Herbert Stuart Zischkau Jr.

FUNERAL ARRANGEMENTS

A Mass of Christian Burial for Herbert S. Zischkau, Jr., will be celebrated at 11:00 AM on Wednesday, June 18, 2025, at Saint Stephen Catholic Church, 575 Tuskawilla Rd, Winter Springs, FL 32708. Viewing will be held just before the funeral Mass starting at 10:00 AM in the church vestibule. The burial will take place at 1:00 PM on Tuesday, June 24, 2025, at Homewood Cemetery, Pittsburgh, PA.

BEGINNING AND END POINTS

Herb died at age 96 on June 13, 2025, about 10:30 AM surrounded by family praying the Stations of the Cross.

He was born in Turtle Creek, PA, to Herbert S. Zischkau, Sr., and Laura Mae (Butterfield) Zischkau. They lived not far from his paternal grandparents, Oscar and Agnes, with their adult children who never married, Aunt Grace and Uncle Bill. Herb had three younger sisters (Grace, Barbara, and Eleanor) who predeceased him.

Herb grew as a young man between the two great wars, developing a great work ethic, a keen sense of justice, and a spirit of service, while constantly observing a rapidly changing world. During his youth, Herb delivered mail and telegrams by bicycle up and down the rugged hills of Turtle Creek and its adjoining municipality, East Pittsburgh, where a large Westinghouse factory dominated the mountainside.

Herb was close to his grandfather Oscar, who taught him how to lay bricks and other skills to maintain the family home. When Herb had his first newly built house in 1960 with the backyard on Darby Creek, he embarked on a project to reverse the erosion of his shoreline by constructing a seawall from slabs of concrete left by the home builders. This project took years, as line by line Herb built the wall out into the creek and his sons filled in the gap of roughly 10 feet with building materials, rocks, sand, and clay unearthed from the yard. Even 12-foot floods of the creek since then have not eroded nor moved that seawall. The newly reclaimed land was also a convenient depository for grass cuttings.

FAMILY

Herb remained close to his family and even when he moved his own new family to suburban Philadelphia and Long Island to take new jobs in the aerospace industry, he and our mother, Susan Zischkau (née Daood) would make a yearly drive on the Pennsylvania Turnpike (the seed of the Interstate Highway system) to visit the Zischkau and Daood families in and around Pittsburgh. Herb and Susan had 4 sons born in the 1950’s: Herby III, Douglas & Eric (the twins), and Jonathan.

The eldest of Herb’s aunts and uncles, Aunt Grace Margaretta Zischkau, was a beacon of joy for us little ones, and she educated us in what an immaculate house could look like, with framed watercolors of Dutch waterways, always dusted, a Baldwin player piano, and furniture that was already a collection of antiques in the 1950’s. We always looked forward to visiting her, and when our neighbor and friend Joe Dougherty went with us one year, he commented “What a sweet woman!” It didn't hurt that she would always serve our favorite dessert, frozen raspberries, with ice cream.

Capt. William Clyde Zischkau (all of Herb’s German/Austrian uncles had Scottish middle names appropriate to having been born in Pittsburgh, the largest Presbyterian city outside of Edinborough) was an Army Air Force veteran of the bloody battle against the Japanese to hold Henderson Field on Guadalcanal. His unit suffered 100% casualties, Uncle Bill being one of the lucky ones who was only wounded. He was the Lieutenant of one of the first two radar companies in the world, so top-secret that it was called a “field artillery” unit. Herb told his sons that the Japanese air force didn’t know how we were able to shoot their planes down at night. Uncle Bill, a captain by the end of the War (he served in the military police after recovering), honored the warnings of the Army and never told even his nephew Herb about radar, even decades later when his information was superseded by new technology. Uncle Bill and Herb were hunting buddies with matching shotguns and in the mid 1950’s Herb would be in the basement cleaning his equipment after hunting trips to northwestern Pennsylvania. We always enjoyed our visits with Uncle Bill, who raised beagles in a long kennel in his back yard and who taught Herb’s eldest son how to work with him to clean out the chicken and turkey coop.

Herb’s maternal grandparents also played an important role. Good Aunt Frieda Dawes (née Butterfield) wasn’t happy with the dawdling about baptizing her infant nephew Herb Jr. As a good Methodist of the traditional sort, she took this essential matter into her own hands, literally, and baptized Herb in his grandfather’s kitchen sink. All that grace flooding down made a big difference in Herb’s supernatural attitude toward his life, family, and work. When we were old enough to understand what happened, we developed high gratitude to Aunt Frieda, whom we liked to visit even as toddlers.

Uncle Hale Butterfield left us his fine orchestral instruments, which helped greatly in school music education for all 4 of us sons. Aunt Hallie (born at the time of the comet’s passage) was a pioneer of women in management and rose to be the nutritionist in charge of the food service for all the patients in her hospital.

Our Grandmother Laura Zischkau did her best to track our ancestry back to the Revolutionary War so she could join the D.A.R. Her granddaughter, our cousin Laura, succeeded in picking up where Grandma left off and, thanks to the internet, traced us back to William Brewster on the Mayflower, and to a girl in the next generation who was Ann Pickett, a last name popular among Massachusetts Indian families we are told. Since genes are indestructible, this may explain the persistent very dark brown hair Herb maintained into his early 90’s.

Herb related that his Grandfather Oscar was close to him starting around age 8, when Oscar would have his grandson do chores around the family homestead. One memorable project was the brick walk installation parallel to the street. Cars were splashing the grassy area along the curb and causing soil erosion, so Oscar instructed Herb on how to install a brick path.

Herb attended Carnegie Institute of Technology (later becoming Carnegie Mellon University) as World War II ended, and the occupation and rebuilding phase of Europe and the Pacific Theatre began. Herb became a degreed electrical engineer. A Theta Xi fraternity brother at Carnegie Tech introduced him to an Army reserve unit, Signal Corp. 840th Radio Relay Company, which Herb joined, taking him to summer camp at Fort Meade. When that company disbanded, Herb moved to the reserve 382nd Signal Battalion. The second summer camp for Herb was a success thanks to Uncle Bill’s training him to use firearms. Herb’s score during testing on the firing range increased from prone, to sitting, to kneeling. At the rapid-fire session, the range became very quiet, as troops and instructors watched Herb fire 9 bullseyes in the X-ring out of his 10 shots with a Garand. His later assignment in the Army reserves was with the 443rd Strategic Intelligence and Research command, at Saw Mill Run in Pittsburgh, he being the youngest of a 6-man unit. Herb’s Army reserve service ended around 1959, when he moved the family back from Idlewild Airport (now JFK) to work at Vertol Aircraft in Springfield, where he went on to do avionics and electrical design for the Marines’ Sea Knight tandem helicopter, and the Army’s heavy-lift tandem Chinook helicopter that saw so much action in Vietnam.

In his early career path, Herb wanted to transfer from the Westinghouse Elevator Division (1950-1951) to the Atomic Power Division, even being granted a Q-security clearance, with a move to the research facility for atomic submarines being part of the package. During the lengthy clearance process, Herb was laid off by Westinghouse from the Elevator Division, but Herb moved onto H.J. Heinz, where he put his electrical skills to work, including the modernization of the kettle heating for cooking the famous ketchup, moving from batch processing to “continuous ketchup.” Herb liked his work at Heinz and when Westinghouse finally offered him the coveted research job in Idaho Falls, he turned the job down as he believed moving was not the best path for his family. Ultimately, Susan convinced Herb that accepting a later offer from Boeing Vertol in Springfield, PA, was a good move. He listened to his wife.

Herb always had time for his sons, in sports, photography, electronics, building the kayak, reading, analyzing current events, and projects at home or for helping others. His basement workbench was a treasure trove for our tinkering minds and hands. He loved gardening and planting flowers for Mom. In making home improvements, he involved his sons in these projects so that they would learn important skills and get used to working hard with persistence and attention to details.

In about 1962, Herb learned of a fledgling soccer program in Springfield, PA. He knew nothing about soccer at the time, but he quickly learned by reading books, studying films of English soccer matches, and learning soccer skills and the laws of the game under the tutelage of his friends, British engineers working at Vertol. Soon Herb was coaching and refereeing soccer. We boys were eager to try the sport out, and found ourselves on teams that played weekly from the fall through the end of spring. The town’s sports organization, called the Springfield Athletic Association (“AA”), was run by Ray Lynch, a brilliant leader, who brought soccer to the suburbs from Philadelphia long before soccer became a national sport. Ray saw that Herb had the organizational skills and determination to grow the soccer program so before long Ray asked Herb to take over the soccer program, which he did. Learning from Ray, Herb set about expanding it 10-fold, and kept adding teams each year. When the program was given a large field but with no goals, Herb built enough portable large goals to create 6 soccer fields. Our family carried the wood and steel posts every Saturday to the field, set up the goals, lined the fields, placed corner flags, and then disassembled everything at the end of the day. Herb organized 6 games each hour and fifteen minutes throughout the day with assigned referees. Then, Herb boldly went where few Americans had ever gone before, to set up another soccer program for girls, more than a decade and a half before girls soccer caught on in the United States. In those days, the original Old Central Schoolhouse was known as the Springfield AA building. Herb’s 1965 Mercury Colony Park station wagon could often be seen tipped rear low to the ground as he hauled up to 14 teenaged boys to away soccer games. Wow! As their thank-you, it being a volunteer organization, the Springfield AA rewarded him with more work as president of all sports programs for a few years. He became a top fundraiser even having his sons and team members sell the hot roasted peanuts house-to-house and outside supermarkets. Herb volunteered to coach baseball and helped in getting baseball equipment to the fields. One of our future Congressmen got his experience playing baseball at an early age in the Springfield A.A.

Herb enjoyed hiking and camping and we made trips to Cooks Forest north of Pittsburgh. He also started a junior NRA air rifle club, and set up a range in our basement (early 1960s), where he taught some of our friends in the neighborhood, too.

Westinghouse did get Herb back in the 1970s, as Boeing Vertol had massive layoffs between procurement contracts, and Boeing’s Osprey development being delayed. Still, the work at Vertol allowed Herb to take his family to the Ridley Park complex where his family got to stand in the giant wind tunnel on a few family picnic days. Herb worked in Lester, PA, where the Westinghouse power plant steam turbines were manufactured, which would ultimately be coupled with Westinghouse East Pittsburgh (Turtle Creek) generators. As a plant facilities engineer, power for the big machines, pump systems, and power distribution to the shop floors came under his care. He even studied lighting, earning a certificate from the Illumination Engineering Society, which helped with assignments to light large signage above the factory roofs. Ultimately, Westinghouse decided to move its engineering division to Orlando, Florida, and that is what brought Herb and Susan to Tuscawilla in 1982.

In Florida, life while working was busy, especially with travel to meet foreign clients, such as the Chinese, with Herb’s work on maintenance planning and a group he suggested, a unit dedicated to failure analysis and repair of the power plants. He was so popular with the Chinese engineers that he benefitted from their national custom of giving foreigners whom they liked a complimentary name sounding something close to our Western name. It was Zee-See-Ka. Our father was told that it meant “Rock hard defender of principle,” which, of course, fit him to a T. Dad was known to provide them bibles and rosaries for them to take home. Dad had a compassionate heart, giving hope and encouragement to the sick and suffering, praying for expecting moms to choose life for their babies, and giving his time and money to the needy.

He loved to take our Mom to play tennis at the Tuscawilla C.C. He had been on a tennis team in his high school and he spent time teaching his family to play tennis. He also coached youth soccer in Winter Springs.

Herb’s foray into public service was to volunteer for membership in the advisory board known as the Springfield Planning Commission. Being another unpaid, volunteer position, they quickly elected him Chairman, of which the timing was nice. The “Blue Route” was still in its planning stages and came before Springfield Township’s advisory board because the future Interstate highway connecting I-95 from the industrial zone along the Delaware River was to connect it with the Pennsylvania Turnpike, now I-76, and one of the alignments went up the Crum Creek valley, skirting Springfield on its west and north sides. Amidst the criticisms of landowners who didn’t want any change to their green country towne, Herb, not one to fudge his analysis for political advantage, courageously came out publicly in favor of the alignment of the Blue Route that was eventually chosen. Herb’s reason: “I cannot see how this location of the Blue Route could be any more favorable to Springfield than it is,” noting that it didn’t cut through the 95% of our township already developed. Our Dad was right, as we can see now driving up that road, which bypasses the mess of clogged commuter roads into Philadelphia.

Herb was received into the Catholic Church in 1975. He had always been open to the faith, seeing the good example of Mom’s family, and was diligent in attending Mass every Sunday and holy day with Mom and us. He would take us to confession on Saturdays. When the new pastor of our parish (Holy Cross), joked that now Herb would be registered and get envelopes, Herb laughed back and told the pastor that he had been doing block collections for the parish since its founding.

Herb studied his faith seriously, read sacred scripture, catechisms, and books by the saints and early Church Fathers. He had a strong devotion to the Holy Eucharist, attended Mass every day, lived a life of prayer and penance, and had a deep devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary. He attended an annual retreat each year at Longlea Conference Center, prayed daily the holy rosary, and always helped us, his friends, and acquaintances, to get closer to God through his example and spirit of service. When he arrived in Orlando, he and Mom were parishioners at Saints Peter and Paul, and when the parish needed a cantor for one of the Sunday Masses, Dad volunteered. He studied music, listened to tapes, and worked with the director of music to do his task as well as possible. When St. Stephen’s opened its doors 40 years ago, he volunteered to lead the daily Mass congregation in an opening hymn and closing hymn. He also volunteered at St. Stephen’s as a religious education teacher. When he was on travel, he made sure he returned home to be able to teach his weekly class.

In his last five years, after a fall in 2020 that made it impossible for him to stand up without assistance, he offered up to God the limitations and difficulties and tried always to be cheerful and pleasant with those who took care of him. He was a trooper in that when he was asked to do the innumerable physical therapy exercises and walking “circuits” with his rollator, he didn’t complain and humbly followed the directions from others. Dad looked forward to the daily rosary, novena for the sick, and prayers for the faithful departed, usually done via zoom with children and grandchildren. In the last hour of his life here on earth, he listened as his family prayed the rosary and then the stations of the cross. It was in the midst of the stations, that God took him to himself. “Well done, good and faithful servant.”

We want to thank the friends and neighbors who came to help Dad over the past 5 years, looking after his physical and spiritual care. Thanks go to Fr. George N., Fr. George D., and Fr. Juanito who heard Dad’s confession, gave him Communion, and administered the Anointing of the Sick. Thanks also to Grace E. for bringing Dad holy communion weekly and ending each session with a song. Thank you, Alicia, for taking such great care of Dad during the weekday morning shift, figuring out how to improve the care in every detail and constantly adjusting the care even as Dad’s strength declined, and teaching other caregivers the routine and even preparing meals for the later shifts. Ralston and Michael provided weekend and afternoon shifts over a number of the years and really put their hearts into Dad’s care. Denise and Bill likewise put in many hours of dedicated service and care, making a sacrifice to travel quite a distance to help Dad. Camille, a family friend, volunteered to provide physical therapy to Dad for at least the first year after the 2020 fall. Our neighbors were always eager to help Dad and our family, especially Bob and Susan next door. Finally, we want to thank Herb’s grandchildren who helped with Dad’s care, including Matt who cared for him full-time for the first 6 months after Dad’s fall, and Herb IV who cared for him frequently during the past 6 months right up to June 13, and read books to Dad such as the Don Camillo and Don Sturdy series. Other grandchildren who put in many hours include Gaby (thanks for reading to him the Narnia Chronicles), Grace, Isabel, and Suzy E. Thank you, Annie, for all of your letters to Grandpa. We are also grateful for his grandchild, Sister Mary Laetitia, who as a cloistered nun, prayed and offered penance daily for the spiritual welfare of her grandfather. May Our Lord reward all of you.