Last month I received this note: “I grew up in Newtown Square in the 1950s on Ridgefield Road. At that time there was a very old stone house on the east side of the street. All I can remember about it is we referred to it as the “Grezcheck House.” The occupants were rumored to be Czechoslovakian immigrants who were members of the underground in WWII. As kids, we were scared of the place and never went there on Halloween.”
It turns out these 70-year-old memories had the right church, wrong pew. Szczepan Grzeszczyk was born in Poland in 1901, studied mechanical engineering and began designing and flying aircraft, particularly gliders. He is one of the fathers of Polish aviation. When the Nazis invaded, he fled west, joined the Polish Air Force in exile and worked in the war effort in England.
At wars end, the U.S. was actively seeking engineers to come to the US and continue their work. Wernher von Braun is perhaps the most well-known example – he developed the Saturn rocket that sent men to the moon. In the Philadelphia area, first-generation Polish-American, Frank Piasecki, was one of the early designers of the helicopter. Hearing that Grzeszczyk and other Polish talent were seeking work, he recruited the engineer to work at Piasecki Helicopter Corp (PHC). Grzeszczyk and his wife moved to Prospect Park by 1950 to work at the nearby Piasecki facility. Piasecki’s son, Fred, recalled of his father that “the Boeings and Northrups and North American aviation and NASA were grabbing all the German engineers. The Polish connection was obvious and he used his connection to get them cleared for the work and hired at PHC. The energy was high as these men had lost their country to the USSR and were still in “battle mode.”
Grzeszczyk and team developed several novel applications for the helicopter – including helicopters used to sweep mines from troubled waters such as the Suez Canal in 1968 and the Persian Gulf in 1991. Fred Piasecki said of this project, “His work was SUPER high priority as the US Navy had no de-mining available in Korea!”
In 1953, Grzeszczyk and his wife Helena moved to an ancient house at 149 Ridgefield Road in Newtown Square, once a tenant house for the Pennsylvania Hospital Farm, where they lived, apparently quietly judging from childhood memories, till his death in 1967.
For more history on Newtown Square, Delaware County, and membership info., visit our website at www.NSHistory.org.
