The day his adopted granddaughter came home, Paul Koshewa was on his hands and knees getting in some quality playtime with her while the other adults celebrated the newest family arrival.
“That was my first day home, and we’re already best friends,” Sarah Wheless said of her late grandfather.
Paul Adolph Koshewa was known for his “childlike sense of fun,” and had a 35-year-long coaching career at Westminster Schools where he coached many individual and team state champions in track and field and cross country. He was also a decorated, retired Air Force colonel, who served in WWII, Korea and Vietnam.
Koshewa, of Atlanta, died April 14 at age 93. A memorial service was April 24 at The Westminster Schools. A private interment will be later in South Carolina. SouthCare Funeral Home and Cremation Services are handling the arrangements.
When Sarah was younger, she used to visit with him about once a week, often playing checkers and eating tuna fish sandwiches for lunch. “We could go a couple hours without saying one word to each other,” she said. “Just being with each other is what we wanted to do.”
Koshewa’s daughter, Katherine Wheless, said her father always had a “childlike sense of fun.” He was still riding his bicycle well into his late 80s, and his joy in flying down the neighborhood’s “scary hill” carried him beyond the posted 25 mph speed limit. Allen Koshewa, his son, said he was even stopped, though not ticketed, for flying down that hill at 32 mph. “Some of the neighbors used to ride with him, but they wouldn’t go down the hill with him because it was too scary,” his wife, Marilyn Schwab, said.
Sarah remembers her grandfather as a “natural teacher” of life lessons. She remembers one race where she suffered a minor knee injury. “Don’t quit,” he told her, “even though this is hard and you don’t like it.” Inspired by her grandfather, Sarah decided to study at seminary and wants to focus on youth ministry.
Koshewa’s mathematics class was memorable, too. “He could stand sideways against the board, and take his arm — without looking — and draw a perfect circle,” Schwab said. “Everybody seemed to remember that perfect circle.”
A favorite story he liked to tell students came from his military days as a flight navigator: Once, a pilot became concerned when he was staring straight at Mount Etna in Italy. He asked Koshewa, who had no view of the outside from the opaque navigation chamber, if they were going to clear the mountain. Looking down at his map, Koshewa replied, “It’s only 3,000 feet,” noting their altitude was 8,000 feet. When the pilot told him to come out and see for himself, he soon realized the map was in meters, not feet. “Had it been a cloudy day,” he said to his students, “you would’ve had a different math teacher.”
He often blended his wide range of experiences into his lessons. He would take math students to the field to set up the hurdles to “learn about metrics.”
The inside family joke, his granddaughter said, was: “He doesn’t just have a one-track mind, he’s got an off-track mind.”
His son said he was also a pioneer in desegregated track meets in the 1950s. “He would invite all black teams,” Allen said. When other coaches expressed disdain, “He would basically tell them, ‘You don’t have to participate if you don’t want to.’ ”
His reputation seemed endless. Allen said when people recognize his last name in public, they’ll ask if he’s Paul’s son. When he says yes, “the gushing” about his father’s impact on their life doesn’t stop.
He seemed to know everybody. If he didn’t see at least five people he knew in the grocery story, Schwab said, it was a bad day.
On a trip back from the grocery store one day, the madly waving arm of a man sitting on the bus bench caught her attention. When Paul waved back, his wife asked, “Who was that?” He told her, “I used to ride my bike past the post office and he was always there by the post office and I used to talk to him. I don’t know his name, I think he’s homeless.”
“You can’t ever forget you met him,” his granddaughter said, and humility is one quality his family distinctly remembers.
Survivors include Schwab, whom he married in 2003, and his three children by the late Anne (Nancy) Deas Koshewa: Allen Koshewa, Katherine Wheless and Max Koshewa; and stepchildren Robbie Stadter and Wally Schwab.
Donations may be made to the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation (Georgia chapter), Reaching Out Foundation, or The Westminster Schools.
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