Stanley R. DuBuske

Stanley Raymond  DuBuske was found dead outside his home on Thursday morning July 19, 2018. He was 97 years old. He appeared to have had a sudden death as he had been preparing to do gardening, his favorite activity. His gardening tools were nearby his body. His beloved wife, Josephine, had passed away February 27 last year also at 97 years of age after a 6 week hospitalization shortly after they had celebrated their 73rd wedding anniversary on December 29, 2016. He was grief stricken after her passing but nonetheless soldiered-on:  doing housework, cleaning laundry, tinkering about with home maintenance, gardening outdoors and even driving locally to go shopping and  attend church at St. Anthony’s Roman Catholic Church in Red Bank. Yet he longed to be with his departed Josephine but understood that this would only happen on God’s schedule, not his. He talked with  her constantly and felt her presence in his home. Now we can only pray that finally they are together again.

Stanley R. was born in Jersey City, New Jersey on September 2, 1920. His father, also named Stanley DuBuske ,was civil engineer who worked many years for  New York City as a designer  for the construction of the subway system. Originally from the Philadelphia but likely born in the Krakow region of  Poland , his father was a multilingual intellectual speaking German and Polish from a large family of Polish and Austrian descent (grandfather named Przyborski and grandmother named  Bauer)  including 11 brothers and one sister who in addition to his engineering profession transiently ran a speak-easy in Jersey City and  once ran for local political office successfully against a candidate supported by the legendary Mayor Frank “I am the Law” Hague. The elder Stanley died at age 85. His beloved mother, Elizabeth Kennedy Fitzgerald DuBuske, had immigrated from the town of Hospital in Limerick, Ireland. His mother died at age 56.  As a child young Stanley R. was taught Gaelic by his mother and later taught to play violin by his father.  His passion, however, as he grew into adolescence was sports, especially baseball, football and boxing. He attended Dickenson High School in Jersey City and played semi-pro baseball and football in his late teens. He often recalled playing football at Pershing Field in Jersey City with likes of later New York Giants’ legends Al Blozis and Joe Sulaitis. Stanley R. was recruited to play college football at Notre Dame by Elmer Layden, the successor of the legendary Knute Rockne; however, he decided it was best to decline the recruitment letter due to his having accepted some small payments as a semi-pro player. Stanley R.’s array of stories of his youth featured the raucous activities of the gangs of Jersey City whose member’s  goal seemed to be seeing what they could get away with that would not land them in Rahway Reformatoryl!  His stories resounded with tales of the fights between Jersey City and Hoboken gangs and activities about Bobby Brady’s tavern near where he lived on Cambridge Avenue in Jersey City. Ultimately his father advised Stanley R. that he had a choice of either going to Pittsburgh to attend Carnegie Institute of Technology or get a job. So off to Pittsburgh he went to study engineering, but not before beginning the romance of his life with Josephine Chrzanowski who had also attended Dickenson High School. She used to comment that his adolescent   gang friends in Jersey City were like the “Dead End Kids”- not exactly a compliment!

At Carnegie Tech Stanley R. was a member of Delta Upsilon fraternity where he met many of his life-long friends. He would later reminisce about meeting Frank Sinatra, Tommy Dorsey and Gene Krupa (who was looking for reefers!)  while waiting on tables at Carnegie.  Football had been de-emphasized shortly before his arrival, so this was no longer an option. Instead, Stanley joined the Army ROTC at Carnegie initially serving as Corporal in January 30, 1944 then elevated to Second Lieutenant and Active Duty August 23, 19044. In 1944 before being deployed abroad, he recalled being promised by the Army that he could graduate from Carnegie before deployment, which he rued did not happen, deployment instead occurring 6 months before he would have graduated.  This event instilled in Stanley R. a unique persistent cynicism related to how the military brass would ultimately treat soldiers despite still maintaining his inherent patriotism. While in the Army before overseas deployment, Stanley R. served at Fort Monmouth New Jersey and at Camp Leonard Wood and Camp Crowder in Missouri.  During his time in Missouri, Stanley R. was assigned to teach  African American troops better reading comprehension. Stanley R., seeing for the first time the discrimination against African Americans in the South, decided a good place to start was teaching these troops how to read the US Constitution. He would recall how he was reprimanded by a white Army officer from the   South, scolding him that  “After the war we have to live with these people down here”. Stanley R. noted that shortly after this episode he was dispatched overseas to India as a casualty replacement, with the presumption that this was a one- way ticket with little hope for return. Prior to deployment, however, he made the most important decision of his life, marrying Josephine Chrzanowski in Jersey City despite the fear expressed by Stanley R’s father  that “she may soon be a war widow”.

Deployment sent Second Lieutenant Stanley R. to the Calcutta region in the Burma China India Theater of the war where he served from February 11, 1945 to June 2, 1946. He served in the 3150th Signal Service Battalion as a “Telephone and Telegraph Officer Outside Plant” after completing Officer’s Candidate School and Long Lines Outside School.  When her arrived in India the Japanese army were hunkered down in Burma in a stalemate on the border of India. Stanley R. led a small group of men who labored in the jungles north of Calcutta maintaining the communication pole lines which ran from India north to Nanking China where the US Army was supporting the army of Nationalist China led by Chiang Kai-shek. His group worked in support of the Flying Tigers of the Army Air Force among whom was one of his classmates from Carnegie, Bob Hanover, and also the actor turned pilot Jackie Coogan.  He had a myriad of war stories that he loved to tell- recalling jungle survival assisted by monkeys they would befriend; the daily sortie by the same Japanese plane that would drop one bomb a day on their position; the new recruit who joined his group and aspired for heroism, only tragically dying  while trying to defuse a bomb; the constant attacks on their camps by wild boars- which they tried in vain to capture and eat- and tigers; and the relentless dysentery and cholera.  He lived on Spam and a jungle moonshine that that a soldier from Kentucky would distill. He came to respect the heroism of the local Sikh troops who had been recruited by the British. He recalled his surprise when a British Officer of Indian Brahman origin disappeared in the middle of a training session, only to re-appear after a few hours, having left to bathe after his body had been crossed by the shadow of an Untouchable.  Stanley R.’s disdain for Army formalities was legendary.  He would tell of being visited by Army officers from Calcutta who traveled to inspect the Army Signal Corp group he led. They reprimanded him because he was working without wearing a compete officer’s uniform and did not have a separate officer’s eating area or latrine. He told them that in the sweltering jungle heat  and rampant disease there was no difference among his men-enlisted men versus officers- they all worked together and would likely die together. He said they never bothered him again; … not surprisingly he never rose beyond Second Lieutenant. When the war ended he was left in India for nearly a year by the Army who wanted the troops from this area quarantined out of fear of them bringing diseases home to the US. He lived through the Indian Revolution against the British and the subsequent Civil War between Hindus and Muslims in the area that later became East Pakistan- modern Bangladesh. He witnessed the raging religious violence including the slaughter of babies and children. In the midst of this chaos the US Army decreed that the American troops should be unarmed as neutral non-combatants so as not to become involved in the civil war. Unfortunately, the Indian revolutionaries did not recognize such distinctions, slaughtering a train of American unarmed  troops before the Army reconsidered this position and allowed the remaining troops to carry small arms to defend themselves. He would tell of being in an Army Jeep which had become surrounded by a group of Indian revolutionaries carrying Red flags which he correctly identified as Communists. After he began shouting “Viva Stalin” loudly, they decided to spare their wrath. The long journey home finally came on a transport ship back to San Francisco in 1946. As the war closed, Stanley R. proclaimed Harry Truman as his favorite US President for the decisions he made which brought the was to and end and saved the lives of possibly over a million troops. Among his prized possessions was a letter signed by Truman thanking him for his service.

After returning from the war, Stanley R. continued to serve as a Second Lieutenant in the Army Reserves until April 1, 1953 when he received his last Honorable Discharge from the Army. He transiently went back to Pittsburgh to complete his Bachelor’s Degree in Electrical Engineering from Carnegie Tech then studied for a Master’s  Degree in Engineering at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey. He worked as an Electrical Engineer  at Durotest and at Sperry, both in New Jersey. While at Sperry he had to travel throughout the Southern US manning a device in a special railway car which inspected railroad tracks. He would relate being questioned by police in Dothan, Alabama who asked what “Yankees” were doing in their town. He decided it was best to stay North and took a job as a research engineer at Bendix Corporation first in Teterboro, New Jersey then Eatontown, New Jersey. This job led to a move from Cambridge Avenue in Jersey City to the nascent suburbia of Lincroft, New Jersey in 1954. At Bendix in the 1950’s he was involved in highly classified defense work including the building of a trigger for the hydrogen bomb and the early development of laser and fiber optic technology.  He developed a specialization in  Klystron tube development used for the Defense Department applications.

After Bendix left Eatontown New Jersey in 1963 Stanley R. joined the United States Army Electronics Command at Fort Monmouth as a Research and Development Engineer working at Camp Evans in Wall Township until he retired in 1984. At Camp Evans he was renowned as a grant writer and bench scientist.  He had collaborated while there with  distinguished scientists who were culled from Germany after World War 2 in “Operation Paper Clip”. Stanley R. at Camp Evans had projects with the legendary German engineer and inventor Oskar Heil, who had founded his own research company in the Palo Alto area and also was an accomplished musician who    developed a unique air motion transformer audio speaker in the 1970’s.  In his last years at Fort Monmouth Stanley R. was involved in the Strategic  Defense Initiative or “Star Wars” in the early years of the Reagan administration. During his tenure at Fort Monmouth Stanley R. had numerous patents related to often classified Defense Department initiatives most notably related to missile guidance systems.  He received multiple Certificates of Recognition from the United States Army Material and Development and Readiness Command including successful US and Canadian Patents  for “EBS Amplifier with Cold Cathode”- 1983 patent;  “Vacuum Deposition Method” -1980 patent; “Method of Joining Boron Nitride to a Refractory” -1982 patent; and a “Method to Detect Gamma Radiation By Placing Glass Doped with Iron in an Environment Subject to Gamma Radiation and then Measuring a Color Change in the Doped Glass as a Function of Gamma Radiation”- 1985 patent-  for  monitoring US troops on the battlefield.  He received a Letter of Appreciation for “design , fabrication and delivery of three Laser Target Designators”  in 1980 from the Department of the Army.  On December 23, 1983 he was “Officially Commended” by the Department of the Army for “his outstanding performance of duties during the period of 1 December 1982 to 1 December 1983 while serving as an Electronics Engineer in Pulse Power Technology Branch, US Army Electronics Technology and Devices Laboratory, ERADCOM, Fort Monmouth , NJ. During this period his personal efforts resulted in two DARCOM approved productivity capital investment programs which will provide transient data collection s systems essential to the development of pulse power technology”.  At his retirement on June 29, 1984 he received a Certificate of Appreciation from the Department of the Army for “the many years of service given to our county” from C.G. Thornton, Director, US Army Electronics Technology and Devices Laboratory, ERADCOM, Fort Monmouth, New Jersey. As he would later relate, he spent most of his career designing better ways to assist the US military “ kill Russians”, often said  in irony.  He had made the evolution from supporter of Roosevelt and Truman to Kennedy then Reagan but always remained staunchly independent and a fierce proponent of a strong national defense.

During these years his house was frequented by the men and women with whom he worked, who loved and respected him- first at Bendix- his close friend and lead technician Al Newman; his close friend and skilled technician Bill Sardo whose family immigrated from Italy after the war; and later from Camp Evans- his co-worked dear friend Bernie Smith; co-workers Ed Dailey, Bill Smith , Lou Branovich and Harvey Weinstock- the latter two who had adopted Stanley R. as a surrogate father for advice on their lives. They all would come to have dinner at his home to be regaled by the wit, wisdom and spellbinding stories of his life.

In 1954 Josephine gave birth to his only child Lawrence, whose wellbeing became a focus of his life. Lawrence was named after Stanley R.’s cousin Lawrence who perished in a jeep in Europe while fighting Nazi Germany. Stanley R. provided and paid for his son’s entire schooling with a private education at the Elementary School at St. Leo the Great Parish in Lincroft, the building of whose Church and School occurred assisted by Stanley R.’s  significant contributions; Christian Brothers Academy in Lincroft; and later Northwestern University and Northwestern University Medical School in Chicago. Stanley R. made certain that his son would have even greater opportunity for success than he had in his life.

In 1984 Stanley R. retired to a life of watching televised Mets games in the summer   and Notre Dame  and New York Giants football games in the fall; gardening; maintaining the house in his own inimitable way; enjoying single malt Scotch and Irish whiskies; listening to Count Basie and Bing Crosby; and telling the stories of his years in the Army and later as a Civil Service research scientist for the US Army Electronics Command. The stories usually had an ironic twist relating the decisions of the command which led to the demise of the little guy. To the end he eschewed those in leadership who always went “by the book” and was skeptical of authority.

 In his later years he continued to receive great kindness and assistance from his close friends Sandra Fenn , who discovered his body outside the home  when going to check on his well-being, and Peter Viani, the jazz pianist and teacher, who would frequently visit with him to listen to his many stories. He lived life his own way and at his own pace.  He devoted his later years to his time with Josephine. She was his soulmate and life partner. He often said they were like one person. They sat for hours watching television together. They discussed the world with one mind. They always seemed to agree as they assessed the state of life around them. He recounted how she took such care of him for the first 7 decades of their marriage, cooking and cleaning, and that in her later declining years he needed to do his best to take similar care of her, which he did until her death February 27, last year. He used to say he admired how the singer Nelson Eddy died on stage while performing, doing what he loved.  In the end, Stanley R. was blessed with the same fate. May he rest in eternal peace with his beloved Josephine.

Stanley R.  is survived by his son, Lawrence DuBuske, MD, Clinical Professor of Medicine at George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences in Washington, DC and his wife Ilona DuBuske, DO, Allergy and Immunology Fellow at the University of Cincinnati, both of  Harvard, Massachusetts;  his grandson Robert DuBuske and his wife Kaileigh Reeves DuBuske along with his great-granddaughter Josephine Leona Reeves DuBuske of North Port, NY; and his granddaughter Barbara Lynch and her husband Thomas Lynch along with his great grandson Thomas Lynch and great-granddaughter Olivia Lynch of North Attleborough, Massachusetts. From Stanley R.’s father’s family in Philadelphia and New Jersey, he is survived by numerous nieces and nephews of the DeBuske and Borski (Przyborski) families including  former US Congressman Robert Borski from the Philadelphia area. He is also survived by the descendants of his deceased half- brother William DuBuske and his deceased  half- sisters Lorraine DuBuske and Anna DuBuske Keusel all originally from Jersey City, New Jersey. Stanley R. is survived by his nieces and nephews of his wife Josephine  including  Patricia and Tom Alvino; Dorothea Magyar; John and Doris Chrzanowski; Joseph and Eleanor Chrzanowski all of New Jersey and their numerous children; Jimmy Chrzanowski; Dennis Chrzanowski and his mother May Chrzanowski of Jersey City, New Jersey;  Elaine and Charles Mink of Chantilly, Virginia; and Robert and Kathy Chrzanowski of Hollywood, Florida and their children.

A wake for Stanley R. DuBuske will be held at the John E. Day Funeral Home, 85 Riverside Avenue, Red Bank, New Jersey on Friday July 27 from 4:30 PM to  8:00 PM; a Mass of Christian Burial will be held at Saint Anthony’s Church, 121 Bridge Avenue, Red Bank New Jersey 11:30 AM Saturday July 28 followed by internment at Mount Olivet Cemetery, 100 Chapel Hill Road, Middletown, New Jersey.

Among Stanley R.’s favorite charities were Boys Town in Boys Town, Nebraska; and the Association of the Miraculous Medal in Perryville , Missouri. A priest at the latter charity had been in communication with Stanley R convincing him during his despondent days after the death of Josephine that he must wait for God to decide when his life would end. Donations are welcomed in lieu of flowers

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