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Friends, family say goodbye to Kaluza
By Joe Gorman
CANFIELD
Joe Kaluza didn’t have to work at being a hero. Instead, it was his work and the way he supported his family that made him a hero, said the minister who presided over his funeral Monday.
“Real heroes are the ordinary people who work hard to take care of their family,” said the Rev. David Parry, pastor of Paradise United Church of Christ. “That’s what Joe did. That’s what we call love.”
Kaluza, who was shot and paralyzed in March 2008 while delivering a bank deposit after his shift as a manager at the KFC restaurant on South Avenue, died Thursday at 49.
The two people convicted of robbing and shooting Kaluza are both serving long prison terms.
The Rev. Mr. Parry said Kaluza’s family wanted to make sure as they said goodbye to him that they did not dwell on the robbery that took his freedom of mobility. Instead they wanted to remember the man who worked hard to take care of his wife, Lisa, and his two special-needs children.
Lisa died in 2013.
That “tragedy,” as Mr. Parry called it, and how Kaluza handled it, was just another example of the life he led and work ethic he had, he said.
“He never gave up,” he said. “If anything, he worked harder.”
The doors were open in the church, and Kaluza was in an open coffin bedecked by flowers as the building was filled with sunshine on a spring morning.
A great niece sang a song in tribute to Kaluza, and a nephew, Tyler Fitzgerald, praised his uncle, saying Kaluza was his “inspiration” for his attitude after he was wounded in the attack.
“Uncle Joe had a reason to be depressed, but he didn’t look at it that way. He looked at it as a second chance,” Fitzgerald said. “He still looked at everything positive.”
Fitzgerald said Kaluza was overwhelmed by the support he and his family received from the community. Whenever he was in public and people called him an inspiration, Kaluza was glad that he could help people, Fitzgerald said.
It is Kaluza’s example that is driving him through medical school to be a surgeon, Fitzgerald said.
“It’s hard to believe he’s gone,” Fitzgerald said. “You were my uncle, my godfather, my inspiration and my hero.”
Kaluza also knew how to “graciously receive,” Mr. Parry said, which he said is a gift that heroes also have.
“Joe was a gift to all of us,” he said.