BUFFALO, N.Y. — "They grew up next door to each other on Rother Avenue, which is in old Polonia — the Broadway Fillmore area," said Geno Banaszak.
Geno Banaszak tells the story of how his mom and dad, Eugene Banaszak and Alice Schultz, met and began their long life together.
"My father and my mother knew each other from the time they were probably toddlers," Geno Banaszak said. "They interacted as friends, best friends, and eventually a relationship developed that became very solid and very firm."
They eventually married and started their respective careers.
"My mom started working right after high school with the Bell Telephone company as an operator," Geno Banaszak said. "Within a year of my father graduating from Emerson Vocational, he got a job with Westinghouse, which he kept from 1957 until the plant closed here in Cheektowaga."
He added, "He was a brilliant man when it came to being able to look at a device or a part and his machinist's brain would just figure things out."
Alice Banaszak left the workforce to raise a family with her husband in typical Buffalo fashion.
"Those are the happiest memories is my family as a unit with my parents being relatively carefree letting us enjoy our youth not being terribly restrictive," Geno Banaszak said. "What I could say about them is they were extraordinary people that only did ordinary things, but they were the things that counted."
Two lives filled with the things that counted. After a childhood, an adolescence and adulthood together, Eugene and Alice Banaszak passed within a few days of each other at the beginning of March, their two lives intertwined into a life well lived.