[Clipping from the Port Hume Clarion of Wednesday, 17 October 1923. Page three, two columns. Byline in italic below the head.]

FATHER JARZEMBEK, 22 YEARS AT ST. CASIMIR'S, IS DEAD

Parish in Mourning; Police Call the Fall Accidental

By Józef Kamiński, Stringer.

Father Wiktor Jarzembek, who for twenty-two years had been the pastor of St. Casimir's Polish Catholic Parish in Little Warsaw, was found dead in the rectory of his church on the evening of Sunday the fourteenth. He was sixty years of age. The Port Hume County Coroner has returned a determination of accidental fall down the rectory staircase.

This reporter, who for the last seven years has been sacristan at St. Casimir's and who himself was the person to discover Father's body, writes this notice from within the grief of his own parish and the lesser discipline of a stringer at this newspaper. The reader is advised of both.

Father Jarzembek came to Port Hume from the city of Poznań in the year 1896. For the five years before his installation at St. Casimir's in 1901 he assisted at St. Stanislaus of the North Side in Buffalo. In 1901 he took our parish when its first pastor, Father Michałowski, died; the parish then numbered some two hundred families. At his death it numbered nearly nine hundred. He had baptized many of those of us who are now of an age to write. He had buried most of those who were then of an age to bury.

It is not for this reporter to editorialize upon the person of the dead. What this reporter will say — because it is the factual substance of the parish's present grief — is that Father was a steady man in his duty. He was not one of those pastors whose declining years were occupied by an honorable emeritus. He was in the pulpit the Sunday before the one in which he died. He had attended the Benediction service on the fourteenth at five-thirty, had supped afterwards in the rectory, and, per the Coroner, had fallen at approximately nine in the evening of that same day.

Mrs. Halina Vasko of Little Warsaw, who had delivered laundered linens to the rectory that evening in her regular monthly duty to the altar society, is reported by the police to have been the last known visitor to the rectory. She has stated, and this reporter has confirmed, that she delivered the linens at the rear door and spoke with Father Jarzembek only briefly. She reports Father as being "in good spirits, thinking about tomorrow's homily."

Mr. Paweł Korzeniowski, a local merchant who had called upon the rectory earlier in the afternoon in an errand concerning the parish's regular purchase of meat for the sacristan's dinners, has stated to this reporter that he found Father Jarzembek "tired but well," and that their business was brief.

The funeral will be on Thursday, the eighteenth, at ten in the morning, at St. Casimir's. A bishop will come from Buffalo to concelebrate. The parish invites the wider Polish community of the Lakes to attend.

The successor pastor has not been named. The parish committee, chaired in the interim by Mr. Tadeusz Wójcik, will meet in November to consider candidates. Mrs. Elżbieta Makowski, president of the Women's Sodality, has announced a memorial mass on the eighteenth of each month for the coming year.

A reporter who is also a man of a parish writes with one hand upon the typewriter and the other upon a rosary. What he writes with one hand is the news. What he prays with the other is for Father Jarzembek, and for all of us who loved him, and for whoever in this city will be our next pastor, and for the steady hands of those who administer the parish while we wait.

— J. K.