In Memoriam

Jack Zukowski (1924-1985)

Czeslaw (Jack) Zukowski was born in Lnowroclaw 18.01.1924. He married Helena Stanislawa Wojnowska (born 09.05.1927 in Bydgoszcz) in 1945 in Lublin in a catholic church. At that time, he was an officer cadet, twenty years of age. When WWII ended in 1945, they moved to Gdansk in northern Poland and started working in the Polish Navy. Helena worked in an office of the Navy department. Jack worked on a ship. They had a daughter, Anna, born 14.04.1947. In 1949 the family was living in Poland. This is when Jack decided to come to the West. Helena could not get a passport. Poland was still a communist country at that time. The family life was broken. The couple divorced in Gdansk in March 1952.

Helena remarried. Jack came to Canada in the early 1960s and worked in Nova Scotia as a restoration technician and draftsman on Parks Canada's reconstruction of the French Fortress of Louisbourg. One of his major projects there was the reconstruction of the Engineer's House. Jack remarried in Canada in 1963 to Rose; they adopted a first child named Nancy and they had a son named Gregory. The family lived in North Sydney, Nova Scotia at that time.

Jack and Rose came from Louisbourg to Ottawa together with their little girl Nancy and their younger son Gregory in 1969. Jack had been transferred to Ottawa to work in the first team ever assembled by the government of Canada to work on the conservation of its historic properties. The group created was called the Restoration Services Division and it was part of the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development. The Division was later transferred from that department to Parks Canada. There, he worked as an architectural technician and one of his major projects was the restoration of St. Thomas Rectory in St. John's Newfoundland. For a few years he worked under the direction of Chief Engineer Ghassan Attar. The Division's staffs were decentralized in 1975 and Jack moved to the regional office in Cornwall, Ontario.

Jack was an amazingly colorful and talented man, very knowledgeable. He was a close friend of Jean-Claude Yarmola, a French architect who came to work with the Restoration Services Division of Parks Canada in the early 1970s. Jack and Jean-Claude exchanged and competed to show each other in their collections of books about European period details down to the designs on the buttons of military uniforms of different countries in different eras in different wars and comparing all that with corresponding North American details; their knowledge was fascinating.

Jack and his family were very good friends of Ken and Carol Elder and Gouhar Shemdin and Richard Simison. Ken and Gouhar were both restoration architects who worked in the Restoration Services Division.

Jack was known by his colleagues to be tall, handsome, grey haired, very proud of his Polish background, an antique collector, very knowledgeable, and friendly. Jack was superb in refinishing antique furniture.

He passed away in 1985 at the age of 61.

Helena and Jack Zukowski (1940s)

Helena & Jack Zukowski (1940s)

Jack Zukowski (1950s)

Anna & Jack Zukowski (1960s)

French Fortress of Louisbourg where Jack worked as an architectural technician during the early 1960s

Engineer's house, one of Jack's projects while at Louisbourg.

The Commissariat Building in St. John's, Newfoundland. One of Jack's projects while working for the Restoration Services Division of the Federal government of Canada (1970s)