The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project STANLEY JAKUBOWSKI Interviewed by: Mark Tauber Initial interview date: October 2, 2017 Copyright 2019 ADST Q: This is our first recording session with Stan Jakubowski and we always begin with the question of when and where you were born. JAKUBOWSKI: I was born in Jamaica Hospital in Jamaica, New York, Queens County on the seventh of November, 1942 and after initially living in Jamaica for a few years lived in a place in Queens called Ozone Park. It's a small area in New York and at that time, back in the forties and the fifties, I always thought of New York, or I learned to think of New York, as a place of small communities, Ozone Park was a Polish area. All my neighbors, all my friends, my church, were mostly Polish in origin. I was raised a Roman Catholic. At the Catholic Church, Saint Stanislaus, the masses were in Polish. I initially attended a Polish Catholic school where, among other subjects, the nuns tried to teach me Polish. I was not going to learn Polish. If you know some Polish people, they can be stubborn and I don't care what the nuns did to me, I was not going to learn Polish. I was there in that school for roughly four years before my parents moved out to Long Island, part of that great migration after World War Two out to Nassau County. To sort of finish this initial story, I learned later on that all of my grandparents had been born in Poland. They all immigrated to the United States in the late 1800s, early 1900s. And as it turned out, my father's father, of whom I'm the third Stanley of that line. Family history says he was a draft dodger. He was about to be drafted in the army of the czar at that time and he decided he'd rather not be a private in the army of the czar. And so he took off for the United States of America. And so that's sort of how I became an American. But in any event, I'm a second generation Polish American. My grandfather spoke Polish, very limited English. My father was fluent in Polish and in English. And as a matter of fact, he only knew how to pray in Polish. He did not know the English versions of Our Father, Hail Mary or any of these prayers, just the Polish version, but I wasn't going learn Polish so I never learned Polish. I later learned that this was typical of second generation immigrants no matter where they came from. This was something I came to regret later on because had I learned it at a very early age, it would have prevented several embarrassing moments later on in my life. A slight digression about this. When I was in Bamako, Mali. I got acquainted with a Malian doctor. He had gotten his medical education in Poland and everybody who hears the name Jakubowski, they talk to me in Polish and the only things I know in Polish were the few things my mother used to yell at me when I was not being a very good boy. So I was unable to respond to this Malian doctor who spoke English, 1 French, Polish, and God knows how many tribal dialects and I, you know, I felt a bit stuck. But that's a digression. In any event, to move on with the life history. My parents moved out to Long Island. I first spent two years in the Coronal Avenue elementary school and then I went to a Catholic school in Malverne. The town was Malverne. Our Lady of Lourdes was the school. I spent a roughly two years there until I graduated, ready to go to high school. Our Lady of Lourdes School was not a Polish school, it was sort of an Irish Catholic school and it's one of those things that used to drive my mother crazy because they would celebrate St Patty's Day and my mother was not enamored of the Irish. Again, a little bit of a side digression. My mother, one of the banes of my mother's life was that they always had Irish cardinals in New York, never a Polish cardinal. So when they got a Polish pope, one Polish pope trumps a whole lot of Irish cardinals. Made my mother a very happy person to get the best of that. When I finished the Catholic elementary school, I went off to a public high school. It was Valley Stream North High School. And I had a very checkered career there. Q: Wait, before you get into high school, let me ask, did you have brothers and sisters? JAKUBOWSKI: Yes, I have two brothers and a sister. I'm the oldest in the family. The next in line is my brother William. He's 11 months younger than I am and my sister Carol, she's four years younger than I am. And the sort of change in life brother is my brother James. He's 11 years younger than I am. Q: So you did most of your elementary school years in Ozone Park? JAKUBOWSKI: Ozone Park and Nassau County, that's what I did, sort of a basic New York educational system. Q: Were both your parents working when you were a child or, or just your father? JAKUBOWSKI: My father was the sole breadwinner. He had a, again, a little family history. My mother and I will say this, my mother was one of the smartest persons I've ever met in my whole life. Unfortunately when she was 12 years old, her father said that's enough education for a woman and he pulled her out of school and put her to work. Had she been able to get a decent education she would have been incredible, but she never did, but she was still one of the smartest people I ever met in my whole life. I didn't learn until 20 years ago that my father had never finished high school. I thought all my life, he had finished high school, but he had never finished high school. He quit high school and went to work in the Brooklyn Navy Yard as a carpenter and for most of the war he got a deferment, but it was just towards the end of the war when they were beginning to run out of people that he was called up. So he was called up like in February of 1945 to the service. And again, slight digression, when I get into arguments about whether or not the atom bomb should have been used in Japan, well my father would have been one of the people hitting the beaches in Japan. Had the atom bomb not been used. So I have a slight bias in the direction of yes, it was the right thing to do. 2 But he worked after the war; he started his own business as a small general contractor. He used to employ other members of the family, but he, what he did is, I think nowadays they call sort of flipping. He would buy a piece of property, put up a house, sell the house, he would take a contract to renovate a kitchen, do this or that. Anything else to earn money. He built the house we lived in out on Long Island when we moved. So that was built by him. It was something of a luxury at the time because it had more than one bathroom. I know people don't think about that now. But back then the idea that you'd have more than one bathroom per family. Oh, what luxury that was. Q: Yeah. Even when I was a kid, average houses in my neighborhood typically had only one bathroom and not even a powder room. JAKUBOWSKI: That was a three bedroom house and suited them. It was a very nice place. But I was a rotten student in school. Thank God for the New York State Regents system. My high school average was about, passing was 65 and I had like a 68 average. However, on the New York State Regents exams I was in the 90s. Q: How do you explain the discrepancy? JAKUBOWSKI: The discrepancy I would think comes from the fact that I love to read. My mother introduced me to books at a very early age and I read everything. I was at that time, I was consuming two or three books a week and it didn't matter the subject. A minor life changing event was one Saturday morning. I went to get the mail out of the mailbox and there was a letter addressed to me from Governor Nelson Rockefeller. And I didn't know why Rockefeller was writing me, but I opened it up and the letter congratulated me for having won a New York State Regent's scholarship. I did not even remember taking the test for a New York State Regent's scholarship at the time. But the notice arrived on a Saturday and the following Monday I went in to see my guidance counselor at the high school, Miss Brennan, a lovely lady. And I showed Miss Brennan this letter. And I said, “What‟s this Miss Brennan, this letter.” She looked at the award and her basic response was, “oh no, not you.” In our high school class.