Walter Szykitka

Walter Szykitka died peacefully, at the age of 93, at NYU Langone Kimmel Pavilion, New York City, on February 10, 2025, after a brief hospitalization for a recurrence of lymphoma. Walter was born June 24,1931, in Millville, New Jersey, to Myron and Anna (Lezan) Szykitka. Myron immigrated in 1907 from what was then Austria-Hungary (now western Ukraine), from a village in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains. Anna was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, to immigrants from villages in the same region. Raised as a Jehovah's Witness, Walter was expelled from public school in 1941, during World War II, for refusing, on religious grounds, to salute the U.S. flag. During this period, he and other local expelled Witnesses attended a special school in Lakewood, New Jersey (set up by the Witnesses), where he lived and studied during the week. A landmark case, brought by Jehovah's Witnesses opposing the expulsions, went to the Supreme Court in 1943. The court ruled that compulsory flag salute policies in public schools were an unconstitutional violation of freedom of speech and religion. Walter returned to public school, where he was on the Millville High School tennis team and graduated in 1948.

Around 1950, Walter was accepted into Bethel, World Headquarters of Jehovah's Witnesses (then in Brooklyn Heights), where he lived until 1958, when he married Margaret (Peggy) Blomgren, who was from Milltown, Wisconsin, and also living at Bethel. They had two daughters: Anya, born in 1961, and Kirsten, born in 1962. Walter and Peggy separated in 1968, and both left Jehovah's Witnesses around the same time.

From a young age, Walter was passionate about travel, with an unending curiosity about people in other lands and a belief in the capacity of travel to promote understanding and broaden horizons. Over many years, Walter and his second wife, Barbara Siegel (whom he met in 1968 and married in 1993), made many journeys worldwide, including throughout Europe and to Japan, Kenya, Thailand, Egypt, and Peru, and to China with one of the first U.S. tourist groups to visit that country, in 1973.

In addition, much of Walter's professional life was spent in the travel industry. In 1958, he co-organized all the domestic and international group travel to the largest religious convention ever held in New York City, with 250,000 attending. From 1963 to 1966, he oversaw creation of Dayton's Travel Service in Minneapolis, the first travel agency owned by a department store. In 1967, he organized and personally escorted Twin Cities WCCO Radio personality Howard Viken and a group of 60 on a luxury tour of the Mediterranean. From 1980 to 1985, he was director of international sales at Park East Tours, based in New York City, organizing tours to East Africa. Over many years, and through many agencies and consulting opportunities, Walter organized and marketed group tours to Europe, the UK, Kenya, Tanzania, Nigeria, Swaziland, India, Egypt, Hawaii, Mexico, and Thailand, for medical doctors, nurses, psychiatrists, zoologists, students, unionists, photographers, teachers, firefighters, and art collectors. In the mid-1980s, he started his own travel agency, Global Expeditions, focusing on custom, special-interest tours. In addition to travel, Walter was a consultant on international trade and business development as well as nonprofit projects, working with partners and clients in Spain, Japan, Mauritius, Peru, Bolivia, the Dominican Republic, Switzerland, Kenya, Greece, and the U.S. Over his lifetime, he traveled to more than 45 countries and lived for a time on the island of Ibiza.

Walter was a writer and editor of both fiction and nonfiction. Some of his published books include the nonfiction bestseller Public Works: A Handbook for Self-Reliant Living (Links, 1974), which he promoted in an appearance on the Mike Douglas Show, How to Be Your Own Boss: The Complete Handbook for Starting and Running a Small Business (editor, New American Library, 1980), Without a Lawyer (with Steven Sarshik, New American Library, 1980), and The Big Book of Self-Reliant Living: Advice and Information on Just About Everything You Need to Know to Live on Planet Earth (Lyons, 2004). He also wrote a twelve-part series, Pursuing the Unexplained (1977), that was syndicated to more than 30 magazines and newspapers worldwide by the New York Times Syndicated Features. His fiction included short stories and treatments for novels, which were greatly inspired by John Steinbeck, as well as screenplays. He also wrote a lively account of a 1961 trip he took with his new in-laws to a remote hunting camp in Northern Wisconsin, which he adapted into a short book titled Thanksgiving at Cable Hunting Camp (2010).

Walter was passionate about music. He learned the guitar as a teenager, playing regularly for the rest of his life, accompanying himself on songs he wrote as well as on a wide array of country, folk, and rock songs by Hank Williams; Johnny Cash; Peter, Paul & Mary; and Bob Dylan, among many others. His daughters have vivid early memories of his singing "Puff the Magic Dragon" and other folk songs for them. In addition to Dylan, some of his favorite musicians included Frank Sinatra, Dave Brubeck, Stan Getz, the Beatles, Jackson Browne, and Bruce Springsteen. He was also known to be a wonderful dancer, taking tango lessons and often telling the story of learning a variation of the traditional Greek hasapiko dance from workers at an Athens hotel in the 1960s.

Walter had a deep love of, and fascination with, New York City and its endless diversity and excitement. He lived in Greenwich Village in the 1960s, in an apartment on Barrow Street that became legendary for its open, welcoming spirit and for the community that regularly gathered there to play music, discuss politics, and talk late into the night. This period unleashed the dreamer in Walter, but his idealism was grounded in pragmatic solutions to issues of the survival of humanity and all life. His buoyant intelligence contributed to his ability to see opportunity where others saw futility. Walter's warmth and easy communication style made him a natural magnet for people from all walks of life—from shop owners in his neighborhood to professional associates—and he made many friends of longstanding along the way. His curiosity was boundless, and his kindness profound.

Wrestling with his early religious beliefs and absorbing the idealism of the 1960s were key in shaping Walter's life philosophy. R. Buckminster Fuller was another significant inspiration for his lifelong interest in egalitarianism and self-reliance, especially as a foundation for sustainability. Walter dedicated himself to furthering the idea that Earth's resources could meet all of humanity's basic needs if liberated from the shackles of financial agendas. In 2017, he was invited to present a briefing on his Whole Earth Design Project (WEDP) at the U.N. International Conference on Sustainable Environment, Clean Energy, and Safe Mobility. The ultimate aim of the WEDP (which is loosely modeled on Fuller's World Game), and the related Coalescence Project, is to design, in cyberspace, an ecologically sustainable economic system capable of providing every individual with all of life's essentials (food, water, energy, etc.), as a template for transforming the economic system in the real world. Always ahead of his time, his lens on labor put the emphasis on work that has "life-sustaining value." May this project, and Walter's legacy, serve as a vision to strive for at a time when cooperation offers our only chance for survival. May we harness Walter's benevolent worldview whenever we find ourselves adrift and renew our commitment to positive action when pessimism threatens.

Walter is survived by his cherished wife, Barbara Siegel (Manhattan); his two adoring and adored daughters, Anya (Brooklyn) and Kirsten (Port Townsend, WA); their mother, Margaret Lee Szykitka (Port Townsend, WA); Kirsten's husband, Joshua Sage; and many cousins from the Lezan family. Cremation took place February 26 in Queens, and a celebratory reception for Walter was held April 13 at Novíta restaurant, Manhattan.

"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete." —R. Buckminster Fuller

"Imagine there's no countries, it isn't hard to do; nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too. Imagine all the people living life in peace." —John Lennon

Please take a minute to explore Walter's website: https://thecoalescence.net/

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