Dad, this is your story, gathered by the people who love you. Every chapter comes from your own words, with photos from all of us. Happy 80th birthday.
Love, Adam, Jesse, Sarah, Abel, Noah, Henry, Karl and Jane
You have been Marek, Meir, Motyl, Motty, Légionnaire Morony, Marian, Motyle, on the pickleball court Mariano, and to your grandsons, Saba. Eighty years, four countries, seven languages, and one boy who still can’t sit still. “Let us just say that I do know who I am, most of the time.”
80Years
7Languages
4Countries
1968First program
1983In CAP since
Chapter 1
A Tenor Named Grey
Your father's story
Every story has a before, and yours begins with a voice.
Your father, Adam Motyl, was a timber expert and soccer player from Gostynin, a small town near Warsaw. In September 1939 he was defending the Warsaw Citadel when the city fell. In a German prisoner camp he picked up a second name, Szary, “grey,” the way Poles told one Motyl from another. He escaped east, only to be arrested by the Soviets as a spy and sent to the timber camps of Siberia, where spit froze before it hit the ground.
Adam Motyl-Szary, 1982
What saved him was his singing. Locked in a Soviet prison, the other inmates chanted “Adam, sing!” and he did, and got solitary for it. But Russians love a choir, and somewhere along the way someone important heard that tenor. He was pulled out of Siberia into a military choir near Moscow, then marched with the Polish army from Warsaw all the way to Berlin.
In conquered Berlin, 1945
“Adam, sing!”
He had lost everything: his first wife, Yoheved, and their little boy, Sender. In 1945, posted to a plundered military hospital in Łódź, he and a band of young doctors sang for textile workers in exchange for blankets for the wounded. In the audience was a 25-year-old blonde bookkeeper named Józefa Potocka. He fell in love. A year later, they had a son.
Adam and Józefa on their wedding day
Those were dangerous years. Once, rebels surrounded his convoy of livestock for the hospital kitchens in the middle of a forest. With rifles pointed both ways, he let them take the cows, on one condition: their leader had to sign a detailed receipt.
And he never stopped singing. In Łódź he sang in the Russian and Jewish Folk Choirs led by his good friend, the composer Shaul Berezowski, and in the Łódź Opera. In Israel, Berezowski found him again, and he sang in shows and choirs, including shows by Dzigan & Schumacher, well past his retirement. “You could see a change, a look of bliss on his face when he sang.”
In costume for the operaWith the choir and Shaul BerezowskiHis Łódź Opera card
Chapter 2
Jutka
Łódź · Holon · Northborough
If your father gave you your voice, your mother gave you your nerve.
Józefa Maria Potocka was born into a branch of one of Poland's most famous noble names, the Potockis, though her branch had long since lost the money, because “one of her male ancestors married a commoner and was disinherited.” Everyone called her Jutka: “a beautiful blond, modern woman.”
She had instincts, and she trusted them. One evening the hospital's officers and doctors were invited to a celebration at a villa in the countryside. Jutka had a bad feeling about it and begged her husband not to go. They stayed home. That night, gunmen surrounded the villa and opened fire. Many died.
Jutka, 1944
Adam had wanted to name you after his own father, Isaac Mayer, and settled on a Polish version. When you were born, she looked at the birth certificate her husband had filled out, Izydor Marian, and simply ignored it. You were Marek to her, and that was that. “My father, of course, gave in.”
She ran the household the way she did everything, with her own two hands. Live carp waited in the bathtub before Friday dinner, and chickens were plucked and butchered on the fourth-floor windowsill. Shirts were pressed with an iron heated on the coals, with water sprayed from her mouth: “who needed spray bottles?” She knew which mushrooms to pick after a rain, how to dry them on strings from the ceiling, and how to make a cold remedy from an ant hill. She sewed handbags on the side to make ends meet. And she made the schnitzel you still chase to this day.
Jutka
“who needed spray bottles?”
Adam and Jutka
When the Red Pioneers refused to take you because of your behavior grade, it was Jutka who marched into the director's office and pleaded until they let you in.
In Israel she started over in her late thirties, in a new language, and went to work at Lodzia, the country's largest hosiery factory. Every Saturday she and Adam walked an hour to the beach at Bat Yam and spent the day swimming and walking by the sea. They kept it up for years.
After Adam died in 1983, you brought her to America. In 1985 she sold the Holon apartment and joined her two sons in Northborough, Massachusetts, where she lived into her eighties. Every week she was with her family: you and Jan, and the grandchildren, to whom Jutka had become Safta.
In memory
Remembering Jan
Your little brother
Jan was your little brother, nine years younger. On the long journey out of Poland in 1957, and through the first years in Holon, he walked with an arm wrapped around your leg. In the Holon heat, you carried your own faucet handle to drink from yard taps, and when Jan couldn't climb the fence, passed him the water mouth to mouth. Later Jan followed you to the same French school in Jaffa, the Collège des Frères, and the two of you walked the hour to school so you could spend the bus fare on falafel. In the late 1970s he served in the Israeli army.
Little Jan walked with an arm wrapped around your leg.
Jan built his life in Massachusetts too. He owned his own company, Suburban Fire Protection, an industrial sprinkler fitting business, and he raised his two kids, Coleen and Niles Motyl-Szary, in Northborough.
Jan was a free spirit, and he loved to laugh. We miss him, and we remember him today alongside you.
Chapter 3
The Boy Who Walked to Warsaw
Łódź, 1946–1957
You were born on October 16, 1946, in that same military hospital. You were Marek for your whole Polish childhood, until the family left in 1957, and “never knew my real names until 1959.”
Home was four rooms up a dark stairwell at Narutowicza 18, and through the bathroom wall you could hear the Łódź Philharmonic rehearsing. Your father taught you to ride a bike by running behind you with a broomstick jammed under the seat. When the family's leather strap, known as “the Discipline,” got a little too much use, young Marek quietly fed it to the furnace. Nobody ever mentioned it again.
Łódź, 1948
You were a straight-A student with one exception: behavior. At summer camp you were the entire Penal Squadron and reported for muster every morning: “Penal Squadron, members – one, all present.”
The courtyard at Narutowicza 18, where you learned to ride a bike
“Penal Squadron, members – one, all present.”
Międzyzdroje, 1949With your parents at Morskie Oko, near Zakopane
Summers meant the Baltic, at Gdynia and Międzyzdroje. You dove head first into the waves and popped up asking, “Did you see my butt or my head, or was I really deep underwater?” Winters meant Zakopane, in the Tatra Mountains. On the first trip, Dad went ahead and booked the hotel under the name Szary, so Mom and Marek couldn't find the reservation. “There was a bit of a row and the word ‘idiot’ came up a few times.”
On the Baltic, 1949On Dad's shoulders
Your first crush was Ewa, a tall, blond classmate with two braids who laughed at your silliness. She was the only person you were sorry to leave behind in 1957.
Second grade, 1953. Ewa is in the second row, with the braidsSummer camp, 1955
At seven, sent out for bread, you bought a bottle of lemonade too and simply kept walking, toward Warsaw, eighty miles away. You hitched a ride on a farmer's cart, napped in the fields, and got as far as the town of Głowno before deciding the adventure was over. You rode the train home locked in the bathroom, were caught at the gate at 1:30 in the morning, and waited at the police station for your father, who walked in and “just hugged and kissed me.”
Chapter 4
A Jewish Cat
The voyage, 1957
On May Day 1957, when Poland briefly opened its doors, the family left with two wooden crates, a moped to sell, and your little brother, Jan. The old ship out of Szczecin rolled so badly that every passenger was seasick except the crew — and you, ten years old, spending the voyage at the bow with the wind in your face.
Then came France: a train through Paris, the first baguettes and cheese of your life, licorice in an immigrant camp near Montpellier, and finally a gleaming Italian ship with handsome crew in white and more pasta than anyone had ever seen. In Haifa, on your first walk in the new country, you pointed at a stray: “Dad, look – a Jewish cat.”
Haifa, where the family landed in 1957
“Dad, look – a Jewish cat.”
Chapter 5
Falafel and Beetles
Holon, 1957–1966
Israel was younger than you were. Within weeks Marek became Meir, “shines,” and you were chattering in Hebrew. You spent your afternoons in the sand dunes behind the housing blocks, racing desert beetles through Lego mazes while jackals howled at night. On hot days you looked after little Jan, who walked with an arm wrapped around your leg.
The family started out with Dad's older brother, Shabtai, in Rishon LeZion. Shabtai had come to Palestine in 1926 and translated Motyl, “butterfly,” into Hebrew: Parpari. In Holon, cooking eggs for Jan on the little primus stove, you set the balcony on fire and put it out yourself with a big towel. You were a Red Pioneer, after all. You saw your very first television program in 1960, at a classmate's apartment.
On Friday nights, the neighborhood kids walked miles to someone's rented hall and danced until they couldn't stand: rock 'n' roll, cha-cha, tango, and samba, your favorite. Then came the jeans and the Elvis haircut.
Your second runaway was more ambitious. You picked the lock of your piggy bank with a kitchen knife, took your father's prized bicycle, and rode to Tel Aviv. You ate two full falafels at one stand, two more at another, and caught a shared taxi to your uncle's house with the bike tied to the roof. Asked why, you told your parents the truth: you just wanted to ride the bike and eat falafel.
“How cool with my jeans and Elvis-style haircut”
Marek became Meir, “shines.”
Uncle Shabtai and Aunt Batsheva Parpari with Dani and EdniDad and JanA studio portrait in IsraelAs a teenager
Chapter 6
The Choirboy Who Released the Beetles
Collège des Frères, Jaffa, 1958–1966
At eleven you were sent to board at a French Catholic school a few hundred yards from the ancient port of Jaffa, where Solomon's cedars once came ashore. You spoke no French. Six months later you did. The French Brothers wrote your name the French way, MOTYL Marian, and to your classmates you have been Motyl ever since.
Collège des Frères, Jaffa
Your classmates were Catholic, Orthodox, Muslim and Jewish, from a dozen countries, and “we were all getting along just fine.” You were, in your own words, “an excellent student but a bad boy.” You released beetles into the church from the choir loft. You also sang the Kyrie Eleison solo at Easter high mass in a falsetto so pure that everyone thought you were a girl. “I did not care. The brothers were proud of me!”
Swimming in the Red Sea at Eilat, 1965
“An excellent student but a bad boy.”
In 1964 the whole class of thirteen went on strike against their physics teacher, Mr. Trau, whom nobody could follow. The principal had no one else to send. So you and two classmates, Meloul and Lagnado, studied each chapter on Monday and Tuesday and taught it to the class on Wednesday and Thursday. Six weeks later the principal relented and sent Frère Michel to help. Most of them finished the year with good grades in physics.
Eighth grade, 1960Mr. Trau, the physics teacher, on the leftWith Joseph and Roger on a field trip, 1964
In 1966 you graduated with the French Baccalauréat, top of your class, with honors.
Chapter 7
Légionnaire Morony
Paris, 1966–1971
You landed in Paris at nineteen, and within a week, in what you call your last walkabout, you had joined the French Foreign Legion, on October 13, 1966. The recruiter decided your collection of names was “simply not enough” and renamed you Légionnaire Morony Thomas. You learned to shout it at six paces.
Out of the Legion by 1967, you studied economics and law at the Sorbonne and Dauphine and were there for the barricades of May 1968, a proud “soixante-huitard.” That January you had passed an aptitude test at Bull General Electric, back when there was no such thing as a computer science degree. By February 1968 you were programming a machine with five kilobytes of memory, fed by punched cards, your handwritten code typed onto them by keypunch operators.
1967, just out of the Foreign Legion
The recruiter decided your collection of names was “simply not enough.”
Chapter 8
Starting Over, Again
Massachusetts
In February 1971 Honeywell invited you to Wellesley, and you — the boy from Narutowicza Street — became a New Englander. At Honeywell, among the keypunch operators, you met Jane Wood. “One of those very nice women was my future first wife.” They fell in love, moved to Paris together for a short while, and then came back to Massachusetts to start a family.
“One of those very nice women was my future first wife.”
1971, your first year in America
Jane, newly arrived in ParisJane in Paris
You earned your MBA at Babson in 1975, the same year you and Jane welcomed your son, Adam, on August 27. Your daughter, Jesse, followed on April 24, 1978.
The family put down roots. Home was a house on Thoreau Road in Northborough, in a fun, safe neighborhood, with a backyard pool where Adam and Jesse spent much of their childhood. And when a missed promotion to CEO stung in the summer of 1989, you didn't sulk. You took thirty days of vacation, a French textbook called Learn Spanish in 30 Days, and sat by that pool learning a new language, “taking a break from time to time to swim with my kids and their friends.”
“Taking a break from time to time to swim with my kids and their friends.”
Chapter 9
Full Throttle
Northborough and beyond, as your kids know you
Ask your children what it was like growing up with you, and the word that comes back is gusto. You do nothing halfway.
You drove your Trans Am like it was a race car. You took your Bronco off road at the drop of a hat, whether or not there was a trail.
Then there was the monster truck show. Partway through, the announcer opened the course to amateur entries. You excused yourself to use the bathroom. The next thing the family knew, the Bronco was rolling out onto the stadium floor with you at the wheel, headed straight for the mud course in front of the whole crowd. “So crazy,” Adam says. It was also completely you.
“Always willing to take an adventurous path.”
Given a safe path and an adventurous one, you take the adventure every time. It’s why you became a sailor and a pilot, and why that boy from Narutowicza Street grew into a real world traveler. You brought your kids along for the ride, on wonderful vacations: France, Hilton Head, cruises through the Caribbean.
And every year, without fail, there was the family’s A-frame and bunkhouse on Brickyard Cove, in East Harpswell, Maine: days of swimming and boating on the water. The family still goes back every year, to this day.
Ready for takeoff
In the air, you were just as hard to miss. Out on a fun flight, you would swing over the house in Northborough and buzz the neighborhood, flying low and rocking the wings to wave at your kids below.
On the water, you sailed in and around Boston and Cape Cod, but your heart is in the Caribbean. Your favorite spot is the Soggy Dollar Bar on Jost Van Dyke, in the British Virgin Islands. There’s no dock: you anchor off White Bay and swim in, paying with whatever wet bills made it ashore. You’ve known the owner since well before the bar became famous.
Chapter 10
Fifty Years in Technology
The career
Your career ran through the whole history of computing. You started in machine language and worked your way through COBOL, FORTRAN, client/server, groupware and data warehouses. You worked in the nuclear industry, training plant operators and hosting Russian nuclear executives after Chernobyl, in Russian. At Stratus Computer you ran worldwide sales force automation, enterprise systems and corporate networks, and later you were a Director at AnswerThink Consulting. You founded your own company, Gamatron, which built design software for fire protection engineers. You took graduate courses at WPI and MIT, and taught PASCAL and C++ to engineers.
Fifty years in tech
You retired at 53, in 1999. It didn't take.
Chapter 11
Catch Me If You Can
Civil Air Patrol
Along the way you earned your commercial, instrument and multi-engine ratings and became a flight instructor. In 1983 you joined the Civil Air Patrol, the Air Force Auxiliary, and when you moved to Florida you joined again. You rose to Lieutenant Colonel, flew as a mission check pilot, ran IT for the 3,500-member Florida Wing, and in 2017 were named CAP's National Public Affairs Officer of the Year. On some days your job was to be the “target of interest,” flying a little Cessna across the sky while fighter jets practiced finding you.
Lt Col Marian I. Motyl-Szary, CAP
“Target of interest.”
Chapter 12
Once a Programmer, Always a Programmer
MassMonopoly
In 2003 you and Adam started MassMonopoly Media Productions together, father and son building websites and online stores. The tools changed and you didn't. “I am not using a teletypewriter or keypunched cards but a powerful gaming computer with four screens, one of 42 inches... For an old programmer it's all the same.” These days you test every new AI model the week it comes out and write about it in four languages.
“For an old programmer it's all the same.”
Chapter 13
Mariano
Naples
Around 2009 you traded snow for the Gulf. In Naples you ate lunch on the patio watching the lizards, watched dolphins hunt twenty feet off the pier, and took up pickleball, in early 2020, as “Mariano.” Somewhere in those later years you were also married, for a few years, to Nava, your girlfriend from the Jaffa school days. Your grandsons stayed connected: Henry Arthur James, Jesse and Karl's boy, and Abel and Noah, Adam and Sarah's. To them, you are Saba. It was for them, and because your kids kept asking, that you finally sat down to write it all. Sarah, you note, makes schnitzel as well as your mother did.
With Henry at the Naples Zoo, eight years apart
Sarah, you note, makes schnitzel as well as your mother did.
The grandsons loved it too. Swimming off the Naples Pier Beach, with three dolphins patrolling twenty feet away and pelicans dive-bombing for lunch, Henry announced, “I want to live here!”
Chapter 14
Three Flights Up
Paris and Île-de-France, 2011–2025
Paris had already had one turn at making you a young man. Decades later, you went back to see what else it could do.
Between 2011 and 2025 you returned several times, and from 2022 through 2025 you settled in for three months each summer. Your address was 24 rue des Meuniers in Montreuil, in an apartment generously offered by Miriam Phillip, Mimi, your childhood friend from Jaffa. She had been one class below you at school. More than half a century later, she was helping you feel at home in France again.
The apartment was on the third floor. No elevator. Every bottle of wine had to be carried up personally, which gave grocery shopping a small athletic component.
You loved slipping back into the rhythms of your university days in the late sixties. There was the morning expedition to the bakery: a fresh baguette, perhaps one with poppy seeds, perhaps sesame. These were decisions worth taking seriously. In central Vincennes, about nine minutes away on foot, the Monoprix across from the RER supplied groceries, cheeses, different hams, and wine. A few good things to eat, something good to drink, and a baguette under your arm. You remembered how to do this.
A little farther along your own street, at number 38, were Mimi and her companion, Pierre. Their garden became a familiar gathering place for dinners with Mimi, Pierre, her daughter Audrey, and often other friends. Early mornings brought coffee with Audrey (and her cigarette) before she took her son, Clément, to elementary school. You stayed long enough to become part of the everyday timetable.
Then there was Léon Rochfeld, your classmate from Jaffa and your friend since 1960. Lunch with Léon came with an extensive walking program.
Léon was an expert walker and an extraordinary historian. Paris, in his company, had something to explain on every wall.
“See this plaque? That’s where Victor Hugo lived.”
A little farther on, another pause: a plaque marking where the Nazis had shot two members of the French Resistance in 1944. With Léon, you learned to stop and read. A pleasant street could hold a terrible story, and someone had made sure it would be remembered.
You walked along the Seine, out toward La Défense and its towers and Grande Arche, where the great historic axis stretches back toward the Louvre.1 Paris offered plenty of room for Léon to keep going.
Under La Grande Arche, La Défense
“OK, Léon, I am on my knees. I am taking the métro home.”
Other outings took you to the Buttes-Chaumont, where an old gypsum quarry had been transformed into a park of hills, cliffs, and greenery. Beautiful, certainly. Also more climbing.2
Montparnasse offered another attraction: a “liter of mussels” at Chez Léon. Lunch with Léon, at Léon. Convenient, at least, for remembering the name.
Eventually even you reached your limit.
“OK, Léon, I am on my knees. I am taking the métro home.”
Your appetite for discovery remained healthy, with one exception. You learned that you had no taste for truffles. Everyone around you could rave about them. You were quite happy to let them.
Some visits took you farther afield, aboard the Transilien to Bouffémont, north of Paris. The journey runs from the Gare du Nord on line H, through the northern suburbs to Bouffémont-Moisselles. At the other end were Yadwiga, another friend from Jaffa, and her husband, Jean Kergoat.3
A visit meant setting aside half a day. There would be a gourmet dinner with several courses, several wines, and long discussions about everything. With old friends and that much to talk about, there was no reason to hurry through either the meal or the conversation.
Jaffa had scattered its schoolchildren across countries and continents. Here you were, decades later, meeting again over coffee, in a garden, at a restaurant table, or at the end of a suburban train ride. To these friends, you were still Motyl.
Three months each summer gave you time for all of it. And after a day keeping up with Léon, there were always those three flights of stairs waiting to welcome you home.
Chapter 15
A New Chapter, Close to Home
Holden, Massachusetts, 2026
After many good years in Naples, you decided it was time to be near your family again. In September 2026 you moved home to Massachusetts, to Holden, a short drive from your children and grandsons.
Now you are close enough for the everyday things: a dinner together, a conversation with the grandsons, an afternoon that doesn't have to be planned around a flight. We have only just started making new memories with you here. This chapter has just begun.
Dinner with friends, back in MassachusettsYour new room, back home in MassachusettsCelebrating your 80th, together at Arturo's — October 16, 2026.
From the Family
Birthday wishes from your kids and their families.
Adam
Dad, happy 80th birthday. You've been my inspiration my whole life, my role model, and a wonderful dad. You taught me to work hard, to give 100% every time, and never to settle for less than my best. You taught me to stand on my own two feet, to think like an entrepreneur, and above all to look out for the people I love. So much of who I am, as a husband, a father, and a business owner, comes straight from you. I'm proud to be your son, and so grateful for everything you've given me. Here's to 80 amazing years and many more together.
Love, Adam
Jesse
Happy birthday, Daddy! I'm so happy to be celebrating with you tonight, and that I have gotten to spend the last 48 years with you. So thank you for being my dad and being the best dad ever. Happy birthday!
Love, Jesse
Sarah
Happy 80th birthday to a man who has truly lived his life! Not only are you one of the most adventurous people I know, you are kind, generous, and a wonderful person. I am so lucky you are a part of my life story and hope you know how much you're loved. Here's to celebrating 80 wonderful years and many more to come!
Love, Sarah
Abel
It's been great being able to see you again, even if that means carrying a bunch of heavy boxes around. I do enjoy spending time talking with you. Have a wonderful 80th birthday!
Love, Abel
Noah
It has been so nice these past few months finally having you in our lives. It has been great being able to spend time with you and talk. I hope you have a great 80th birthday.
Love, Noah
Henry
Happy 80th birthday, Saba. I've had fun with you in Florida. I hope you and Gigi are doing good. Bye.
Love, Henry
Karl
Happy birthday, Marian. Just a short little video, as requested by your wonderful, devoted children, Adam and Jesse. I wish you all the best on this wondrous and joyous occasion. I hope for many more birthdays to come, and I hope that we get to indulge in some of the finest wines and the greatest cake. I look forward to celebrating this day with you and with your family. I wish you all the love and the peace of the world. Well, actually, of the universe. Take care. Bye.
Love, Karl
Jane
You saved me from the poor house and I am forever grateful.
Happy happy birthday, you make 80 look amazing! ❤️
Love, Jane
From Your Friends
Two friends, two continents, more than seventy years of friendship between them, sent their wishes for this day.
Leon Your friend since 1960
Leon has been your friend since 1960, the Jaffa school years, and is ten months older, a fact you never let him forget. Since you were always the one with the camera, Leon dug out the pictures he thought you wouldn't have.
“When I think that we've been friends since 1960 I realize that I am old, and that your dad is much younger (10 months). He does not forget to remind me!!! 😠 Nevertheless, wish him a very good birthday from me.”
— Leon
Bob & Gerry Corriveau Civil Air Patrol, Marco Island Squadron
Lt Col Bob Corriveau flew alongside you in the Civil Air Patrol's Marco Island Squadron. Since you were the squadron's Public Affairs Officer, and the one taking the pictures, Bob had to dig deep for this one.
Marian and Bob with their Florida Wing awards
Happy Birthday! “Bon Fête Mon Ami!!”
Sorry we are not with you on this Very Special Day. However, we are with you in Spirit. Looking back on 15 years of friendship, Gerry and I will always remember the many philosophical conversations and discussions we have had over dinner and a glass of wine. We will miss those occasions.
Regarding CAP, there are many great memories from past Wing Conferences, Search and Rescue Exercises, Coastal Patrols, Subordinate Unit Inspections and Level Two/Three Courses. You were always a great partner and comrade on these adventures. And let’s not forget the many Squadron Christmas parties!
We will carry on but it won’t be the same without you.
We are very happy that your plans and arrangements worked out so well for you. Enjoy your retirement and your family in Massachusetts. Hope to see you when we next visit New England.
Bob & Gerry Corriveau
A Few More Favorites
In Your Own Words
“I was too busy doing so many things that I thought my epitaph would say, ‘Here lays a man who has done everything…’”
