Carpentersville Memories

Lawrence Marion Kozlowski

September 5, 1933 – December 29, 2020 (Age 87)

Lawrence Marion Kozlowski died in his home on December 29, 2020, surrounded by his loving family.

Lawrence was born in Chicago on September 5, 1933, to Helen (Buszkiewicz) and Stanley Kozlowski. Prior to age 18 he lived in Chicago’s West Englewood neighborhood and the East Side-near Indiana. He attended Pullman Tech, one of just a few trade schools in the country at the time. Students worked at becoming an apprentice in a trade after graduation; his choice was electric shop. After three years the school closed because of finances. He was in the last graduating class in 1950.

Lawrence’s biological mother Helen survived the Eastland Disaster in Chicago in 1915 where 844 people died. After being “thrown” into the Chicago River she vowed to God that if He saved her, she would raise any boys she had in a future marriage to become Catholic priests. The moral guidance she provided before her early death in 1942 had a great influence on Lawrence’s early years, as did his father who believed in family and in caring for the family home.

A good relationship with his brother Edmond, help and fun with his Chicago relatives, and guidance from them when the family house was sold when he was 18, all helped in his maturation.

Because of the military draft in the 1950’s, he worked at short term jobs until 1954 when he was drafted. Camp Chaffee and Fort Sill provided basic training and the specialty of artillery observation. His battalion’s destination was going to be South Korea or West Germany which was decided alphabetically. The K’s went to Germany where he was retrained to be a DW radio operator. The overall mission in Germany was to help keep Soviet totalitarian Communism from expanding into Western Europe. He saw no combat. Following in the family tradition of traveling, he spent his two-year tour of duty visiting many Western European countries, developing his life-long interest in the beauty of churches and other architecture, and opening his mind to other world spirituality.

Back in the U.S. he decided that electricity didn’t “turn him on” and architecture, spirituality, geography and several other social studies did. For long-time employment he went to NIU to become a secondary level social studies teacher. He began working at Lakewood Middle School in 1960. He also took a job as a seasonal (summer) National Park Ranger in the early 1960s, which was his second favorite job. He worked in Yellowstone National Park during the summer of 1960 and Big Hole National Battlefield in the summers of 1963 and 1964.

In 1964 he was offered a job at Yellowstone’s elementary school in Mammoth, but his first principal talked him into staying with School District 300. From 1960-1997 he was employed by D300 at Lakewood Middle School and Crown and Dundee-Crown high schools which provided two great influences on his career and life.

The first influence on Lawrence’s life was that D300 encouraged teachers to be creative. This allowed him to develop his overall teaching method which he called “student learning through classroom activities.” His 37 years of teaching were filled with student activities, some of which included speeches, written article reviews, historic plays or skits, debates on problems in U.S. history, student-led questioning with “symposium” topics, and field trips to local sites. He later also added in-class field trips with postcard drawings and movies and videos with compact lessons. In psychology classes he and his students enjoyed dream interpretation, handwriting and simple drawing analysis, and personality theories.

The second great influence from D300 was in meeting his wife-to-be, Helen Dicken, who turned out to be the love of his life. The joy of almost 50 years of marriage were beyond word description. He found it difficult to figure out how he could be fortunate enough to have such a beautiful marriage. They had two remarkable children, Mark and Gleneen (Orndahl), who also provided frosting on the family cake with grandchildren Kayleigh, Grace and Cada Kozlowski and Jack and Alec Orndahl who now share the blessings of family life. Lawrence and Helen discovered early on that you can’t raise children adequately without dogs and had several beloved furry family members.

In 1967 the family decided to make Algonquin home. They bought a fixer-upper summer house they could afford near the beautiful Fox River. They eventually established the Kozlowski-Orndahl Compound there; it provided a great family setting with friendly neighbors, a short commute to work for Lawrence and opportunities for Helen to do volunteer work. Lifelong activities and experiences included enjoying the music of orchestra and chorus together that he was exposed to by Helen and her beautiful singing. He also enjoyed raising children with all their beauty and promise, experiencing alternative reality through Zen meditation, studying landscapes and photographing them, studying world religions and architecture, finding self-help for health problems and searching for beauty in all areas of life.

Memorials can be sent to Dundee-Crown High School boosters at 1500 Kings Road, Carpentersville, IL, 60110.