Ron Badowski was my cousin. He passed away this week, at the age of 82. I loved him and I’ll miss him forever. There are large sections of his life that I wasn’t in touch with him, so I won’t pretend this is a complete biography.
Here he is with his wife Jackie (who’s also left us) at our house in Chicago, in the mid-60’s, I’d guess. That’s probably the Sunday Chicago Tribune on the couch on his left.
Note the plastic covers on the couch! Yes, people really did that back then.
and here they are, much later, in Arizona with Uncle Larry:
My mom and Ron’s mom, Elizabeth, were sisters, from the Saldecki family. Here they are as children:
Mom’s in the chair and Liz is on her right. Uncle Larry is in front on her left (he’s the guy in the suit with Ron & Jackie above). Since Mom was the youngest, everyone called her Babe, and that name stuck with her for her entire life. I’ve met relatives who said they didn’t even know Aunt Babe’s real name was Martha.
Here’s the same five kids years later, after all of them had moved, one by one, to southern California. Mom and Dad were still only about a mile from Aunt Liz’s house.
Mom and Aunt Liz were very close. Our families lived only about a mile apart in Chicago, so I saw Ron all the time. I guess it’s not exaggerating to say I grew up with him. Aunt Liz (front, middle) was what her own mother called “high strung.” They didn’t have fancy psychiatric terms for that back then and I’m not going to make up one. Aunt Liz would spend, literally, days making Thanksgiving dinner and then not eat anything. Her furniture was covered in plastic, too.
Ron was planning to become a Catholic priest, and attended Quigley Prep for a few years, but he dropped out at some point (I’m not clear when or why) and went to college at night in Accountancy, while working at Tootsie Roll. He eventually got his degree and became a CPA.
He was always one of most pleasant people I’ve ever known. I remember my Mom saying about him, “Ron has such a pleasing personality!”
At the time, I heard that as, “Why can’t you be like that?”
Once in the 2010’s, Ron and I were going to a Cubs - White Sox spring training game near Phoenix, and he got into a lengthy conversation with a total stranger in the parking lot. That was his way.
Roller Skating
Ron became a competitive roller skater at the Swank Roller Rink around 111th and Western in Chicago:
and that’s where he met Jackie. The two of them were a competitive dance team.
Accordion
Ron also played the accordion, and quite well. When he was in his youth, he played in a polka band all over Chicago. Older people do tend to tell the same stories over and over again, and the one he always told was how, when he came home late from a gig and Jackie was asleep, he’d lay a bag of White Castle burgers on the pillow next to her, and the smell would wake her up.
Oddly enough, the week before he died, he was so deeply into dementia that he didn’t even recognize his own daughter half the time, and I remembered that story. I was musing about how smells trigger memories, and maybe we should bring him a bag of White Castle burgers (of course there aren’t any outlets in Tucson so they’d have to be the frozen ones heated up).
His band was a tight, long-lasting group, and he was so indispensable to it that the only way to quit was to move away! So that’s what he did.
Ron researched small towns that might need an accounting practice (I’m not sure if he restricted himself to Arizona or just wanted to escape Chicago winters), and found Wickenburg, AZ, a town of about 3,000 that’s 45 minutes northwest of Phoenix. It had one of the highest proportions of millionaires of any of the small towns he looked at, I guess. “Those rich people must need accountants!” he thought.
He bought a practice and moved his family to Wickenburg, where he joined every conceivable civic organization: the Rotary, the Kiwanis, the country club, … you name it. Eventually he built up the practice into a Wickenburg institution.
His daughter Michelle married another accountant, Dean White, and here’s one thing to remember about my whole extended family including Ron:
We’re cautious and we’re careful!
Ron thought he wanted to bring Dean into the business, but he had to check him out first. He gave Dean some tax returns to do, with the excuse that he needed some help to get everything done, and then he checked over Dean’s work. I guess it made the grade, because the business became “Badowski and White” (now closed).
Family
Ron and Jackie had three kids and ten grandkids. I thought I had a photo of everyone, but this one has all the grandkids, at least:
After my mom passed, I spent every Christmas with them for seven years, so I got to know them all. I guess you could call them my Family Of Choice, except they actually are family.
Politics
I mentioned that Ron was everywhere in Wickenburg, and so it came to pass that he became the Mayor. He quickly pissed off the “no government, no taxes, no growth, leave me alone” people who abound in small town Arizona, by trying to be pragmatic and get the town the funds it needed.
I wasn’t there, but the one issue I heard from him was the volunteer fire department. An all-volunteer department can work for a very small town, but when Wickenburg got to be 6,000 people, the department was handling a call almost every day, and it became time to hire full-time firefighters. He wanted to do this without raising anyone’s taxes or issuing bonds, which would be the normal politician thing to do. There was a country club just outside the boundaries of the city, and he came up with a plan to incorporate it into the city. Thus, all their sales tax revenue would flow to the city instead of the county or state, and Wickenburg’s finances would be healthy.
For some reason unknowable for a non-Wickenburg citizen like me, this plan encountered violent opposition, and Ron faced a recall election. I remember he was out in California and the returns were mostly in, with him winning, and I showed him how many precincts were still uncounted and how unlikely it was for all of them to vote against him. I was right and he survived. However, he was defeated for reelection.
While he was Mayor, the then-Governor, Janet Napolitano was on a tour of small Arizona towns, and her plane landed at Wickenburg’s tiny airport. Ron met her plane and played his accordion for her. The Governor was so taken with this that she and Ron became close colleagues, despite being from opposite parties. Ron and Jackie had her over for dinner, and Jackie said that the pork roast she served was extremely welcome for the Governor, since almost all political banquets serve chicken and she was sick to death of it.
Ron said he found the Governor and her office very helpful in getting State resources for Wickenburg. He endorsed her for reelection, a cross-party endorsement so unusual that it earned him a mention in the liberal blog The Daily Kos (which I unfortunately can’t find now).
Conclusion
I had 13 cousins, if I’m counting correctly, all on my mom’s side. Ron was the one that all of us would probably pick to be marooned on a desert island with. Or, to use another comparison, if I had to trust one of them with my life and my entire fortune, it would be Ron, no contest. I guess the good people of Wickenburg felt the same way, since they trusted him with their money.
Ron Badowski was always pleasant, always courteous, and always kind. All of his progeny can just remember, “Be like Grandpa Ron” and they’ll be OK. May his memory be a blessing forever.
Good life.