The Parade Marshal for 2011 Alex Wizbicki is a WWII Veteran and the following is:

para-phrased from an article about his life  From Business North.Com
by Wayne Nelson.   

Alexander John “Alex” Wizbicki was born Oct. 26, 1921 in Brooklyn, NY, the last of five boys. His family persevered through the Depression, and watched its youngest member become a star football player at Brooklyn Boys High School.

Wizbicki turned down a Notre Dame football scholarship from the venerable coach Frank Leahy because he didn’t want to be that far from home. He enrolled at Dartmouth College, and then transferred to College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA.

He starred on the 1942 Holy Cross team that upset favored cross-town rival Boston College 55-12 in the season finale on Nov. 28, a defeat that likely saved the lives of many of those BC football players. The team cancelled a post-game reservation for a victory celebration at the Cocoanut Grove in Boston. That evening, 492 patrons died and several hundred more were injured in a fire that leveled the nightclub.

With World War II underway, Wizbicki enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps in 1943 and spent the next two years in a reconnaissance company with the 6th Marine Division, island hopping across the south Pacific from Guadalcanal, Guam, Okinawa and ending the war in China.

In 1945 he was the 18th round draft pick of the NFL Pittsburgh Steelers, but signed a year later instead as a defensive back with the old American Football Conference Buffalo Bills for $6,000.

“They paid better. NFL owners then weren’t what you’d call gratuitous,” he said. “The biggest joke (among returning veterans) was the NFL telling us we’d be playing for pride. They were talking to the wrong boys. We had fought for pride, we weren’t going to play just for pride,” he said.

After three seasons, the American Conference folded and Wizbicki signed with the NFL Green Bay Packers for the princely sum of $5,500 a year. He was a Packer for a single season in 1950 for coach Vince Lombardi, again as a defensive back, playing 12 games.

In 1951, he substitute taught in Milwaukee. But with a wife and baby daughter he had dragged halfway across America, he wasn’t satisfied. His Packer connection introduced him to a liquor-marketing job, but that didn’t work either. Then he signed on with a California-based winery as its distributor rep in Milwaukee and the Upper Midwest. “And I stayed in the wine business until I retired in the mid-1980s,” he said.

Wizbicki and his wife Mary always had planned to return to the East Coast. But their daughter Gloria by now was teaching in Lake Nebagamon, and alone after a divorce.
Her mother decided she needed support from her parents, and Alex learned he was moving further north than he’d ever imagined. “My wife was the driving force,” he said.
He took a job as a rep for a liquor distributor in Superior, this time selling to retailers in a four-state area. Since 1991, he’s worked part-time at Keyport Liquors, lending the retailer a special talent for marketing wine. Mary Wizbicki died in January 2004, and Alex now lives with his daughter and son-in-law, Donald Leighton in Superior. The couple has two adult children. The younger, Alexa, 20, plays basketball at The College of St. Scholastica, apparently inheriting the family’s athletic genes.