Mikolaj Piotr Wozniak

Mikolaj Piotr Wozniak died in Harrisburg on September 6, 2026, at eighty. He was born there on November 19, 1945, to parents who had come from Kraków by way of a long patience. He grew up in a capital that still had steel at the edges and offices in the middle. He learned English at school and a second set of manners at the table. For twenty years he fabricated plate that other cities only ordered. Later he kept a turnpike booth that treated a long line as weather you could live with if you kept moving. He arrived early. He did not advertise. He would not let a supervisor invent a rule that made the counter a liar. After a bad afternoon he sat in the stairwell with the radio off until his hands were quiet. He married Janina Wozniak in 1968. They raised a son and a daughter in a bungalow that needed storm windows. After Janina died in 2014 he still sat with neighbors who had to renew something and did not know where to start. Friends remember a man who would stay seven minutes past closing for a person who had taken two buses, who hated a messy stamp pad, and who said you're fine in a way that actually meant the work would get done. He died in Harrisburg, in the brick city he refused to apologize for. The booth is someone else's now.