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Finding just the right story for a book was my New Year’s resolution in 2013. I just didn’t know where to look. But I’ve always loved writing about my neighborhood — Manhattan’s historic Lower East Side, where I grew up and still live — and so I was happy to be assigned a small magazine piece on Polish classes at St. Stanislaus, a local Roman Catholic church. 

As I arrived at the parish one Sunday morning in March, a caffeinated secular Jew with a notebook in hand, the Sunday school students were singing the Polish version of "Happy Birthday" to the new head priest, Father Tadeusz Lizinczyk:

Sto lat, sto lat, Niech zyje, zyje nam.
A 100 years, a 100 years. Once again, once again, may he live with us!

Father Lizinczyk was a handsome, energetic 39. He’d arrived from Poland only a month before to add some dazzle to the dwindling community. There was only a vestigial group of parishioners left, although at the start of the 20th century St. Stanislaus had been the center of a vibrant Polish neighborhood. In 1921 the parish had even hosted a visit from Ignacy Jan Paderewski, the first prime minister of Poland as well as an acclaimed composer and pianist whose interpretations of Chopin, Schubert, and Beethoven remain legendary. (Father Lizinczyk proudly told me that Paderewski’s Manru was the only Polish opera ever performed at New York’s Metropolitan Opera.)

I had been assigned to write an article of 1,500 words, so after my morning at Sunday school, I walked the neighborhood to see what other relics of the old Polish community I could find. There was one grocery store and a butcher, although he had more Ukrainian customers than Polish ones. And while today’s 19 St Mark’s Place houses hipster stores selling poke bowls and vaping oils, this address was once home to several prominent Polish organizations, including the Democratic Club and a restaurant owned by Polski Dom Narodowy, the Polish National Home. (In 1966, Andy Warhol sublet the space, using his Lemko heritage to secure the deal, and turned the dom — Polish for "home" — into a nightclub synonymous with downtown cool.)

I stopped for a bowl of cold borscht at one of the two remaining Polish-owned restaurants in the East Village, unlikely to survive much longer in a neighborhood with soaring rents. (Four years later, both are indeed gone.) Who was documenting this fading world? 

All afternoon, back at home, I read about a community that had been so lively only a 100 years before. Just as I thought I had enough to start writing my article, I stumbled upon yet another colorful historic tidbit: In 1930, 5,000 children paraded from the steps of St. Stanislaus to City Hall to celebrate the return of Rear Admiral Richard E. Byrd from the first American expedition to Antarctica. Along on the voyage was one William Gawronski, an all-American schoolboy who had once attended Sunday morning Polish classes at St. Stanislaus. Gawronski had joined the expedition two years earlier, stowing away on Byrd’s flagship.
As The City of New York sailed from New York to Tahiti to New Zealand all the way to the Antarctic ice shelf, Gawronski became the envy of children across America, who thanks to newfangled shortwave radio could tune in daily to the expedition’s by turns terrifying and triumphant exploits. Upon his return to New York, the student who’d played the biggest hooky of all time was bombarded by requests for inspirational appearances at schools and civic organizations up and down the Eastern seaboard. What, I wondered, had become of the boy as an adult?


Journalists become skilled stalkers, and so it wasn’t long before I’d made a chart of all the East Coast Gawronskis and Gavronskis (the newspapers of the day didn’t seem sure how to spell his name), hoping to talk to a descendant. I’d like to think this was more than procrastination. I convinced myself that if I didn’t follow through, a marvelous true tale would be forever lost. No one was out there looking to tell this story. Maybe there would not be enough to tell a larger story, but a hope had taken hold of me that anything was possible if I just did my homework. Sitting down with another big cup of coffee, I called the first of the 100-plus Gawronskis/Gavronskis in the New York area. I introduced myself as a writer, and asked if the man on the other end of the line might possibly be descended from a teenager who swam across the Hudson River and stowed away to Antarctica in 1928.


After a quick hang up, the next few Gawronskis were polite nos. I gave up on my chart, and returned to Google — where I discovered, thanks to an online grave site, that a Captain William Gawronski, born in New York in 1910, had died in Cape Elizabeth, Maine in 1981. The birth year matched. And my boy could have become a captain, with that early adventure at sea... Could this be my William Gawronski’s daughter or granddaughter?


This time, an elderly woman with an Eastern European accent answered the phone — not who I was looking for. I thought about hanging up, but instead launched into my familiar spiel. 

“That was my husband,” her soft voice said.

It wasn’t long into my conversation with Gisela Gawronski that I realized I had a book on my hands.

Billy Gawronski was like some character sprung from the pages of Robert Louis Stevenson or Mark Twain and plunked down in 20th-century New York City — between the world wars, at the height of the Jazz Age. His was a classic immigrant success story, a tale of gritty urban striving that morphed into one of the most audacious on-the-road fantasies ever lived. This 17-year-old kid raised on borrowed adventure novels had willed those stories to become the stuff of his own life. 

I sheepishly called my editor to ask for an extension on my St. Stanislaus story. He agreed I’d be crazy not to start my own journey into Billy Gawronski’s past that very day. Laurie Gwen Shapiro is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and journalist. The Stowaway is her first full-length work of nonfiction.