Sternum Deep: The Man Who Left Bruises
What Lawrence T Kuznia left behind
They found him under his John Deere, pinned beneath the machine that had given him purpose after everything else was gone.
A giant laid low by the very thing that kept him standing.
But giants look different up close. I remember him in his kitchen thirty years earlier, pulling me onto his lap when I should've been getting a beating for stealing quarters from his Life Savers jar.
The same voice that could strip paint off a cultivator shared stories about my dad's own Hartz store heist twenty years before.
That was LTK—a man who could crack your breastbone with one finger while offering you a popsicle with the other hand.
Sixteen lawns, he'd maintained in his "retirement." Sixteen perfectly clipped monuments to a man who never learned to think small.
Even after losing an empire measured in sections, he built another measured in city lots.
Because Lawrence T Kuznia only knew one way to do things: bigger, better, more.
Truth rides in the box of a company Silverado, wrapped in an Applebee's bag and drowning in ketchup. That's where I made my grandpa's leftover fish and chips ride, anyway.
Couldn't stand the smell of what he'd done to it.
Who puts ketchup on fish?
Grandpa Lawrence, that’s who. A man who’d lap it up later, all soggy and blood-red, as if choking down those leftovers was a badge of his unshakable grit.
Everything he did—even eating—was a defiance ritual against the ordinary. His name sounded like a corporate merger, and his index finger left more marks on local sternums than a slipped wrench on frozen knuckles.
The T stood for Thomas, his father’s name—a legacy he carried like a crown.
When he returned from Korea with mechanized dreams, his father handed him an order dressed as authority: “First thing you’re gonna do is get these boys in line.” His brothers, Paul and Andrew, were record-breaking hellraisers, more likely to start a bar fight than follow orders. But Lawrence didn’t have much choice.
Family wasn’t just blood; it was business. And the business demanded discipline.
That Depression-era fear his father carried didn’t just pass down—it calcified into a creed inscribed deep into Lawrence’s marrow: Plant more. Build bigger. Never stop growing.
Maybe he thought more acres meant more security.
Maybe he thought he was protecting us from his father's ghosts.
But fear has a funny way of taking root—and once it’s planted, it’s nearly impossible to pull out.
Even now, decades later, you can spot an LTK veteran from across the coffee shop.
They've got this tell—hand drifting to their chest, rubbing at memories that never quite healed. "Your grandpa LK," they'll say, massaging that spot like they're trying to dig out an old bruise. "Haven't seen the man in twenty years, but I still have the mark."
No shit—his imprints are everywhere. In courthouse records and coffee shop stories. In land deals sealed with a finger poke. In promises made and broken between beats of calloused hand against bone.
Some men threaten with fists or lawyers.
All Lawrence Kuznia needed was one digit and the conviction that he was right.
Though I doubt he ever stopped to think about the bruises he left—not just on people but the land itself.
Some marks fade with time.
Others bleed into the soil, feeding wounds that never heal.
We sat in my company pickup, watching winter shadows stretch across fields that once fed families but now feed corporations. I couldn’t wrap my head around it—the same fields I’d once begged him to rent me, back when I still believed blood carried weight in the arithmetic of acres.
"These young guys nowadays," he said, those cracked-leather catcher’s mitts gripping the dashboard like it might try to escape. "The equipment costs, the land prices..."
As Grandpa spoke, the winter sun caught his profile, emphasizing every crease and hollow that time had carved into his face. His jaw moved steadily—not clenched, but deliberate—like he was chewing on memories, working them over before spitting them out just right.
Funny how the same stories that goosed his pride only fueled my resentment. "Drove me to drinkin’, all that pressure," he half-joked. "And that was back when a guy could run without selling his soul to the son of a bitchin’ bank."
I damn near swallowed my tongue.
Here I was, sitting next to the architect of my exile—flesh of his flesh, with dirt in my veins but no land to call my own.
Did he even see me?
Or was I just another shadow of a decision he made decades ago?
"When I expanded out east, I helped people," Grandpa declared, voice steady as December wind. "They couldn't afford to make it on their own, so when I offered top dollar for their land, they welcomed me with open arms."
Spoken like a genuine modern-day Robin Hood.
They welcomed him, sure. But what happened after he left?
Those acres, now leased to faceless corporations, don’t just represent lost livelihoods—they’re the final chapters of a story once written in Sunday potlucks and Main Street parades. All that’s left are empty storefronts, rusting playgrounds, and a handful of stubborn holdouts fighting to farm against the tide.
There was a flicker in Grandpa's eyes then—something that looked like doubt, though I couldn't tell if it was for his past decisions or for saying them out loud.
The drive to grow wasn't just ambition. It was armor. Bigger meant safer, stronger, untouchable. That's what Grandpa believed. But fear wears a hell of a mask when it's dressed up like success.
People here still talk about LTK as if he were two different men.
To the farmers of the ’70s, he was a force of nature—buying up land with borrowed money and time, a man whose finger in your chest felt like a gavel rapping against a sounding block.
But to us grandkids?
He was popsicles during strep throat, mercy over stolen quarters, and stories that got rowdier with each telling.
That’s what makes it so hard to reconcile: how a man who could offer such grace over petty theft couldn’t find it in himself to give his grandson forty acres and a chance.
The same hands that handed me popsicles when I was sick built walls I could never climb.
I still remember trembling in his kitchen, confessing to the great coin heist of ’94, bracing for that infamous finger to deliver its lesson. Instead, he gave me wisdom over punishment, mercy over scars.
That duality lived in everything Grandpa touched—even that damn coin jar that sat like a sentinel in their bedroom. An ankle-high Life Savers tube growing heavier with each dropped quarter. In the '90s, when every kid's dream could still be bought with pocket change, that jar might as well have been Fort Knox.
The weight of it—both physical and symbolic—is something I can still feel in my hands, almost like phantom pain from a life I didn’t get to live. That jar held more than just quarters; it carried the quiet weight of what we save—and what ends up saving us.
Funny thing about saving, though—it starts looking an awful lot like fear after a while.
And fear? It doesn't just pass down like some hand-me-down tractor. It evolves.
Tommy Kuznia's Depression-era terror of losing everything pushed Lawrence toward empire-building. Build it big enough, spread it wide enough, and maybe you can finally outrun that ghost of want that haunted your father's generation.
But empires have their own kind of hunger.
I saw it in how LTK approached those sixteen yards after losing his kingdom—that desperate need to build something, prove something, and keep expanding long after burying the dream.
Each lawn groomed was a tribute as if he were still trying to impress his father’s ghost.
Every new yard added to his downsized empire.
Every equipment upgrade, another attempt to prove he still had it—whatever “it” was.
I watch that same desperation play out in coffee shops and grain elevators. Men who'd rather work themselves to death than admit they're farming dirt that's already stifled their dreams. They grip their land like drowning men clutching driftwood, not because the acres are profitable but because letting go feels like failing every spirit that came before.
Inheritance isn’t always written in wills or carved into headstones. Sometimes, it’s invisible—etched in the tremble of a farmer’s hand over operating notes, the snag in their throat at words like “foreclosure” or “auction,” or the way I feel it, deep in my bones, why men break themselves to cling to land that’s already broken them.
Maybe that's why I'm out here fixing equipment I don't own, crawling under other people's tractors just to keep my hands in the game. Some inherited compulsion to stay tethered to the dirt, even if I can't call it my own.
After everything else was gone, the machine that gave him purpose became the weight that finally brought him down.
You know what gets me though?
I don't think Grandpa ever saw that his empire started growing long before he planted the first seed. Those were sown generations before, in Depression-era furrows of fear, watered by Earl Butz's promises, and fertilized by the kind of hopelessness that makes men mistake expansion for security.
The seeds are still sprouting, but they look different now.
Instead of chest pokes, they come out as words.
Instead of land grabs, they emerge as stories.
Different crops, same dirt.
EDITOR’S NOTE: I remembered this interview with Grandpa from 2021 while writing this piece. It was supposed to be about his military service. True to form, he had other ideas. Fair warning: Grandpa swears like he's still trying to start a stubborn Gleaner in twenty below.
Some harvests take generations to understand.
But at least we're starting to read the soil tests right. 🌱
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Another well-written post, Adam. Awesome homage to Uncle Lawrence. I loved that you included his 2021 interview—I hadn’t seen it before. It was great to see his face and hear his voice.
Beautifully written, as always.
Like wisps of smoke, I keep trying to grasp how you turn the brutal and the tragic into soothing prose, into art.