COUNTYWIDE : Picnic Brings Back Memories of Poland

Camarillo resident Antoni Parecki, 37, sat with his daughter and friends at the annual picnic of the Polish Eagle Lodge of Ventura County on Sunday as the oom-pah-pah of Polish polkas boomed over the loudspeakers.

“You don’t hear it too often in Poland,” Parecki said of the traditional music. Parecki, a computer programmer, moved here from Zabrze, Poland, five years ago.

But “this is how Americans imagine Poles to be,” said Tom Milaszewicz, 43, a mechanical engineer who moved to Camarillo nine years ago from Warsaw.

Of the 150 or so Ventura County residents of Polish descent who attended the picnic at Camarillo Grove County Park, Parecki and Milaszewicz were among those who have emigrated since 1983, when the former Communist government imposed martial law.

They are the newcomers, said Ed Osiadacz, 35, president of the county’s Polish Eagle Lodge. Osiadacz, who moved to the United States in 1984, counts himself among this group.

Most of the others at the picnic had been born in the United States, many in the Midwest or other parts of the country that have large, tightknit Polish communities.

Beverly Jardin, 50, and her sister, Barbara Damron, 42, both moved to California from Hamtramck, Mich., in 1978 and 1980.

They miss the closeness of their Polish community back home, said the sisters, who now live in Ojai, although they were glad to escape Michigan’s weather.

“There’s just not the traditions that there used to be,” Jardin said. “We used to have family picnics once a week.”

In addition to the music and camaraderie with people of the same heritage, they get to eat traditional food, such as Polish sausage and pirogi, which are dumplings made of mashed potatoes and cheese.

Rose Zachowski, 70, who also moved to Ventura County from Michigan, said that when she was growing up, people believed that America was a melting pot and that all of its citizens would gradually lose their sense of where they came from.

But “it hasn’t turned out that way,” Zachowski said. “People still like to maintain identity with their ethnic backgrounds.”