The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project LEONARD J. BALDYGA Interviewed by: Charles Stuart Kennedy Initial Interview Date: January 3, 2007 Copyright 2015 ADST Q: Today is January 3, 2007. That is the first time I have said that in the oral history program; move into a new year. This is an interview with Leonard J. Baldyga. It is done on behalf of the Association for Diplomatic Studies, and I am Charles Stuart Kennedy. You go by Len is that right? BALDYGA: That is correct. Q: In the first place, Baldyga. Where does that come from or what does it mean? BALDYGA: Baldyga is a Polish name, although many people do not recognize it as a Polish name because they expect them to end in “ski”. But if you go across the United States you will find thousands of Baldygas, but primarily up in the Boston area and Hartford, Connecticut. The name doesn’t really have anything in the way of meaning. I have asked about that including the time I was in Poland, and it went back to something to do with the Baltics. Q: Ok, well let’s start at the beginning. When and where were you born? BALDYGA: I was born in Cicero, Illinois. Q: The home of Al Capone. Well not really. BALDYGA: Well you know it is interesting because you know that is what a lot of people talk about, but it was a very solid blue collar community, Poles, Germans, Italians, Czechs. The neighborhood I grew up was solidly Polish. I didn’t speak English until I was six. Newspapers were in Polish; Church services were in Polish. The school for the first couple of years was in Polish. That is the way I started out. Q: OK, so what year were you born? BALDYGA: I was born in 1932. Q: 1932, right in the middle of the Depression. BALDYGA: Exactly. 1 Q: All right, let’s talk first of your father’s side, and then we will go to your mother’s. What do you know about your father? How did his family get out of Poland and over to Cicero? BALDYGA: My father actually came over before WWI. He then joined a Polish volunteer group to fight in Poland, first in France and then in Poland in the Blue Army of General Jozef Haller, who was a very famous Polish general. He fought from about 1918 to 1920, because after the war ended in France, he went to Poland and fought against the Bolsheviks. Q: Yes the famous offensive that the new Red Army took which almost went to Warsaw. BALDYGA: They got as far as Warsaw, and thanks to Charles de Gaulle and the French working with the Poles they were able to defeat them. Q: One of the lessons. Ok what drove your father out of Poland initially? BALDYGA: My father came from a small village north of Warsaw, and I guess it was again a question of looking for opportunities, economic reasons. His mother had died, and so he decided to go to the United States. He didn’t get along, I guess, with his stepmother. Q: One time back in the 70s I interviewed the Polish consul general in Chicago who said he had a constituency that was next in size to Warsaw as far as Poles go in his consular district. BALDYGA: That story is always around, Chicago being the second largest Polish city in the world. That is not true anymore because most of those Polish populations have dispersed in that area. But there is a new influx of Poles into Chicago. Right now I would say there are cities like Lodz in Poland that are larger in terms of the number of Poles. Q: What was your father engaged in? What was his schooling like and then what did he do? BALDYGA: His schooling was probably at the grammar school level in Poland. But because of where he was raised in Poland, he spoke German, Russian and Yiddish. He came over and worked in various jobs. Later on he worked in a furniture company where he painted designs on furniture. So that is the kind of work that he used to do. But then he became ill in the 1930’s and was unemployed for a long time. But the point is, he was not in good health because in WWI he was severely wounded and also suffered injuries in a gas attack. After the war with the Bolsheviks ended, he spent six months waiting to get back to a state of health where he could return to the United States. Q: Well now, on your mother’s side, where do they come from? 2 BALDYGA: You know my father was from the Bialystok area which, of course, at that time was under the Russians. My mother came from a town near Mlawa. That was under the Germans. So she went to German schools and he went to Russian schools. It is funny. She didn’t come over until 1921. But they met in Chicago and from two different backgrounds really. Q: Well how much schooling had she gotten? BALDYGA: The same thing grammar schools. So she didn’t speak any English; he didn’t speak much English, but eventually they got their citizenship after so many years. Q: Were you one of a number of children? BALDYGA: I was one of four. I have another brother and two sisters, and actually had a brother that died in birth. Q: OK, let’s talk a bit about Cicero in the 1930s. What was it like as a kid? BALDYGA: As I pointed out it was a solidly Polish ethnic community, but you still had the same things going on as in other communities. You played baseball or basketball. Eventually, after I finished grammar school, I went to an Irish Catholic high school, Fenwick High School in Oak Park, Illinois, an all boys school. I was the first kid from the neighborhood to go to a school other than a Polish school. So I went over to Fenwick. That was the breaking out from that community for me. Q: Let’s keep staying within the community. BALDYGA: Cicero again, the Al Capone era, the clichés about what used to go on with Al Capone. All I knew was from the stories that were told about him. The fact that there were distilleries in the neighborhood and the Capone gang would run them. The town also was virtually cut off and something like a border existed between it and Chicago. You could not enter Cicero without being cleared by the Capone guys. My uncle was involved in getting a Polish American, Anton Maciejewski, to run for Congress in an attempt to drive out the gang. They won the election and, after some federal intervention, they started cleaning up the town. But it took effort and, even more recently, there were still some Mafia connections in running the town of Cicero. But you would always talk of the town of Cicero in terms of Berwyn-Cicero, two small neighboring communities, because the high school, J. Sterling Morton High School, drew students from these two towns. Q: What was home life like? BALDYGA: I would say it was typical Polish American home life, very much tied to the church. We were all altar boys and took part in all kinds of activities in the church, including choirs. I sang at funerals and did all those things that one does in a Catholic parish. But I had a very normal life. 3 Q: Well how did you find, what was your impression of the priest? I was just wondering was he a very authoritarian figure at all? BALDYGA: We had two kinds of priests. We had the priests that were very close to the congregation. In fact two of them would come over frequently to play pinochle at our home. My father used to love to play pinochle with the priests. This was a frequent occasion. On the other hand, the pastor himself was a Germanic man, Father Theodore F. Langfort, a very domineering figure, a very impressive looking man. So you could get this very authoritarian person and priest on one side, but then the other priests were very open, warm and sort of down among the regular churchgoers. No pretensions, no holding back from associating with anybody. Q: You know looking at it, how religious were your parents? BALDYGA: Again, being Polish Catholic, extremely religious. In fact I went to Fenwick High School, which was, as I mentioned, a Catholic high school. It was a joke, but everybody thought I was going to be a priest because it was a Polish tradition that the oldest son would become a priest. But I had several friends who did indeed become priests. Q: How about elementary school? Was this a Catholic school run by nuns and so forth BALDYGA: Yes. It was St. Mary of Czestochowa. An impressive, large church. I mentioned Al Capone. Al Capone’s sister, Mafalda, was actually married in the church in 1930. The fact that the pastor allowed this marriage ceremony to take place, he had to go into retreat. He got sanctioned by the bishop for allowing this to happen. But it was a very lovely looking church, very well kept up, as most Polish communities traditionally support the church. Q: Well elementary school, what was it like? BALDYGA: In the elementary school the first couple of years my classes were in Polish and in English.