Just call him George

• Wolyniec

BRIAN KORTHALS/DAILY GLOBE George Wolyniec holds up a book about his hometown of Lodz, Poland, and some of the medals he has received for running in marathons.

Talk about it

WORTHINGTON — His last name alone — Wolyniec, pronounced vole-wee-nits — can be hard enough for Americans to wrap their tongue around, so Jerzy Andrzej Wolyniec adopted a new first name when he came to the United States.

“I decided to introduce myself as George,” he said. “It is much easier to say.”

George, a native of Poland, came to the United States in 1991. He now lives in Worthington with his wife, Paula, a teacher at Worthington Middle School, and their two sons, Patrick and Oliver. But his hometown is Lodz, the third largest city in Poland, located in the central part of the country.

“The name translates to ‘boat,’ and there is a boat on our (city) flag,” he noted. “My mother is still there. She is retired and has an apartment. She also has a little summer house with power, water and a little garden around it. It’s very green and very peaceful.”

The summer before he was to graduate from the university in Lodz, George took an excursion to Greece. He stayed longer than he initially intended and met his wife-to-be, who was teaching English at a school there.

“We met at a small international church,” he said. “That’s how it started, and we started dating. After a while, I realized she was the one. When you know it, you know it. I proposed before she left at the end of the year. She came back to let me know she accepted my proposal.”

A change in administration in the Greek government affected the country’s immigration policies and George’s status in that country. Therefore, the paperwork for George to enter the U.S. took eight months to go through, and they finally got the OK in August 1991.

“My first flight ever was to the U.S.,” said George. “A male flight attendant on the plane found out that it was my first U.S. trip, so he offered me a bottle of wine from the crew.”

George and Paula first settled in Paula’s hometown of Orange City, Iowa.

“On the last day my visa was valid, we got married,” he explained. “I started working at Diamond Vogel Paints.”

Small town life in the U.S. was quite a different experience from Lodz, which George estimates to have a population of almost 1 million, or Greece’s second-largest metropolis, Thessaloniki. Paula applied for stateside teaching jobs, and they eventually accepted a post as house parents at Hampshire Country School, an educational institution geared toward students of “high scholastic potential,” according to its website. They were there for two years.

“It’s about 70 miles northwest of Boston,” George said about the school. “It was a very demanding job, basically being with the kids 24/7 and organizing activities for them.”

Paula was eventually hired by Worthington School District 518, and they were able to return permanently to her home territory. George has worked at several local industrial plants and now is employed on the night shift at Bedford Industries.

George has also made use of opportunities for higher education, including pursuing an interest in graphic design.

“I was taking classes over the years, mostly generals, when my old dream was revived when they started the law enforcement program (at Minnesota West Community and Technical College),” said George, who earned an associate’s degree in law enforcement in 2005.

Since then, George has done stints with the tribal police in Redwood Falls and in security for an area wind energy company.

“I enjoy working with people a lot,” he said. “I am an EMT (emergency medical technician), and on weekends I go to Adrian to help with the ambulance service there.”

George is also an avid runner, having participated in four Twin Cities Marathons, a half marathon and many shorter races, such as the Turkey Day 10k in Worthington.

“I had never done much long-distance running in Poland,” said George, who took up the sport upon the suggestion of his chiropractor. “I thought there was no way I was going to be able to run 26 miles. But after training, I realized it was just conditioning your body gradually. It’s blood, sweat and tears, but when you get to the finish line, it’s worth it. It’s such a high. Once you do it once, you start thinking, ‘Maybe I should do it again.”’

One of George’s proudest achievements was getting his American citizenship in 1997.

“It was an emotional moment, in this big hall in St. Paul with people of different nationalities and being sworn in as a citizen,” he said. “It is a huge opportunity. No matter what people say, whether they are on the left or the right or what’s happening economically, America is still the best place.”

In his lifetime, George has watched his own homeland go from Communist rule to a thriving democratically governed republic.

“Here we take freedom and liberty for granted,” he said. “Growing up behind the Iron Curtain, even though Poland was more open to the West, people would be arrested for speaking out or writing against the government. You had to watch your back.”

George was a teen when the Solidarity movement began, using civil resistance methods to advance the causes of workers’ rights and social change in Poland. The Polish trade union federation emerged Aug. 31, 1980, at the Gdansk Shipyard under the leadership of Lech Walesa, who eventually became Poland’s president.

“I’m proud of that, that it started in Poland,” he said of the region’s first steps toward democratic practices.

But George also remembers the implementation of martial law in the early 1980s. After graduation from school, he worked in Poland’s motion picture industry for a short time and remembers the trolleys coming to a dead halt on his way home from work and running from the police through an unfamiliar part of the city.

“Many people were arrested, many university kids,” he said. “When martial law happened, you would turn on the TV, and there would be nothing there. So many bright people left the country.”

Last summer, George and Paula took their two sons — Patrick, now a student at Northwestern College in Orange City, and Oliver, a student at Worthington High School — to visit their grandmother in Poland. The boys know a little rudimentary Polish, learned through a Rosetta Stone computer program.

“I’m not a good teacher,” admitted George. “I try to speak it whenever I can. I think they realized last year that it would be good to speak a little Polish. They can understand some. It’s not the easiest language.”

There are many things George misses about his homeland — his mother and other relatives, the beautiful mountains where he could ski, specific foods — and he is certainly proud of Poland’s rich history and contributions to science, music and history. But his heart and home now lie in America.

“I would recommend anyone to stop in Poland and see it,” he said. “It is a beautiful country with lots to see, lots of history.”

Daily Globe Features Editor Beth Rickers can be reached at

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