Korczak Ziolkowski (pronounced “core-chalk jewel-cuff-ski”) was the man responsible for the Crazy Horse Memorial, a colossus of a sculpture dedicated to Crazy Horse, a Native American war leader who fought American settlers to the death.

Ziolkowski was born in 1908 in Boston to Polish parents, as you may have guessed from his name. Orphaned by the age of one, Ziolkowski was put in the foster system and was badly abused. He learned to be scrappy though and eventually learned construction skills that would translate into his art. By the time he was 16, Ziolkowski was on his own, making ends meet by working odd jobs. He put himself through school at the Rindge Technical School in Cambridge, MA then worked in shipyards in Boston, where he began experimenting with woodworking and furniture design. By 18 his creative juices were a flowin’ and he started a successful career doing commissions for sculptures in West Hartford, Connecticut. Soon enough, all of his wildest dreams came true when Gutzon Borglum asked him to help with the sculpting of Mount Rushmore. There was a small falling out that resulted in a fistfight between Borglum and Ziolkowski. But in Ziolkowski’s defense, Borglum was the worst. He fired Ziolkowski by telegram and at one point told Isamu Noguchi that he would never be a successful sculptor. He definitely deserved a quick jab to the face.

Not soon thereafter, Lakota Chief Henry Standing Bear wrote to Ziolkowski asking him if he would create a monument for Crazy Horse. He said he wanted ''the white man to know the red man had great heroes too” in response to Mount Rushmore. After a blip in World War II and being wounded on Omaha Beach, in Normandy, Ziolkowski began work on the Crazy Horse Memorial in 1948. He married his second wife (the first divorced him in 1949 on grounds of mental cruelty), Ruth, a volunteer at the monument in 1950. She was 24 and he was 42 at the time. Ziolkowski worked on the monument for almost 36 years, until his death in 1982. His wife and ten children have continued working on their husband/father’s legacy, and there is no end in sight. Construction has been going on for nearly 70 years. Good thing there are ten children, because maybe by the third generation, they’ll have enough people to actually finish the damn thing.