Walter Anton Sack

June 23, 1906 - June 22, 1960

It's always exciting to find a little piece of the ancestry puzzle but I found a whole lot that surprised me.  I wanted to find out more about my father's side.  I remembered that somewhere along the way he shortened his name from Saskowski to Sack.  The joke in the family was always, "Couldn't he have changed it to something a little nicer!"  Apparently the surname was changed because of the prejudice against the Polish on the south side of Milwaukee at that time.

I wasn't finding any early records in ancestry.com for my father under the name Walter Sack so I changed my search to Walter Saskowski.  Bingo!  According to the 1930 U.S. Federal Census, he was living with his sister and brother-in-law, Julia and Harry Grutza, in Milwaukee.  

The household at that time included the following members and ages:

• Harry Grutza,  33
• Julia Grutza, 34
• Esther Grutza, 12
• Jeanette Grutza, 9
• Richard Grutza, 7
• Harry Grutza, 6
• Bernadine Grutza, <1
• Walter Saskowski, 23

My brother told me that Julia's son was lost in the Pacific.  She took this very hard and died of a heart attack in her 50's, he thought.

Prior to this time, when my father was just 13 and with a third grade education, he went to work in a foundry.  The history gets a little messy here.

According to my brother, our father was locked in the plant when angry workers stormed the fences and a wall.  They were turned back with fire hoses.  Our father witnessed one guy's head split open with a pipe.  Governor Heil's car was overturned and set on fire and the National Guard was called in.  

NOTE:  There is some discrepancy to this narrative.  Julius Heil, born in Germany and immigrated to the United States in 1881, was Governor of Wisconsin from 1939-1943.  According to the "Wisconsin National Guard: Federal and State Activations", the only time the National Guard was called to a company between 1930 and 1950 was In 1934 during the Kohler strike, before Governor Heil's term.  

Our father was known as Walter, Wally, and Mack.  My brother didn't know the order of the following events, but here they are:

He served a hitch in the Navy and he said the sailors enjoyed wine quite a bit.  This was prior to WW II.  He also told of shooting at a sail target with a machine gun and some officer saying, "Sack, you couldn't hit a bull in the ass with a hand full of puffed rice on a windy day."  (My brother assumed the wind would have been blowing toward the bull!)

Our father worked at Allis Chalmers which he liked better than the foundry.  Then he got a job with Chicago Northwestern Railroad where he loaded and unloaded freight which was anything from gravestones to bananas.  He told my brother of workers finding large spiders in the bananas and also a pretty good-sized snake!

I know this is my dad on the right at a swimming pool in Milwaukee.  That's possibly a friend named Harold Kroll with him.

At some point we lived at South Seventh Street in Milwaukee but I'm sure it didn't look quite like this.  There is still a field and railroad tracks across the street.

After we moved to the farm on Hogsback Road in rural Juneau, Wisconsin, (1951?), he was still working at the railroad and came home on weekends.  He gave up a good railroad retirement when he quit to spend more time at home and went to work at Aunt Nellie's canning factory in Clyman (long hours, low pay).  I remember laughing so hard when the pea crop would come in and he's say, "I'll be pea-ing (peeing!!!) until midnight tonight."

Here's a picture taken, I think, in 1948:

Here is a picture taken, I think, in 1950:

The Green Hornet

After suffering for 6 months with lung cancer, he was buried at Saint Isador Cemetery, Plot 218, Clyman, Wisconsin.  I remember the last time I saw him in the hospital.  I didn't want to leave and I kept walking back to wave to him from the doorway.  I was 11 years old and I still miss him like it was yesterday. I remember a loving dad and sitting in his lap every chance I could.  He was always hugging me and calling me his "Schatzi", a German term of endearment for "sweetheart."