Some Good in the World: A Life of Purpose. Edward J. Piszek with Jake Morgan.

Some Good in the World: A Life of Purpose
Edward J. Piszek with Jake Morgan
Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado, 2001

Why read it? I once told an English teacher that I thought Our Town was the great American literary classic. She turned to me and said witheringly, “You would think that.” Well, this book, little known, perhaps outside of the Philadelphia, PA, area and possibly in Poland, is the great American success story. James Michener: “This is a story that imparts exactly what makes America unique among nations, where any man or woman may start life with few advantages and then—through courage, brilliance, endurance, and hard work—achieve not only great material wealth but also turn that life into the greatest treasure of them all: a life filled with purpose.”

Some sample ideas from the book, an autobiography: When he went to school at night, the reaction of his family was dumbfounded: why would anyone want to pay to go to school? Sought approval from his family, but never had it. Believed that putting his thoughts on paper would tell him who he was. A teacher told him: “If you’re a clown, no one is going to listen to you when you make your statement.” Wrote a book for Campbell Soup Co., Tested Sentences that Sell, but no one paid any attention to it or to him, even though he was outselling everyone else. His bosses never passed the book along to those who counted. Problem Solving: He would turn the problem over in his mind, let his mind wander and then would find the solution, a kind of mental brainstorming.

After he became successful selling frozen fish, he turned his attention to Poland, his family’s homeland. Communist Poland and Soviet Communism were different. The people he met in Poland did not believe the Communist line even though they spouted it under pressure from the Soviets. In sending X-ray machines, he was responsible for eventually wiping out the disease of tuberculosis from Poland, a disease that had reached epidemic proportions after WWII. Whole villages had been wiped out. Later, he was referred to as “that same American” who was responsible for its no longer being a problem. “We hardly even think of it now.” Or of “that same American who sent the X-Ray machines,” whoever he was.

He wanted to change the image of the Poles in America from the stereotyped joke of the “dumb Pole.” His best response to that was his inspiring James Michener to write his novel Poland, which details through the centuries the heroic response of the Poles to their crushing defeats by surrounding powers and their courageous determination to rebuild after the continued destruction of their land and people.

His method of prayer was not the rote prayers of childhood, but silent contemplation of everything he thought to be true. He thought that history is not like dominoes, but more like marbles dropped on the ground, ricocheting from each other and no one can know all the elements of an event.

The Campbell Soup Co., the same company that had fired him years ago, bought Mrs. Paul’s Frozen Seafood, the crowning irony of his life.


Quote: “Democracy was an expression of the best of the human impulse and an encouragement to that impulse [through a sense of purpose]: only in a system that valued the individual could real peace—not a mere silencing of guns but a peace of mind and spirit—take place.”