Names on school buildings are often from historical eras long gone, making it difficult to keep the honor alive. The life of Harry Kizirian, who died in 2002, on the other hand, is well within human memory.
Kizirian is remembered in Providence most for his association with the “Turnkey” Post Office, on Corliss Street, the first automated post office in the country. He was an American war hero, a postmaster, and a generous worker for, and supporter of, good causes. The post office represents his most visible association, a sign of modernization at the time and a feather in Providence’s cap.
Harry’s name also went up in 2001 on the Camden Street Elementary School (above), built in 1960. In 2023, the K-5 Harry Kizirian Elementary School had approximately 600 students, a majority Hispanic/Latino. Currently, it is closed and students attend school at the nearby Narducci Learning Center on Smith Hill, while a new Harry Kizirian School is being constructed for over $50 million.
The new school building broke ground in December 2024 and is to become a Pre-K-8 model of education. The greater range of student ages will be accommodated with separate entrances to the school for lower (Pre-K through 5th grade) and upper (6-8 grade) students. The preliminary site plans for the new building were prepared by Studio Jaed, an architectural and engineering firm with offices in both Providence and Delaware. The firm previously did work for North Providence High School’s auditorium renovation. State and local leaders heralded the new plans, with RI Department of Education Commissioner Angelica Infante-Green saying they deliver “transformational improvements.” Some of these improvements include the aforementioned Pre-K-8 model, as well as dedicated STEM spaces, new art and music facilities, and an integration with a nearby rec center.
Who was Kizirian?
Kizirian was born at 134 Chad Brown Street, Providence in 1925. His mother, Hripsime, (sometimes spelled Horopig) had arrived in Providence three years earlier speaking little English and unable to read or write. She had been a survivor of the Armenian Genocide of 1914-1916, in which her first husband and seven children had been killed. Estimates of the Armenian dead during that time range from 600,000 to1.5 million. (The 1930 Providence census shows that many of their neighbors were also Armenian.)
She married a fellow Armenian, a laborer in a tool company. His father died when Harry was fifteen. He began working as a laborer in a meat packing plant after school to support his widowed mother. A football referee noticed that Harry, in line to be captain of the high school football team, was exhausted and suggested he apply for a less strenuous job at the post office. While completing his last two years of high school, Harry swept the post office floors. It was prophetic work, as he was to spend his whole civilian career in the postal service.
Before he could do that, however, there was a war on, and after graduation, he enlisted in the United States Marine Corps.
The most decorated military man in Rhode Island
After basic training, the 19-year-old Harry was sent to Guadalcanal. He took part in the invasion of Okinawa, Japan, in April 1945, the largest amphibious landing in the Pacific Theater. He waded ashore with his platoon among the first assault wave.
Corporal Harry Kizirian saw action in May when he was wounded but continued fighting. In the citation to the first of Harry’s many medals, Major General Lemuel C. Shepherd Jr. said Harry had “assisted materially in the continued advance of his platoon. His actions were at all times in keeping with the highest traditions of the United States Naval Service.”
He was in action again in June, when his position was bombarded by the Japanese and he was blown into the air. He later recalled, “I wondered if I was ever going to get down again. I would have made a poor angel, you know. Angels without wings are as uncommon up there as a Marine without guts down here.”
In June 1945, his unit was looking for the Japanese reserves when Harry noticed a wounded Marine trapped by enemy fire. He single-handedly attacked the Japanese machine gun nest. Although he was badly wounded in both legs and abdomen, he crawled forward on his elbows and killed the Japanese soldiers manning the machine gun, enabling the stretcher-bearers to evacuate the wounded Marine. For this, he received the Navy Cross, the second highest medal in the US military, the citation describing his “extraordinary heroism” and his “outstanding courage and aggressive fighting spirit.”
After serving seventeen of his twenty-four months of military service overseas, Harry was discharged on February 11, 1946. He was still only twenty.
Kirizian was the most decorated serviceman from Rhode Island and one of the most decorated marines of World War II. His honors and medals include the Presidential Unit Citation, the Navy Unit Citation, the Navy Cross, the Rhode Island Cross, the state’s highest award for valor, the Bronze Star with Combat “V” and two Purple Hearts.
Providence the Home of the First Automated Post Office, Thanks to Kizirian
Back in Rhode Island, Harry returned to the post office as a clerk, but he was in and out of veterans’ hospitals for the next four years, enduring major surgeries to repair his wounded body. He married a woman who’d first seen him on the cover of the New York Times Magazine. US Senator Jack Reed, eulogizing Harry in the Senate in 2002, described it as love at first sight. Promoted to foreman in 1954, Harry was made Postmaster in 1961 under the Kennedy Administration. At 36 he was one of the youngest postmasters in the country.
Providence’s new central post office building opened in 1960, where it housed the United States’ first fully automated postal sorting system.
The Providence Preservation Society’s 2023 Guide to Providence Architecture published an enthusiastic review: “This remarkable building… utterly unlike anything else here… the complex parabolic roof structure shows a desire for the building’s design to reflect externally as well as to accommodate internally the innovative activity. There’s more than a hint here of Eero Saarinen’s Trans World Airlines Terminal (1956-62) at Kennedy (then Idlewild) Airport in New York.
But PPS goes on to damn it with faint praise: “It’s almost as though this were the love child of Saarinen and Mies van der Rohe. While too big to be considered delightfully quirky, it is an interesting, unusual, and highly visible landmark that should be better appreciated than it is.”
Automation might suggest cold technology, but according to Senator Jack Reed, Harry’s leadership style was “hands-on and personal” and he “knew the Providence post office’s thousand employees by their first names.” He was said to wear running shoes with his suit as he patrolled the premises. In 1986, however, the Postal Service eliminated his position and “reorganized” him out of the job, and despite strenuous efforts by Senators John Chafee and Claiborne Pell, the Postal Service was adamant, so Harry retired at age 61. Reed recalls: “The announcement was greeted by his co-workers with weeping. They weren’t losing just an admired boss; they were losing a friend, and in October of 1986, two thousand of his friends and co-workers honored him at a testimonial.”
Ten years later, in 1996, the Central Post Office, the “house that Harry built” became the first United States federal building named after an Armenian American. Thanks to legislation sponsored by Senator John H. Chafee and then Congressman Jack Read, it was dedicated as the “Harry Kizirian Post Office Building.”
Post- Post Office
Although he was no longer employed at the post office, Harry was far from idle. He stayed in touch with former colleagues and served on numerous boards, including Butler Hospital, the Greater Providence Chamber of Commerce, Rhode Island Blue Cross, RI Heart Foundation, the RI Lung Foundation, and the Smith Hill Center. He served on advisory boards for the Providence Heritage Commission, the RI Bicentennial Commission, Meeting Street School, March of Dimes among others, and Rhode Island College, which gave him an honorary degree. He was involved nationally with post office employees’ associations, served as a commander in the American Legion, and was active in the Armenian Community.
Jack Reed recalled that when Harry was asked about his extraordinary generosity and public service, he said, “You know, the track is short; when you can help people, do it.”
Of those who remember Harry Kizirian, Senator Jack Reed appreciatively recalls Harry’s selfless warmth. “When I campaigned for my first term in Congress. I knew about the legendary Harry Kizirian, everyone in Rhode Island knew about and admired Harry. I met him several times at meetings of postal workers. He still stayed close to his co-workers. I will never forget at one of these meetings, days before the election, as postal worker after postal worker approached him to thank him for countless kindnesses and asked what they could do for him, Harry said, ‘if you want to do something for me, vote for this kid, Reed.’”
Just before he died, Kizirian was honored by having a Providence school named for him. One of his five children, Dr. Janice Kizirian, says it was “the best honor he could ever have received” because he valued education highly as the way “to get on in the world.” Of the five Kizirian children, Janice and her two younger siblings have “fond memories” of the school on Camden Avenue. All grew up in a Providence triple-decker. They could easily identify with Providence’s immigrant school children; they considered families who spoke two languages “a good thing.”
Harry Kizirian died in 2002 at the age of 77, his widow Hazel in 2023 at the age of 97. Hazel and her daughter Shaky often knitted hats and scarves and donated books to the library for the students at Kizirian Elementary. Although Hazel’s death and Covid have interrupted some of the ties between the school and the Kizirian family, Dr. Janice Kizirian maintains the school has always been considered “family.”
The new Harry Kizirian Elementary School needs a prominent plaque explaining who he was!
Jane Lancaster PhD is a historian and former public school teacher (in the UK) who lives in Providence. She is an award-winning historian and has taught at RISD and Brown, and even (once) in Taiwan.
Sources
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CREC-2002-10-02/html/CREC-2002-10-02-pt1-PgS9828.htm
https://guide.ppsri.org/property/united-states-post-office
https://www.dignitymemorial.com/obituaries/providence-ri/hazel-kizirian-11507155
