‘He never met a stranger’: Daughter remembers father, a longtime Chicago-area resident, who died in Fort Myers Beach during Hurricane Ian
A former Franklin Park man remembered as a lover of all things Chicago died last week while trying to flee his Florida home where he’d been riding out Hurricane Ian.
According to his daughter, Michelle Schuline, Mitch Pacyna, 74, and his partner, Mary Wojciechowski, lived in Fort Myers Beach for 27 years and weathered many storms together. But Ian was different.
Pacyna had taken to social media to share various videos of the wreckage the hurricane left in its wake. In one, he could be heard saying “Wrong decision,” as he filmed water levels rising in his street. In his last post, he wrote: “WE’RE TERRIFIED !!”
Pacyna’s daughter announced Wednesday in an online fundraiser that his body had been found almost a week after he’d gone missing. Wojciechowski is still in Florida with some friends and their dog Lulu, a Maltese.
“It still seems unreal. But they thankfully found his remains (Wednesday),” Schuline told the Tribune over the phone Thursday. “So now it’s just going through the process of finding out, like the next steps and such of how to claim those and what to do next. But just hanging in there and taking it day by day.”
Hurricane Ian hit landfall in Florida on Sept. 28 as a Category 4 storm, bringing a deluge of catastrophic flooding from the storm surge to southwest Florida. The Fort Myers Beach area was one of the places hit the hardest by the storm.
The death toll from Hurricane Ian rose to 101 Thursday, making it the second deadliest storm to hit the mainland behind Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Ninety-two of those deaths were in Florida, according to The Associated Press.
Kathy James, 74, who lives in Fort Myers, said Pacyna was known as “the mayor” of Fort Myers Beach because of his welcoming nature, always greeting people with an ear-to-ear grin. But he was also someone who doesn’t panic or scare easily, she said. So when James and her daughter Lisa Nagy, 56, saw his last post, they realized just how bad the devastation truly was.
Nagy said three of their friends died in the storm, including Pacyna.
“And I’m sure we’ve lost maybe more but we just don’t know yet,” Nagy said.
Pacyna moved to Florida almost three decades ago, but the Franklin Park native was a Midwesterner through and through, his loved ones said. He was known to be a die-hard Cubs, Bears and Blackhawks fan.
James said at a restaurant at the Santini Marina Plaza, Pacyna had a long-standing saved seat right in the center of the television for sports.
In their house, Pacyna and Wojciechowski had a personal bar downstairs filled with sports memorabilia for his Chicago teams that Schuline said, “anybody could walk up to” and share a Miller Lite — his favorite drink.
“He’s known down there for his smile and friendliness and generosity,” Schuline added. “He loves going out and having a good time.”
In one of Pacyna’s videos, the bar’s bar stools can be seen floating away on the street, carried by the water that had made its way up to the family’s house.
Nagy and James met Pacyna after they moved to Fort Myers Beach in 2012, where they lived less than a mile from Pacyna. He was often taking pictures with an old-fashioned camera to document moments with friends, Nagy said.
“You got a hug, and you got a kiss, and he took a picture,” James said.
Many friends took to Facebook this week, sharing photos with Pacyna. “Will miss his forever smile & his twinkling blue eyes,” one friend wrote.
Nagy said she always felt welcome by Pacyna and Wojciechowski.
“It was just like putting on your favorite pair of jeans, you know, you just felt home,” she said.
His daughter fondly remembers a family road trip from Chicago to California and back when she was 11 years old.
“We stopped at every single historical thing he could find — he loved his history,” Schuline said. “Took a million pictures because that was his thing; he always had a gazillion pictures. It was a great time to spend with him and experience all that and it was good to see him happy.”
Though Pacyna had traded in the snow and cold for the sandy beaches of Florida, his daughter said, “he’s still a Chicago boy at heart.”
“He would love Chicago pizza and Italian beef and all that kind of stuff,” his daughter said. “Anytime he found a Chicago place anywhere, he would try it out. But nothing beats when he went back home and went to his favorite places up there, like Jay’s Beef and Gene & Jude’s in River Grove.”
Though he’d weathered most other tropical storms and hurricanes in Florida, Pacyna did leave his home during Hurricane Irma in 2017. That time, however, it was mostly water and no storm surges, Schuline said.
“So they were hoping like many, (Ian) was just going to be one of those kinds of things this time around,” she said. “And unfortunately, it wasn’t.”
