” and “Witaj Królowo Nieba.” The oldest Grasinski Girls also made their confessions in Polish well into their teens.47 It was mostly in the church that their language (and Polishness) was retained, through their participation in the religious pageantry of the holidays. They remember Pasterka (midnight mass) and the kolędy (carols), the sharing of the Christmas wafer (opłatek), the Sunday vespers during Lent chanting the Lamentations of Christ’s Passion and Death (Gorzkie Żale), the blessing of food at Easter (Święconka), and the Rezurekcja (sunrise mass of the Resurrection).
The