By A.M. Kelley
Superior Catholic Herald
Starostas' lives intertwined with parish life
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ASHLAND -- Shirley and Dick Starosta epitomize a generation of people whose lives have always been deeply intertwined with the life of their church. According to their pastor Fr. Henry Willenborg, OFM, it's people like the Starostas that make the difference between a strong and healthy parish and one that merely stumbles along.
"They love their church. They love their faith," he said. "They will do almost anything for their church."
Their parish is Our Lady of the Lake in Ashland. Our Lady came into being when Ashland's two oldest parishes, Holy Family and St. Agnes combined in 1990. The Starostas have been members of the parishes since birth and attended the parishes' schools.
They were two of the many guests at Our Lady of the Lake School on Feb. 1 during Catholic Schools Week. The current students honored them and other alumni at a reception.
The Starostas didn't travel far for the event. They live just a few blocks from the church and school and it's a rare day that the retired couple isn't already on the premises for one reason or another.
Shirley Starosta retired nine years ago from Our Lady's teaching staff but continues to substitute there regularly. Some of the children in her classrooms are the grandchildren--the third generation--of her first students.
"It's just like a family down there," she said of the school's teachers, staff and pupils.
She also volunteers in the school's office and offers her services as a reading aide in the primary grades. She's a song leader at Masses, a Eucharistic minister and along with her husband, sings in the funeral choir.
Dick Starosta retired in 1998 from Fort James Paper Mill in Ashland after 42 years and 10 months.
"I would have made 43 years," he said, "but they closed the mill."
One of his voluntary church responsibilities is keeping the baptismal font clean and filled, and he works with other retired men of the parish on many maintenance and remodeling projects in the various parish buildings.
The Starostas will celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary on Nov. 8 this year. They raised their children--one boy and four girls--in the parish and in its school and now enjoy seeing some of their 17 grandchildren and three great grandchildren follow the same traditions.
Dick Starosta was a year ahead of Shirley Kontny when they were schoolmates. She had attended Holy Family grade school, which Dick said he always called "the Polish school," and he went to St. Agnes grade school. They met when they came together to attend the one Catholic high school in Ashland, De Padua. When the two were in high school the yearly tuition set their parents back a whopping $15 a year. (In grade school it had been a mere $3.)
Dick said he saw Shirley for the first time in an ice cream store.
"Boy, that's a nice girl," he remembers saying to his buddies. The next time he saw her she was in the school's gymnasium. Later when he wanted to ask her to a dance he brought along three friends for support. He need not have worried. The attraction was not one-sided.
"I wanted a date with him so bad," Shirley said.
He graduated from De Padua in 1954 and she in 1955 (the parish closed its high school in 1967). Their courtship lasted three more years as she went on to County Teacher's College (in Ashland) and then taught for one year in Pelican Lake, many miles away in Oneida County.
After they married, the couple bought a house in Ashland in 1959. It was a familiar site to both. As for Dick, he grew up just seven blocks from the house.
"I walked by it every day to school," he said. "I peddled papers here."
Shirley remembers the house because the railroad tracks ran alongside of it and she has fond memories of her then-future husband standing there. After weekends at home Shirley would take the train back to her job. Dick would "stand there and wave goodbye to me," she said.
When they heard the house was for sale, they bought it. And when the railroad left, they bought the lots where the tracks ran. Dick now gardens on the site.
Through the years, they've weathered many health problems together as well as an abundance of joys. Shirley said, above all "our faith has done wonders for us."
And they've done wonders for their parish, as have so many others, said Willenborg.
"What we're reflecting here (in the Starostas' story) is captured in so many other people in the parish," he said. "We would struggle as a parish without Dick and Shirley and people like them."
© Superior Catholic Herald, 2008