The History of Arthur White: Will Witkowski

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 2 January 2013.

Stan Witkowski dodged the Russian draft and came to America from Poland with nothing.

By the time he was forty-five, he had a cement empire in Detroit and was a prominent civic figure in Hamtramck. In his fifties, he helped build the Lodge. He also got married to a beautiful but almost spinsterly Italian woman, Lena. She was a little worried that there might be some cultural conflict, but her family was happier that she was marrying well at an advanced age (30) than they were worried about her marrying a Polish man.  Soon they were married and had Witold (Will), and three years later, Arthur.

From an early age, Will wanted to be exactly like his dad.

He spent all the time he could going to work with his father. By the time he was seven, he could pour a respectable sidewalk. Will made friends with all the workers and studied math diligently so that he could learn bookkeeping and take over the family business. Stan died when Will was eight, and Will became the man of the house. He dealt with that responsibility by turning his father into a grand myth embodying the promise of America.

Will grew into a salt-of-the-earth young man like his father, but his ambition eclipsed his father's.

Stan had built a cement company because he was a hard worker, but his joy was in taking care of other people who were trying to support their families--the business was a means to an end. For Will, business was an end in itself, a reflection of the land of plenty that modern America signified. Will grew up with a very old-world attachment to family and community, and a particularly Polish and Italian approach to making everyone family, but he also grew up with a love of rock 'n' roll, prosperity, fast cars, and empire.

Amid the simple joys of the families he grew up with in Hamtramck, he saw the shadow of old-world poverty. How beautiful, but how sad it was for people to feel like they had it made just because they could afford to put some meat in their golobki. How wonderful to grow up in a dynamic country that allowed for bigger dreams. Will fulfilled the terms of his ethnicity by going to mass on Sundays.

But his mind always wandered to the heaven he could create for himself on earth.