At 89, Lower Burrell woman still thrives on reading and learning

There’s a method to the madness in Jacqueline Kowalik’s Lower Burrell basement.

Akin to a small bookstore or library, the basement holds four towering bookshelves in the back corner.

The reason? Kowalik, 89, says she just can’t stop reading.

“I can’t say I never met a book I didn’t like, but it’s pretty evident — there’s not too many I didn’t like,” she said while standing among the bookshelves.

The shelves’ offerings range from nonfiction books about religion, philosophy or psychology; to biographies, history and music books, plus decades worth of National Geographic magazines.

A separate bookshelf on the other end of the basement holds fiction works.

In total, Kowalik estimates she has about 3,500 books and 70 years worth of National Geographic publications.

While her densely populated shelves are well organized, it’s still a lot to maneuver through if she’s looking for a specific book.

“Sometimes I can’t find it,” Kowalik said, “but I keep looking until I find it.”

Born in Arnold and raised in New Kensington, Kowalik said she was a teen when her world opened up to books.

“When I went from eighth grade to ninth grade, I was required to do a book report every six weeks,” she said. “I didn’t know what in the world to do in the library.”

Kowalik started with nonfiction and biographies “and it took off from there.” She believes her first book report was about jazz composer George Gershwin.

She graduated from Ken-Hi in 1953 and got a job typing fire insurance policies in Arnold. There, a couple of coworkers introduced her to John Kowalik, whom she married the following year. They were together for 63 years until John died in 2017.

Together, they raised six children: Katherine, Charles, Diane, John Jr., Paul and David. Kowalik taught her children the importance of learning and curiosity, and recalled Sunday mornings when they would get up early to go to church and then spend time together on the tennis court.

“I like to read too, but not as much as her,” said her daughter Diane.

As Kowalik’s family grew — she has six grandchildren, and four great-grandchildren — so did her book collection. She recalled buying books from Gee Bee, an old department store in Harrison, and scouring advertisements for book sales. She remembers filling bags for a few dollars at sales in Penn Hills, Greensburg and Oakmont.

“I always went with her to book sales, and found one for me,” Diane said.

Kowalik was especially fond of a spring sale at Peoples Library in New Kensington.

“I’d wait until the last day to go over and get some nonfiction and some goodies,” she said.

Her library ranges from psychology texts to biographies to histories of Pennsylvania and Pittsburgh. It takes Kowalik about 2 or 3 days to finish a book — “it depends on how much highlighting I do,” she said.

John built her bookshelves; she joked that he “put up with my reading addiction.”

“I didn’t go to college, so I thought, I’m going to get educated,” she said of her desire to collect and read a wide array of books.

The couple’s six children attended schools in the Burrell School District, where she volunteered and then worked at the high school library in the late 1960s and early ‘70s.

At the high school, Kowalik helped put 20,000 additional books into circulation.

“I knew that library pretty good,” she said.

Kowalik is writing her own book with the information learned from what she reads. She aspires to be a polymath — knowledgeable in art, music, science and literature.

In her free time, she crochets and toys with the piano and keyboard.

“Curiosity killed the cat?” she said “Well, I should have been dead a few times.”