Cook County Government

Mykola "Mike" Koropeckyj, a retired noncommissioned Army officer who later worked for the Social Security Administration, died June 5 of lung cancer at Gilchrist Hospice Care in Columbia.

The Edmondson Heights resident was 83.

The son of a Ukrainian Catholic priest and a homemaker, Mr. Koropeckyj was born in Dolyna, a village in the Western Ukraine.

With the coming of World War II, Mr. Koropeckyj left his parents and homeland in 1944, eventually being put in a displaced persons camp in Germany at the end of the war.

"During this time he completed gymnasium [high school] and began university studies before he immigrated to the United States in...