August 31st Joseph Eugster, Jr.

This Day in Life—August 31, 2008
By J. Glenn Eugster, Alexandria, VA.

August is a wonderful month! Typically August is the time of the year when we try to get away, rest, relax and restore ourselves. Over my lifetime I have many fond memories of leisurely August days driving to distant places with my parents, sister, daughter, wife, aunts, uncles, and other dear friends to swim, beach comb, hike, sunbath, camp, boat, barbecue, and participate in the other rituals of the summer season. These were, and are, days when our troubles seem to dissolve as we spend time, be it ever so brief, in special places away from home.

August is also the month my father was born and each year on August 31, in some big or small way, our immediate and extended family remember Joseph Eugster Jr.’s special day. For a man who rarely took time off during his lifetime, and died before he had a chance to retire, the fact that he was born in August always seemed a bit ironic to me.

Joseph Eugster Jr., known as Joe or Joseph, was born in St. Gallens, Switzerland August 31, 1924. His father Joseph Eugster, Sr. and mother Johanna Lehner-Eugster had two children, Joseph and his sister Margaret.

According to unsubstantiated family stories the St. Gallen’s Eugster’s came to America from Switzerland through Ellis Island around 1937 when my father was thirteen years old. Initially the family lived in northern New Jersey and worked on a dairy farm. At some point the family moved to the area around Minneola-Westbury-Carle Place, NY, east of New York City on Long Island.

My recollections of my father’s family begin in the early 1950’s when the family lived next to the One Oak Dairy, across from Roosevelt Racetrack. My grandparents owned their home and rented rooms to people that worked at the track. Dad’s sister, my Aunt Margaret Parga, lived in the house until she moved to California where she lives now.

My father’s early years are still a mystery to me but from what I’ve read he completed elementary school and attended Westbury High School for two years before leaving in 1941. Sometime after he left high school he worked at the Colgate Aircraft Corporation of Amityville, NY as a Sheet Metal Worker. He also worked for two months at Aircraft Sheet Metal, NYA, in Oyster Bay, NY.

From February 1943 until March 1946 my father served in the Army Air Forces Technical Training Command. He was inducted in the service on Feb. 11, 1943 in New York City and was discharged on March 9, 1946 in Ft. Dix, NJ. For one and one-half months he was a Private First Class in Minneola, NY. He was then promoted to Corporal with the 36th Depot Repair Squadron as a Sheet Metal Worker where he served for twenty months. Of this time eight months and twenty-one days were in Foreign Service in Europe.

During his time in the service he was qualified, and worked, as an Airplane and Engine Mechanic 747. For his efforts he received the American Service Medal; Good Conduct Medal; European-Middle Eastern Service Medal; and the World War II Victory Medal.

Interestingly in 1946, while in the Army, he was on leave during the Christmas holidays in Rome. He attended Midnight Mass at the Basilica of St. Peter’s, one of the holiest sites and greatest churches of all Christendom. While in Rome he had a private audience with Pope Pius XII. He also visited his grandmother and some aunts and uncles in St. Gallens, Switzerland, the town he was born in.

After returning to the U.S. he married my mother Josephine, “Jay” Stazweski in 1947 in Las Vegas, Nevada on their way to California. I was born in 1948 in Fontana California where we lived in an orange grove and my father worked as a fireman. My sister Claudette was born in Roslyn, New York in 1952 after the family returned to New York to be closer to our family.

Not long after Claudette was born the family moved “Out East” to the North Fork of Long Island, NY. We lived year-round in a small converted summer home in Laurel that was close to Brush’s Creek, a tributary to the Great Peconic Bay and extensive potato, Brussel sprout and cauliflower fields.

My father worked constantly at numerous places to provide for the family including: for Bohack Food Stores as a Clerk and Produce Manager in Roslyn Heights, Mattituck, Southold, Riverhead, Greenport, and Shelter Island, New York; for Grumman Aircraft in Calverton, New York as a sheet metal technician; for Frank Murphy Landscaping Company, Mattituck, New York; for Walter Gatz Landscaping Company, Mattituck, New York; for a Wise Potato Chip Factory in Riverhead, NY; as a caretaker for Harry Berger in East Hills and Walter Brack in Nassau Point, and for Boeing Aircraft in Tinicum, Pennsylvania; and St. Augustine, Florida.

As much as he worked my father enjoyed many hobbies including: surf and boat fishing, fruit and vegetables, jazz, baseball, football, basketball, and NASCAR auto racing. While I was young he coached my Little League team in Mattituck, New York and later while I was in high school would be a regular spectator at basketball and soccer games. He religiously enjoyed daily newspapers with coffee; playing cards with my mother’s brothers Al and Joey; Polish music on Sunday mornings; driving just about anywhere for pleasure; making sea-shell ornaments; small-time gambling, and drinking cold beer and smoking unfiltered cigarettes.

My father was grandfather to my daughter Laura Doyle, and my sister and her husband Eli’s daughter Elise Gold. He was an uncle to Margaret and Frank Parga’s girls Michelle and Lisa, and Jay’s sister Mary and her husband Neal’s sons Richard, Stephen, and Oscar Shaw. He was also an uncle to Jay’s sister Helen and her husband George’s children Patricia and Paul Cheshire.

Joe Eugster was working for Boeing Aircraft in Calverton, and living in Laurel, New York with Jay when he was diagnosed with phenomena and lung cancer in 1988. Despite medical treatment and remarkable and heroic recovery support by the Gold Family, cancer took my father’s life in Birmingham, Alabama on December 22, 1989. He is buried with my mother, his wife of forty-two years, Jay, in the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs National Cemetery in Calverton, New York.

During the last year of my father’s life many of the family spent time with Joe. My wife Deborah and I visited him in Jamesport the last August he was alive. One afternoon we walked with him along the beach of Flanders Bay in South Jamesport looking for shells and enjoying wonderful August North Fork weather. Although his life was shorter than it should have been we often think back with love and great joy while we remember our time with him, his life, and the wonderful days of August.