Ed the Sculptor
Reported by Erik Smith

Ed is a very organized and disciplined man, and that's a bit unusual for an artist. After a few minutes, though, you realize there is nothing usual about this man at all.

Ed grew up on the city's east side, the son of Polish immigrants who taught him the value of hard work and the lasting beauty his talented hands could create.

"It's just a talent that you develop and you can feel," he said. "It's like, you know how a bat can fly around in the dark and he doesn't need sonar. Well, you have a built-in sonar that develops a sense for proportion that you have by discipline, you have trained yourself."

Back in 1942, Ed walked out of Catholic Central High School and into a factory plant. That didn't last long.

He was off to WWII in November as a U.S. Marine. He was in Iwo Jima when the flag was raised.

"We were on the beach and we were looking up and all a sudden someone yelled, 'There's a flag,'" he said. "And that's the way it was."

After the war, Ed's hands went to work in wood. In fact, he built a number of the beautiful staircases in some of Grosse Pointe's most fashionable homes.

"Someone said I should take sculpting lessons and there was a sculptor on the east side," he said. "I stayed with him for eight years."

The wood was wonderful, but sculpture was what he really loved. So Ed was off to Italy to to learn what the masters had taught. And when he came home again, he was not just Ed the woodworker, he was Ed the sculptor.

His artist's hands have kept a marriage strong, raised a proud family and brought timeless beauty to bronze, carefully cast in his favorite foundry out in Clarkston.

"I love painting," he said. "My wife painted for some years. And I love painting and watercolors, but there is nothing like sculpture. It's the Marines of art."

Ed's hands speak silently to all of us from the towering firefighters' monument in Roscommon and in the agony of his latest work, a tribute to the fallen that graces a quiet memorial in Ann Arbor.

"If you notice the helmet is touching the ground and the strap is just looped over his index finger, which represents the fragileness of life," Ed said. "Life is that fragile even in our daily life."

These are the words of Ed, the student, the soldier, the teacher.

"A lady asked my wife one time, about 15 years ago, she said, 'When is your husband going to retire?' She said, 'He's doing what a lot of people that retire want to do. He's been doing this all his life,'" he said. "And so I just love what I'm doing. And that's as far as it goes."

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