Korczak Ziolkowski

Anthony Mellendorf
Mr. Dunn
US History Since 1865
24 October 2015
A Biographical Sketch of Korczak Ziolkowski
Early Life Korczak was born on September 6th, 1908 in Boston, Massachusetts of Polish decent. Korczak’s grew up an orphan from the age of one. He was miss-treated as a young boy by his foster father but he acknowledged that it taught him the importance of working hard. He also gained a wealth of knowledge in heavy construction by his foster father which would ultimately play a significant role later in his life. At the age of 16 Korczak began working dead-end jobs to help pay for his education at Rindge Technical School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, after which he became an apprentice patternmaker to a Boston ship maker.
A Calling

As I studied his history, I became fascinated with what he had accomplished and I was determined to do a statue memorializing a great American.” Ziolkowski immediately began working on his 13 ½ foot statue of Webster. Over the next two years he would work day and night to finish the statue. The work on the statue drew national attention and it even caused a fair bit of controversy among the citizens of West Hartford. After Korczak finished the statue he volunteered for service in World War II. He would eventually land on Omaha Beach, but later got wounded and was forced to return

He was then invited by Chief Henry Standing Bear of the Oglala Lakota tribe to come to South Dakota to carve a memorial to Chief Crazy Horse. Chief Standing Bear wrote to Korczak saying “My fellow chiefs and I would like the white man to know the red man has great heroes too.” Korczak would accept the invitation and arrived on May 3rd, 1947 to meet with the chiefs. He then began researching and planning the sculpture. Korczak believed that the most suitable mountain for the sculpture was in Wyoming, however the chiefs insisted it be sculpted in the Black Hills. On June 3rd, 1948 a year later the first blast of dynamite rang out through the Black Hills, and the mountain was officially dedicated to the Native American people. Korczak pledged at that time that the project would remain a non-profit, educational, and cultural project financed through private donations to the Crazy Horse Memorial Foundation. He made it very clear to everyone that he did not want the government involved with the project. He even turned down two offers of ten million dollars from the United States government to help fund the project. Ziolkowski also refused to take a salary and worked free of charge. In 1950 Korczak would marry Ruth Ross, a volunteer on the Crazy Horse project, who he had met when he moved to the Black Hills. The two of them would go on to have ten children who all