Mrs. Paul Bearer’s

or

Tar tar

or

Frozen Entrée

(props to Monty for the second alternate epitaph)

You’ve never heard of him, but you’ve probably had him over for dinner. The founder of Mrs. Paul's died over the weekend at the age of 87, ending a long-running feud with the Gorton's fisherman after she dallied with Arthur Treacher. Edward J. Piszek, the man behind the crabcake, was a walking version of the American dream. The son of an immigrant saloonkeeper, in the 1940s he gambled $450 on a scheme to freeze seafood for later meals, then used the millions he made off an increasingly lazy country to fund a wide range of philanthropic goals. Never forgetting his Polish roots, he bought and established a memorial in Philadelphia to Thaddeus Kosciuszko, an overlooked hero of the American Revolution, founded the Copernicus Society, and on a visit to Poland, he was appalled by the severity of the spread of tuberculosis and donated millions of dollars worth of medical supplies and equipment. During the 1970s, he visited Poland and Ireland with his friend Cardinal John Krol, and met Karol Cardinal Wojtyla, who would become Pope Paul II in 1978. During the Pope’s 1979 visit to Philadelphia, he stopped his procession and entered the crowd to embrace Piszek. Piszek was equally proud of his adopted country, and during the American Bicentennial, commissioned a duplicate of the Liberty Bell from the foundry in Whitechapel, England that had produced the original. The Liberty Park Commission declined his donation, as did the city of Philadelphia, but in 1987, during the Bicentennial Anniversary of the Constitution, former Supreme Court Justice Warren Berger sounded the bell.