1 the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs
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.
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