Joseph R. Sarnoski

(Jan. 31, 1915-June 16, 1943)^*

Joseph Raymond Sarnoski was born at home January 30, 1915, in his family’s single-story clapboard house on Jefferson Street in Simpson, Pennsylvania, a suburb of sorts to Carbondale, overlooking the D&M railroad and Lackawanna River. He was the fifth of sixteen children, the second eldest son of John and Josephine Sarnoski. His parents came to the U.S. separately from Poland amid the revolutionary unrest in that country in the early 1900s, his father in 1906, his mother in 1908.

Sarnoski’s father, by birth Johann Sarnowski, was a man of short stature, only 5’6”—a trait he would pass on to Joe—and dark complexion, with a scar of unknown origin on his forehead.  Records imply he had met his future wife, Josephine, before leaving Poland, since they were married shortly after her own arrival in the U.S., and John was already referring to Josephine’s sister’s husband—who paid for John’s passage to America—as his “brother-in-law” on the ship’s manifest. He referred to himself as a “laborer” on the manifest, but was a coal miner all his adult working life. Tight-lipped about his past, he was a simple man of simple purpose and life. He enjoyed fishing in the pond in the back of their country farm on No. 7 road, and never owned a car, choosing to walk to and from his work in the coal fields of northeastern Pennsylvania.

Josephine Kozlowska was in some ways an interesting contrast to her husband. A farm worker with her siblings as a child, she was already a polymath, fluent in Polish, German, and Russian, before emigrating. In America she added English, taking language lessons and becoming a frequent correspondent with family members, a practice Joe inherited while in the service. Unlike John, she also stayed in contact with family back in Poland. But like her husband, she was a hard worker, raising a total of seventeen children—a grandchild lived most of his youth with them—and running a farm that included livestock, fruit trees, and an extensive garden. By all accounts she did it remarkably well, marshalling her small army to help harvest the potatoes, carrots, corn, cucumbers, tomatoes, onions, beets, and beans, among other vegetables, from the huge garden, and pick apples and berries from the trees. (The latter of which resulted in much stained clothing.)

From the beginning, though, Joe was a special case. While the other children worked the farm, he was granted a large degree of clemency from it, instead being given the task of helping put meat on the table through the abundance of game around the farm. After school at Grade School #4, a half-mile down the road in Fell Township, and on weekends, Joe would venture into the thick woods surrounding the farm in search of rabbit, deer, and wild turkey. Not surprisingly, he became an excellent shot with a rifle early on, a skill that would redound to his benefit later. He would include “rifle and pistol shooting” as a hobby on his service records.

He also listed aviation, and it was that ambition that propelled his life. From a young age his room was decorated with balsa wood airplane kits he built. From his tree stand in the large maple tree near the house—which he also built—he would send paper airplanes off into the breeze. True to his driven nature, he wasn’t content to stop there, taking to full-size gliders once he got older. “He’d often fly over the area in a glider,” his brother Charles recalled, “and usually crashed.”

Sarnoski did find a more earthbound outlet for his need for speed and freedom—an Indian motorcycle that became his pride and joy. He rode the bike all over the area, and may even have entered some local time-trial races. Like his forays into gliding, it also revealed his daredevil streak: both Francis and Martha remember Joe riding across a local bridge standing on the Indian’s seat.

Like his mother and father, Sarnoski loved music, always singing, whistling, or humming, and it became a goal to play in a band. Fueled by his competitiveness and self-imposed need for excellence, it didn’t take long to get his wish. While still in grade school, Joe earned money working odd jobs after school. With that income, plus a dollar stipend from his mother, Joe bought an accordion and began taking lessons, following in his father’s footsteps. He was a fast learner, and by the age of twelve, was the sole accordion player in The Buddy Howe Band, a group of young players led by drummer Peter “Buddy Howe” Howanitz. The youth group played high school dances and weddings in Carbondale and beyond. Before long, Joe was even teaching lessons himself, with his own sister as a pupil.

Joe “was always trying to advance, be the best,” his brother Ted would write later. “He didn’t like anyone to be ahead of him.” One can only imagine, then, how Sarnoski must have felt about having to drop out of school at age fourteen to join his other siblings working the family farm. This was a common enough rite of passage in farm families at the time, and with coal in decline in Pennsylvania by the late Twenties, all hands were needed on deck in the burgeoning Sarnoski household. Joe was already one of fourteen children at the time, six of whom were under ten. And so Joe’s eighth grade year would be his last of formal education.

It could not have been unexpected. And yet it’s hard not to sense that he felt the loss more keenly than most. From the time he was a young man, Joe always “enjoyed the company of educated people, and gained tremendous pleasure from talking to them and learning from them.” No doubt this was due in part to his inherently curious nature, but for someone as driven as Sarnoski, it’s hard to believe his abbreviated school career didn’t play its own significant part.

For the next six years, then, Joe’s world revolved around the family farm, specifically the huge garden adjacent to the house and barn and bordered by woods. Almost a quarter of an acre in size, its plowing, planting, and harvesting was truly a family affair, requiring a tractor that in due time became Joe’s responsibility to drive. In his off hours he continued his accordion playing. His competitive drive never abated, finding an outlet in his later teen years on the White’s Crossing Eagles baseball team. Many Sunday afternoons were given over to the game during those years.

Sarnoski was always serious and disciplined by nature, but the “not jovial” Joe his sister Martha recalled during his teenage years would have surprised his future squadron mates, who knew him to be an upbeat kidder who enjoyed springing the occasional practical joke. The contrast isn’t all that mysterious. Monotonous hours in a tractor seat provide a lot of time to think, and no doubt Sarnoski’s thoughts during those several years were focused forward, up and away from the family garden. Biding his time must have been hard for his restless nature and airborne dreams. That, combined with the responsibility of helping provide for his now eleven younger siblings, is likely the only explanation necessary for the difference in his personality during those last years at home. He worried about their future—he promised to buy Martha a watch if she graduated high school with honors—and wondered about his own.