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July 9th at 5:30pm in St.Casimir Church (Didžioji g. 34, Vilnius 01128), a Holy Mass was celebrated by Father Antanas Saulaitis in memory of Dr. Joseph P. Kazickas (1918.04.16-2014.07.09).
He was a devoted family man, a statesman, a generous philanthropist, who led a wonderfully full, productive and exciting life.
"My parents bequeathed in me a joy in living that I've never lost. They lived their lives according to four principles: love and support inside the family, hard work every day, a thirst for knowledge and the relentless pursuit of freedom. They never put these beliefs into words; they simply lived by them and the example they gave me was their greatest legacy."-Joseph P. Kazickas from Odyssey of Hope
Joseph P. Kazickas learned the joy of giving and generosity from his earliest years. He remembered his mother silently giving away her last bits of bread to a beggar. His father, Mykolas, who had a small shop in the front of their two room house a tiny village in Lithuania, always gave away his sugar and coffee goods to those who could not afford to pay. He was a kind, sensitive and gentle man and his death when Joseph was only 11 years old was a tragic loss.
But all these wordless lessons in Christian charity sank into his child's mind and stayed with him for the rest of his life.
With a successful career as a business entrepreneur, Kazickas joined the Lithuanian Foundation in Chicago and was on its board of directors for 16 years. In newly independent Lithuania in the early 1990s, recognizing the importance of technology, he donated more than a thousand computers to schools all over Lithuania. Committed to working full time for the betterment of his homeland, he founded the Kazickas Family Foundation in 1998.