| Notes |
Baptismal sponsors John Lavery & Rose McMahon. The church where she was baptized was destroyed by fire. Robert Casey Lane states: I do not know much about Mother's life as a young girl. She did not have an easy life. When she was about two years old, her father disappeared. He simply left home. So far as I know, James Lavery was never heard from. It bothered Mother very much. One day when Sheila and I were probably around 12 and 13 years old, maybe a little younger, she told us about her father's disappearance and a little bit about how she grew up. She said that she had not previously told us about her father because she did not want us to think that she had grown up any differently from us. She said that Aunt Sis believed Mother's father must have died because, Aunt Sis said, he had loved Roselia and his children too much to have simply abandoned them. After her father left, Mother lived with Aunt Sis (who had not married) for part of her childhood. I believe my mother's sister Jane stayed with Roselia. I do not know where Charley and Joe were, probably with Roselia or one of the Callahan or Lavery families. I do not know how long Mother lived with Aunt Sis. I don't think it was for too long. I think Mother lived with her mother, sister and brothers for most of her childhood, but the period when she had not lived with her mother had seared her memory. It was something she mentioned to me in the year before she died. Roselia and her children were poor. However, the Callahan and Lavery families rallied around Roselia and her family after James disappeared. Mother spoke often of her various aunts and uncles and was close to her Callahan and Lavery first cousins all her life. I think they all lived near each other in Chicago. Mother was especially close to the three daughters of Agnes Callahan and Pat Phelan. They were almost sisters to her. The youngest of the Phelan girl, who became Ann Manning, was Mother's maid of honor and the middle Phelan girls, who became Peggy Kearney, and Mother lived in the same retirement home in Milwaukee. The third girl was Marcella. We called all three of them "aunt" when we were children. Another Callahan cousin of Mother's was Franc (pronounced France) Callahan. He became a Chicago politician. He was an alderman for a while and was later the head of the Chicago airport. He and mother were close and he and Dad were friends. Mother was raised in St. Mel's parish, on the west side of Chicago. Jane Cochrane Lavery must have lived near Mother after Jane came to Chicago because Mother talked about Jane having been a very involved and active member of that parish. Mother was bright and I think she was a good student. She and Dad once told me that each of them had won a medal for excellence in Irish history when they were children. When Mother finished the eighth grade at St. Mel parish school, she did not go to high school. She signed up for a two year commercial course where I think she learned bookkeeping and clerical skills. By this time Roselia was ill. She had stomach cancer and died on December 15, 1911. At this point, Aunt Sis stepped in and basically became Mother's adopted mother. I believe she lived with Aunt Sis until she and Dad married. Mother worked in an office but I do not remember what she did or the nature of the business she worked for. Mother remained very close to her sister Jane and her brothers Charley and Joe. She was especially close to Jane. Jane married Kyran Conarchy. Uncle Kyran was one of the most delightful people I have ever known. Jane and Kyran had seven children, all of whom Mother, and for that matter my Dad as well, loved very much. We were very close to the Conarchys when we were growing up and have remained so as adults. Dad and his family were raised on the near south side of Chicago, in a neighborhood known as the front of the yards, the "yards" being the Chicago stockyards. At some point, probably after 1916, his family moved to the west side of Chicago. I think Mother and Dad met each other at a church dance. Mother had become acquainted with Dad's sister Loretta. Loretta introduced them. They were married on April 28, 1923. They were a skinny pair. Mother weighed something like 89 pounds and Dad was about twenty pounds heavier. Mother and Dad settled on the west side, living in a succession of apartments. This is where Rosemary, Clem, John and I were born. My Dad's parents had bought a two flat on the west side after they had sold their house on south Oakley Avenue. They apparently got caught up in enthusiasm for the real estate boom of the late 1920's and sold the two flat in order to buy a large apartment building with a large mortgage. The 1929 crash occurred and the Depression started. They could not rent their apartments so our parents and my Dad's brother Dan moved into their building to help pay the mortgage. This would have been in 1932 because I was born while my parents lived in Grandfather and Grandmother Lane's building. It was a two bedroom apartment, housing our parents, four children and a "hired girl", Bea Lucas. Most of the apartments in the building must have been empty because, even with our parents' and uncle Dan's rent, the Lanes were not able to pay the mortgage. Consequently, after I was born they encouraged Mother and Dad to move to larger quarters. Jane and Kyran Conarchy had moved to Evanston and in 1933 Mother and Dad decided to move there as well. Thus we ceased to be Westsiders and became Northsiders. Only people who grew up in Chicago at the same time we did will appreciate the significance of that move. It was not exactly like moving from Tacoma to Mars, but it was close. Our folks rented a house in central Evanston. I think it had four bedrooms. It is still standing and is about four blocks from the hotel where next summer's reunion will be. Shelia was born within a year of our moving in. We must still have been pretty crowded, with two parents, five children, Bea and later our dog Toby Topsy Bunnington Lane. Bea had come to work for Mother when John was born. The strapping lad that John became conceals the sickly infant that he was. He was a very sick baby. Bea came to help Mother with Rosemary and Clem so Mother could spend some extra time taking care of John. Bea was just a kid when she came, about 17 or 18. She was a farm girl from the upper peninsula of Michigan. I think she was hired for three months and stayed for eight or nine years. She was a nice woman. We stayed in Evanston until May 1939 when we moved back into Chicago. We moved into an apartment on Chicago's far north side. Mother and Dad had the opportunity to buy the hose in Evanston, but they never wanted to have a mortgage. They had seen Dad's parents lose everything they had accumulated in their lifetime when they lost the big apartment building to a foreclosure. Aunt Sis also lost her house during the Depression because she could not service the mortgage. Mother and Dad, particularly Dad, never wanted to run that risk. Consequently, they rented all their lives. Paradoxically, Dad always encouraged each of his children to become a homeowner. As was the norm in those days, Mother was a stay-at-home Mom. Bea left us when we moved into Chicago. She came out to Seattle to work in the war industry. Consequently, Mother had the full load of doing the shopping, laundry and housecleaning for the family. She was also the family budgeter and bill payer. This was of course in the days when there were no freezers, dishwashers, dryers, etc. Housewives did a tremendous amount of manual labor. They also shopped every day for meat and bread. In addition to these chores, Mother became the family chauffeur. My parents had never owned a car. The religious order to which Mother's cousin, Sister Huberta, belonged was raffling a 1937 Dodge. Sister Huberta sold my parents some raffle tickets. Mother put the raffle tickets in the name of each of the children. Clem's ticket won the car, but it didn't do him any good because he was only ten years old. Dad had driven when he was young, but refused to start driving again, so Mother learned to drive the car and spent a large part of the next twenty-one years driving my father various places. Mother was an assertive driver, perhaps because Dad was the most aggressive backseat driver I have ever encountered. Mother would pull herself up to her full five foot height and yell at the other motorists while Dad would launch into lengthy diatribes at the various lardheads who were inconsiderate enough to be driving on the same street as my parents. I have heard rumors that one or two of their children inherited their compassion towards other drivers. When Dad joined Alcoholics Anonymous, Mother might just as well have joined. AA was a large part of each of their lives. They spent almost every Tuesday and Saturday night at AA functions and Dad attended an AA meeting almost every Thursday night. Mother supported him totally in his AA work. She also participated with him in all his Catholic activities. They went to mass together every day until Dad got too sick to go. Dad had his first coronary on July 4, 1956. It was a serious heart attack. He had a stressful job, was overweight and had diabetes. All of this contributed to making his coronary life-threatening. Dad started to recover after a couple of months. They went to Florida for two or three months in early January 1957 (their first winter vacation and one of the few vacations they ever took) and when they returned to Chicago, Dad was well enough to go back to work. He was in good health for nine months but in January 1958, he had a stroke from which he never fully recovered. This was two or three weeks before John and Bess June were married. Mother virtually lived at the hospital with Dad. She spent every night in his hospital room. The only time I remember that she was away from Dad for more than an hour or two was when she went to John's and Bess June's wedding. Dad eventually became well enough to leave the hospital and even go back to work. However, the stroke had weakened him so much that he walked with a cane for the rest of his life. He had a series of heart failure attacks and finally had a massive coronary on October 25, 1958 from which he died on October 27, 1958. It is difficult for a child to assess the state of his parents' marriage. With that caveat, I believe Mother and Dad had a very good marriage. They spent a great deal of time together and appeared to enjoy being together. They gave every appearance of loving each other. Their treatment of each other demonstrated that they liked and respected each other. Mother mourned Dad. One memory that still pains me is the day that Mother moved from the last apartment in which she and Dad lived. The apartment was empty. Mother, being Mother, had spent hours cleaning it for the next tenant. She closed the door for the last time and started to cry, saying she felt like she was leaving something behind. When Dad died, his pension from the Daily News also died. Mother got nothing from the Daily News. After a lifetime of raising and educating five children, they had just started to save some money when Dad got sick. Mother had only some life insurance proceeds and some small savings. She was 61 when Dad died, too young to draw social security. She decided to go to work. Mother went to see Dan Ryan (the man for whom the expressway is named). Dan Ryan was the President of the Board of Commissioners of Cook County and, with Mayor Daley, was the all-powerful political boss of Cook County. He had been a friend of Dad. Mother asked him for a job. He made a phone call and Mother was employed in the Cook County welfare department. Asking Ryan for a job and then going to work in an office after a thirty-five year absence from the work place must have been very painful. She worked with people who had gone to school with Sheila. She was the oldest person in the Department by decades. She had to learn new procedures, acquire new skills and deal with situations that were foreign to her. She not only survived this; she grew from it. The young people in her office loved her and she loved them. Mother kept this job for eight or nine years. After Mother stopped working, she continued to live in a small apartment on Chicago's north side, a block or so from Joan and Bess June's first house. She stayed in that apartment until April 1980 when she moved to a retirement home in Milwaukee. I suspect she was sick when she moved there. She was diagnosed with bladder cancer in January 1981 and had surgery to remove the tumor. The cancer recurred two or so months after the surgery. Mother refused further surgery and died on November 30, 1981 at the Milwaukee Catholic Retirement Home. She had none of us in Milwaukee, but Jane Marie Conarchy O'Brien lived a mile or so from the Retirement Home and saw Mother constantly. Jane, who is Mother's eldest niece, was as good to Mother as any of us would have been. She was with Mother when she died. I described Mother as an assertive driver and indeed she was. That, however, was an aberration in her personality. She was ordinarily the most even-tempered person I knew. Her harshest epithet was to call someone a "big Gom". This was hurled at people who were unjust to others; for example, a bigger kid picking on a smaller one or any instance where someone was being unfair or cruel to someone else. The phrase always conjured in my mind the image of some ferociously hulking being. Mother is the only person I have ever heard use that phrase. I think it is derived from the word "gombee" which was use in Ireland to describe a man who preyed on the Irish poor. Mother lived to see her five children marry and to see the birth of all her grandchildren. She had a grandmother's bracelet that had a locket with each grandchild's name. I think she reveled in the name "Meema" that Bob gave her and that all the rest of the grandchildren adopted. Whenever a new baby was born, Mother hurried to see that baby as if to bless the child and welcome the baby into the family. She was fascinated by the grandchildren, especially as they got older. Like a good grandparent, she was much more tolerant of her grandchildrens' misadventures than their parents were. I could continue to write for pages about Mother. I admire her. I love her. Some of your grandchildren knew her well, particularly the Spoeries and the Purcells. Others of you were not so fortunate. All of you should know at least this much about her. Angela Lavery was a good, loving and strong person. However difficult her childhood may have been, she did not dwell on it. She was a happy person who knew how to give and receive love. She was inclusive and welcoming. She may not have graduated from high school, but you would not have known that from talking to her. She was articulate, had an extensive vocabulary, read a lot, had solid mathematical skills and wrote very well. She continued to educate herself all her life. She grew with the changes around her. She knew how to respect the past but to live in the present. She is a good model for anyone. (Source: Robert C. Lane) --------------------------------------------------------------- I had the pleasure of working with Angela Lane while we were both employed at the Welfare Rehabilitation Services Office of the Cook County Department of Public Aid. She and I started working there at about the same time in October of 1959, although I was hired just before she was. She would have been 62 years old when she started working there. I recall her saying how nervous she was on her first day of work. I tried to reassure her that she would do fine. I knew her daughter Sheila as a classmate at Loyola University, and knew of her son Robert, who was kind of a "big man on campus" at Loyola. This department had a fairly high employee turnover rate, with some people staying as little as two months, but Angela stuck it out. Within a short time, she learned all of the department's policies and practices and became a valued member of the training unit. In her position, she would work directly with welfare recipients who were candidates for job training. Although the counselors and not Angela, were the ones with the actual "caseload", she helped to oversee many of the counselors' caseloads. She also supervised the flow of people coming into the office and would assign "clients" to individual counselors. I recall an incident when Angela helped me to retain my job. Although everyone who worked in the department was supposed to (in theory) have taken the Civil Service Exam to be hired, the department didn't insist on this until four years after we were hired. So she and I and others took and passed the federal Civil Service Exam and we needed to go through an additional certification procedure. Shortly after we received the news that we had passed the test, I was struck by a taxicab in LaSalle, Illinois, near where the Spoeris lived for a time. This is not that easy to do considering there are only about five cabs in all of LaSalle. But I was laid up in the hospital in LaSalle and was in traction for five weeks. Attendance at the certification session was mandatory and one would be fired if he did not comply. Being in traction, I obviously could not attend. Angela, however, interceded on my behalf by getting my supervisor to allow me to obtain the certification at a later time. Angela especially enjoyed working with the young people in the department and many of them spoke of how much she had helped them in their work. Although the job didn't pay that well, I think it was $352.00 per month, it was honorable work. Angela worked there eight years, retiring in October of 1967 a little before her 71st birthday. (Source: John Geiger as told to John W. Spoeri)
Baptismal sponsors John Lavery & Rose McMahon. The church where she was baptized was destroyed by fire.
Robert Casey Lane states: I do not know much about Mother's life as a young girl. She did not have an easy life. When she was about two years old, her father disappeared. He simply left home. So far as I know, James Lavery was never heard from. It bothered Mother very much. One day when Sheila and I were probably around 12 and 13 years old, maybe a little younger, she told us about her father's disappearance and a little bit about how she grew up. She said that she had not previously told us about her father because she did not want us to think that she had grown up any differently from us. She said that Aunt Sis believed Mother's father must have died because, Aunt Sis said, he had loved Roselia and his children too much to have simply abandoned them. After her father left, Mother lived with Aunt Sis (who had not married) for part of her childhood. I believe my mother's sister Jane stayed with Roselia. I do not know where Charley and Joe were, probably with Roselia or one of the Callahan or Lavery families. I do not know how long Mother lived with Aunt Sis. I don't think it was for too long. I think Mother lived with her mother, sister and brothers for most of her childhood, but the period when she had not lived with her mother had seared her memory. It was something she mentioned to me in the year before she died.
Roselia and her children were poor. However, the Callahan and Lavery families rallied around Roselia and her family after James disappeared. Mother spoke often of her various aunts and uncles and was close to her Callahan and Lavery first cousins all her life. I think they all lived near each other in Chicago. Mother was especially close to the three daughters of Agnes Callahan and Pat Phelan. They were almost sisters to her. The youngest of the Phelan girl, who became Ann Manning, was Mother's maid of honor and the middle Phelan girls, who became Peggy Kearney, and Mother lived in the same retirement home in Milwaukee. The third girl was Marcella. We called all three of them "aunt" when we were children. Another Callahan cousin of Mother's was Franc (pronounced France) Callahan. He became a Chicago politician. He was an alderman for a while and was later the head of the Chicago airport. He and mother were close and he and Dad were friends.
Mother was raised in St. Mel's parish, on the west side of Chicago. Jane Cochrane Lavery must have lived near Mother after Jane came to Chicago because Mother talked about Jane having been a very involved and active member of that parish. Mother was bright and I think she was a good student. She and Dad once told me that each of them had won a medal for excellence in Irish history when they were children. When Mother finished the eighth grade at St. Mel parish school, she did not go to high school. She signed up for a two year commercial course where I think she learned bookkeeping and clerical skills. By this time Roselia was ill. She had stomach cancer and died on December 15, 1911. At this point, Aunt Sis stepped in and basically became Mother's adopted mother. I believe she lived with Aunt Sis until she and Dad married. Mother worked in an office but I do not remember what she did or the nature of the business she worked for.
Mother remained very close to her sister Jane and her brothers Charley and Joe. She was especially close to Jane. Jane married Kyran Conarchy. Uncle Kyran was one of the most delightful people I have ever known. Jane and Kyran had seven children, all of whom Mother, and for that matter my Dad as well, loved very much. We were very close to the Conarchys when we were growing up and have remained so as adults.
Dad and his family were raised on the near south side of Chicago, in a neighborhood known as the front of the yards, the "yards" being the Chicago stockyards. At some point, probably after 1916, his family moved to the west side of Chicago. I think Mother and Dad met each other at a church dance. Mother had become acquainted with Dad's sister Loretta. Loretta introduced them. They were married on April 28, 1923. They were a skinny pair. Mother weighed something like 89 pounds and Dad was about twenty pounds heavier.
Mother and Dad settled on the west side, living in a succession of apartments. This is where Rosemary, Clem, John and I were born. My Dad's parents had bought a two flat on the west side after they had sold their house on south Oakley Avenue. They apparently got caught up in enthusiasm for the real estate boom of the late 1920's and sold the two flat in order to buy a large apartment building with a large mortgage. The 1929 crash occurred and the Depression started. They could not rent their apartments so our parents and my Dad's brother Dan moved into their building to help pay the mortgage. This would have been in 1932 because I was born while my parents lived in Grandfather and Grandmother Lane's building. It was a two bedroom apartment, housing our parents, four children and a "hired girl", Bea Lucas. Most of the apartments in the building must have been empty because, even with our parents' and uncle Dan's rent, the Lanes were not able to pay the mortgage.
Consequently, after I was born they encouraged Mother and Dad to move to larger quarters. Jane and Kyran Conarchy had moved to Evanston and in 1933 Mother and Dad decided to move there as well. Thus we ceased to be Westsiders and became Northsiders. Only people who grew up in Chicago at the same time we did will appreciate the significance of that move. It was not exactly like moving from Tacoma to Mars, but it was close. Our folks rented a house in central Evanston. I think it had four bedrooms. It is still standing and is about four blocks from the hotel where next summer's reunion will be. Shelia was born within a year of our moving in. We must still have been pretty crowded, with two parents, five children, Bea and later our dog Toby Topsy Bunnington Lane. Bea had come to work for Mother when John was born. The strapping lad that John became conceals the sickly infant that he was. He was a very sick baby. Bea came to help Mother with Rosemary and Clem so Mother could spend some extra time taking care of John. Bea was just a kid when she came, about 17 or 18. She was a farm girl from the upper peninsula of Michigan. I think she was hired for three months and stayed for eight or nine years. She was a nice woman.
We stayed in Evanston until May 1939 when we moved back into Chicago. We moved into an apartment on Chicago's far north side. Mother and Dad had the opportunity to buy the hose in Evanston, but they never wanted to have a mortgage. They had seen Dad's parents lose everything they had accumulated in their lifetime when they lost the big apartment building to a foreclosure. Aunt Sis also lost her house during the Depression because she could not service the mortgage. Mother and Dad, particularly Dad, never wanted to run that risk. Consequently, they rented all their lives. Paradoxically, Dad always encouraged each of his children to become a homeowner.
As was the norm in those days, Mother was a stay-at-home Mom. Bea left us when we moved into Chicago. She came out to Seattle to work in the war industry. Consequently, Mother had the full load of doing the shopping, laundry and housecleaning for the family. She was also the family budgeter and bill payer. This was of course in the days when there were no freezers, dishwashers, dryers, etc. Housewives did a tremendous amount of manual labor. They also shopped every day for meat and bread. In addition to these chores, Mother became the family chauffeur. My parents had never owned a car. The religious order to which Mother's cousin, Sister Huberta, belonged was raffling a 1937 Dodge. Sister Huberta sold my parents some raffle tickets. Mother put the raffle tickets in the name of each of the children. Clem's ticket won the car, but it didn't do him any good because he was only ten years old. Dad had driven when he was young, but refused to start driving again, so Mother learned to drive the car and spent a large part of the next twenty-one years driving my father various places. Mother was an assertive driver, perhaps because Dad was the most aggressive backseat driver I have ever encountered. Mother would pull herself up to her full five foot height and yell at the other motorists while Dad would launch into lengthy diatribes at the various lardheads who were inconsiderate enough to be driving on the same street as my parents. I have heard rumors that one or two of their children inherited their compassion towards other drivers.
When Dad joined Alcoholics Anonymous, Mother might just as well have joined. AA was a large part of each of their lives. They spent almost every Tuesday and Saturday night at AA functions and Dad attended an AA meeting almost every Thursday night. Mother supported him totally in his AA work. She also participated with him in all his Catholic activities. They went to mass together every day until Dad got too sick to go.
Dad had his first coronary on July 4, 1956. It was a serious heart attack. He had a stressful job, was overweight and had diabetes. All of this contributed to making his coronary life-threatening. Dad started to recover after a couple of months. They went to Florida for two or three months in early January 1957 (their first winter vacation and one of the few vacations they ever took) and when they returned to Chicago, Dad was well enough to go back to work. He was in good health for nine months but in January 1958, he had a stroke from which he never fully recovered. This was two or three weeks before John and Bess June were married. Mother virtually lived at the hospital with Dad. She spent every night in his hospital room. The only time I remember that she was away from Dad for more than an hour or two was when she went to John's and Bess June's wedding. Dad eventually became well enough to leave the hospital and even go back to work. However, the stroke had weakened him so much that he walked with a cane for the rest of his life. He had a series of heart failure attacks and finally had a massive coronary on October 25, 1958 from which he died on October 27, 1958.
It is difficult for a child to assess the state of his parents' marriage. With that caveat, I believe Mother and Dad had a very good marriage. They spent a great deal of time together and appeared to enjoy being together. They gave every appearance of loving each other. Their treatment of each other demonstrated that they liked and respected each other. Mother mourned Dad. One memory that still pains me is the day that Mother moved from the last apartment in which she and Dad lived. The apartment was empty. Mother, being Mother, had spent hours cleaning it for the next tenant. She closed the door for the last time and started to cry, saying she felt like she was leaving something behind.
When Dad died, his pension from the Daily News also died. Mother got nothing from the Daily News. After a lifetime of raising and educating five children, they had just started to save some money when Dad got sick. Mother had only some life insurance proceeds and some small savings. She was 61 when Dad died, too young to draw social security. She decided to go to work. Mother went to see Dan Ryan (the man for whom the expressway is named). Dan Ryan was the President of the Board of Commissioners of Cook County and, with Mayor Daley, was the all-powerful political boss of Cook County. He had been a friend of Dad. Mother asked him for a job. He made a phone call and Mother was employed in the Cook County welfare department. Asking Ryan for a job and then going to work in an office after a thirty-five year absence from the work place must have been very painful. She worked with people who had gone to school with Sheila. She was the oldest person in the Department by decades. She had to learn new procedures, acquire new skills and deal with situations that were foreign to her. She not only survived this; she grew from it. The young people in her office loved her and she loved them. Mother kept this job for eight or nine years.
After Mother stopped working, she continued to live in a small apartment on Chicago's north side, a block or so from Joan and Bess June's first house. She stayed in that apartment until April 1980 when she moved to a retirement home in Milwaukee. I suspect she was sick when she moved there. She was diagnosed with bladder cancer in January 1981 and had surgery to remove the tumor. The cancer recurred two or so months after the surgery. Mother refused further surgery and died on November 30, 1981 at the Milwaukee Catholic Retirement Home. She had none of us in Milwaukee, but Jane Marie Conarchy O'Brien lived a mile or so from the Retirement Home and saw Mother constantly. Jane, who is Mother's eldest niece, was as good to Mother as any of us would have been. She was with Mother when she died.
I described Mother as an assertive driver and indeed she was. That, however, was an aberration in her personality. She was ordinarily the most even-tempered person I knew. Her harshest epithet was to call someone a "big Gom". This was hurled at people who were unjust to others; for example, a bigger kid picking on a smaller one or any instance where someone was being unfair or cruel to someone else. The phrase always conjured in my mind the image of some ferociously hulking being. Mother is the only person I have ever heard use that phrase. I think it is derived from the word "gombee" which was use in Ireland to describe a man who preyed on the Irish poor.
Mother lived to see her five children marry and to see the birth of all her grandchildren. She had a grandmother's bracelet that had a locket with each grandchild's name. I think she reveled in the name "Meema" that Bob gave her and that all the rest of the grandchildren adopted. Whenever a new baby was born, Mother hurried to see that baby as if to bless the child and welcome the baby into the family. She was fascinated by the grandchildren, especially as they got older. Like a good grandparent, she was much more tolerant of her grandchildrens' misadventures than their parents were.
I could continue to write for pages about Mother. I admire her. I love her. Some of your grandchildren knew her well, particularly the Spoeries and the Purcells. Others of you were not so fortunate. All of you should know at least this much about her. Angela Lavery was a good, loving and strong person. However difficult her childhood may have been, she did not dwell on it. She was a happy person who knew how to give and receive love. She was inclusive and welcoming. She may not have graduated from high school, but you would not have known that from talking to her. She was articulate, had an extensive vocabulary, read a lot, had solid mathematical skills and wrote very well. She continued to educate herself all her life. She grew with the changes around her. She knew how to respect the past but to live in the present. She is a good model for anyone.
(Source: Robert C. Lane)
---------------------------------------------------------------
I had the pleasure of working with Angela Lane while we were both employed at the Welfare Rehabilitation Services Office of the Cook County Department of Public Aid. She and I started working there at about the same time in October of 1959, although I was hired just before she was. She would have been 62 years old when she started working there. I recall her saying how nervous she was on her first day of work. I tried to reassure her that she would do fine. I knew her daughter Sheila as a classmate at Loyola University, and knew of her son Robert, who was kind of a "big man on campus" at Loyola.
This department had a fairly high employee turnover rate, with some people staying as little as two months, but Angela stuck it out. Within a short time, she learned all of the department's policies and practices and became a valued member of the training unit. In her position, she would work directly with welfare recipients who were candidates for job training. Although the counselors and not Angela, were the ones with the actual "caseload", she helped to oversee many of the counselors' caseloads. She also supervised the flow of people coming into the office and would assign "clients" to individual counselors.
I recall an incident when Angela helped me to retain my job. Although everyone who worked in the department was supposed to (in theory) have taken the Civil Service Exam to be hired, the department didn't insist on this until four years after we were hired. So she and I and others took and passed the federal Civil Service Exam and we needed to go through an additional certification procedure. Shortly after we received the news that we had passed the test, I was struck by a taxicab in LaSalle, Illinois, near where the Spoeris lived for a time. This is not that easy to do considering there are only about five cabs in all of LaSalle. But I was laid up in the hospital in LaSalle and was in traction for five weeks. Attendance at the certification session was mandatory and one would be fired if he did not comply. Being in traction, I obviously could not attend. Angela, however, interceded on my behalf by getting my supervisor to allow me to obtain the certification at a later time.
Angela especially enjoyed working with the young people in the department and many of them spoke of how much she had helped them in their work. Although the job didn't pay that well, I think it was $352.00 per month, it was honorable work. Angela worked there eight years, retiring in October of 1967 a little before her 71st birthday.
(Source: John Geiger as told to John W. Spoeri)
Baptismal sponsors John Lavery & Rose McMahon. The church where she was baptized was destroyed by fire. Robert Casey Lane states: I do not know much about Mother's life as a young girl. She did not have an easy life. When she was about two years old, her father disappeared. He simply left home. So far as I know, James Lavery was never heard from. It bothered Mother very much. One day when Sheila and I were probably around 12 and 13 years old, maybe a little younger, she told us about her father's disappearance and a little bit about how she grew up. She said that she had not previously told us about her father because she did not want us to think that she had grown up any differently from us. She said that Aunt Sis believed Mother's father must have died because, Aunt Sis said, he had loved Roselia and his children too much to have simply abandoned them. After her father left, Mother lived with Aunt Sis (who had not married) for part of her childhood. I believe my mother's sister Jane stayed with Roselia. I do not know where Charley and Joe were, probably with Roselia or one of the Callahan or Lavery families. I do not know how long Mother lived with Aunt Sis. I don't think it was for too long. I think Mother lived with her mother, sister and brothers for most of her childhood, but the period when she had not lived with her mother had seared her memory. It was something she mentioned to me in the year before she died. Roselia and her children were poor. However, the Callahan and Lavery families rallied around Roselia and her family after James disappeared. Mother spoke often of her various aunts and uncles and was close to her Callahan and Lavery first cousins all her life. I think they all lived near each other in Chicago. Mother was especially close to the three daughters of Agnes Callahan and Pat Phelan. They were almost sisters to her. The youngest of the Phelan girl, who became Ann Manning, was Mother's maid of honor and the middle Phelan girls, who became Peggy Kearney, and Mother lived in the same retirement home in Milwaukee. The third girl was Marcella. We called all three of them "aunt" when we were children. Another Callahan cousin of Mother's was Franc (pronounced France) Callahan. He became a Chicago politician. He was an alderman for a while and was later the head of the Chicago airport. He and mother were close and he and Dad were friends. Mother was raised in St. Mel's parish, on the west side of Chicago. Jane Cochrane Lavery must have lived near Mother after Jane came to Chicago because Mother talked about Jane having been a very involved and active member of that parish. Mother was bright and I think she was a good student. She and Dad once told me that each of them had won a medal for excellence in Irish history when they were children. When Mother finished the eighth grade at St. Mel parish school, she did not go to high school. She signed up for a two year commercial course where I think she learned bookkeeping and clerical skills. By this time Roselia was ill. She had stomach cancer and died on December 15, 1911. At this point, Aunt Sis stepped in and basically became Mother's adopted mother. I believe she lived with Aunt Sis until she and Dad married. Mother worked in an office but I do not remember what she did or the nature of the business she worked for. Mother remained very close to her sister Jane and her brothers Charley and Joe. She was especially close to Jane. Jane married Kyran Conarchy. Uncle Kyran was one of the most delightful people I have ever known. Jane and Kyran had seven children, all of whom Mother, and for that matter my Dad as well, loved very much. We were very close to the Conarchys when we were growing up and have remained so as adults. Dad and his family were raised on the near south side of Chicago, in a neighborhood known as the front of the yards, the "yards" being the Chicago stockyards. At some point, probably after 1916, his family moved to the west side of Chicago. I think Mother and Dad met each other at a church dance. Mother had become acquainted with Dad's sister Loretta. Loretta introduced them. They were married on April 28, 1923. They were a skinny pair. Mother weighed something like 89 pounds and Dad was about twenty pounds heavier. Mother and Dad settled on the west side, living in a succession of apartments. This is where Rosemary, Clem, John and I were born. My Dad's parents had bought a two flat on the west side after they had sold their house on south Oakley Avenue. They apparently got caught up in enthusiasm for the real estate boom of the late 1920's and sold the two flat in order to buy a large apartment building with a large mortgage. The 1929 crash occurred and the Depression started. They could not rent their apartments so our parents and my Dad's brother Dan moved into their building to help pay the mortgage. This would have been in 1932 because I was born while my parents lived in Grandfather and Grandmother Lane's building. It was a two bedroom apartment, housing our parents, four children and a "hired girl", Bea Lucas. Most of the apartments in the building must have been empty because, even with our parents' and uncle Dan's rent, the Lanes were not able to pay the mortgage. Consequently, after I was born they encouraged Mother and Dad to move to larger quarters. Jane and Kyran Conarchy had moved to Evanston and in 1933 Mother and Dad decided to move there as well. Thus we ceased to be Westsiders and became Northsiders. Only people who grew up in Chicago at the same time we did will appreciate the significance of that move. It was not exactly like moving from Tacoma to Mars, but it was close. Our folks rented a house in central Evanston. I think it had four bedrooms. It is still standing and is about four blocks from the hotel where next summer's reunion will be. Shelia was born within a year of our moving in. We must still have been pretty crowded, with two parents, five children, Bea and later our dog Toby Topsy Bunnington Lane. Bea had come to work for Mother when John was born. The strapping lad that John became conceals the sickly infant that he was. He was a very sick baby. Bea came to help Mother with Rosemary and Clem so Mother could spend some extra time taking care of John. Bea was just a kid when she came, about 17 or 18. She was a farm girl from the upper peninsula of Michigan. I think she was hired for three months and stayed for eight or nine years. She was a nice woman. We stayed in Evanston until May 1939 when we moved back into Chicago. We moved into an apartment on Chicago's far north side. Mother and Dad had the opportunity to buy the hose in Evanston, but they never wanted to have a mortgage. They had seen Dad's parents lose everything they had accumulated in their lifetime when they lost the big apartment building to a foreclosure. Aunt Sis also lost her house during the Depression because she could not service the mortgage. Mother and Dad, particularly Dad, never wanted to run that risk. Consequently, they rented all their lives. Paradoxically, Dad always encouraged each of his children to become a homeowner. As was the norm in those days, Mother was a stay-at-home Mom. Bea left us when we moved into Chicago. She came out to Seattle to work in the war industry. Consequently, Mother had the full load of doing the shopping, laundry and housecleaning for the family. She was also the family budgeter and bill payer. This was of course in the days when there were no freezers, dishwashers, dryers, etc. Housewives did a tremendous amount of manual labor. They also shopped every day for meat and bread. In addition to these chores, Mother became the family chauffeur. My parents had never owned a car. The religious order to which Mother's cousin, Sister Huberta, belonged was raffling a 1937 Dodge. Sister Huberta sold my parents some raffle tickets. Mother put the raffle tickets in the name of each of the children. Clem's ticket won the car, but it didn't do him any good because he was only ten years old. Dad had driven when he was young, but refused to start driving again, so Mother learned to drive the car and spent a large part of the next twenty-one years driving my father various places. Mother was an assertive driver, perhaps because Dad was the most aggressive backseat driver I have ever encountered. Mother would pull herself up to her full five foot height and yell at the other motorists while Dad would launch into lengthy diatribes at the various lardheads who were inconsiderate enough to be driving on the same street as my parents. I have heard rumors that one or two of their children inherited their compassion towards other drivers. When Dad joined Alcoholics Anonymous, Mother might just as well have joined. AA was a large part of each of their lives. They spent almost every Tuesday and Saturday night at AA functions and Dad attended an AA meeting almost every Thursday night. Mother supported him totally in his AA work. She also participated with him in all his Catholic activities. They went to mass together every day until Dad got too sick to go. Dad had his first coronary on July 4, 1956. It was a serious heart attack. He had a stressful job, was overweight and had diabetes. All of this contributed to making his coronary life-threatening. Dad started to recover after a couple of months. They went to Florida for two or three months in early January 1957 (their first winter vacation and one of the few vacations they ever took) and when they returned to Chicago, Dad was well enough to go back to work. He was in good health for nine months but in January 1958, he had a stroke from which he never fully recovered. This was two or three weeks before John and Bess June were married. Mother virtually lived at the hospital with Dad. She spent every night in his hospital room. The only time I remember that she was away from Dad for more than an hour or two was when she went to John's and Bess June's wedding. Dad eventually became well enough to leave the hospital and even go back to work. However, the stroke had weakened him so much that he walked with a cane for the rest of his life. He had a series of heart failure attacks and finally had a massive coronary on October 25, 1958 from which he died on October 27, 1958. It is difficult for a child to assess the state of his parents' marriage. With that caveat, I believe Mother and Dad had a very good marriage. They spent a great deal of time together and appeared to enjoy being together. They gave every appearance of loving each other. Their treatment of each other demonstrated that they liked and respected each other. Mother mourned Dad. One memory that still pains me is the day that Mother moved from the last apartment in which she and Dad lived. The apartment was empty. Mother, being Mother, had spent hours cleaning it for the next tenant. She closed the door for the last time and started to cry, saying she felt like she was leaving something behind. When Dad died, his pension from the Daily News also died. Mother got nothing from the Daily News. After a lifetime of raising and educating five children, they had just started to save some money when Dad got sick. Mother had only some life insurance proceeds and some small savings. She was 61 when Dad died, too young to draw social security. She decided to go to work. Mother went to see Dan Ryan (the man for whom the expressway is named). Dan Ryan was the President of the Board of Commissioners of Cook County and, with Mayor Daley, was the all-powerful political boss of Cook County. He had been a friend of Dad. Mother asked him for a job. He made a phone call and Mother was employed in the Cook County welfare department. Asking Ryan for a job and then going to work in an office after a thirty-five year absence from the work place must have been very painful. She worked with people who had gone to school with Sheila. She was the oldest person in the Department by decades. She had to learn new procedures, acquire new skills and deal with situations that were foreign to her. She not only survived this; she grew from it. The young people in her office loved her and she loved them. Mother kept this job for eight or nine years. After Mother stopped working, she continued to live in a small apartment on Chicago's north side, a block or so from Joan and Bess June's first house. She stayed in that apartment until April 1980 when she moved to a retirement home in Milwaukee. I suspect she was sick when she moved there. She was diagnosed with bladder cancer in January 1981 and had surgery to remove the tumor. The cancer recurred two or so months after the surgery. Mother refused further surgery and died on November 30, 1981 at the Milwaukee Catholic Retirement Home. She had none of us in Milwaukee, but Jane Marie Conarchy O'Brien lived a mile or so from the Retirement Home and saw Mother constantly. Jane, who is Mother's eldest niece, was as good to Mother as any of us would have been. She was with Mother when she died. I described Mother as an assertive driver and indeed she was. That, however, was an aberration in her personality. She was ordinarily the most even-tempered person I knew. Her harshest epithet was to call someone a "big Gom". This was hurled at people who were unjust to others; for example, a bigger kid picking on a smaller one or any instance where someone was being unfair or cruel to someone else. The phrase always conjured in my mind the image of some ferociously hulking being. Mother is the only person I have ever heard use that phrase. I think it is derived from the word "gombee" which was use in Ireland to describe a man who preyed on the Irish poor. Mother lived to see her five children marry and to see the birth of all her grandchildren. She had a grandmother's bracelet that had a locket with each grandchild's name. I think she reveled in the name "Meema" that Bob gave her and that all the rest of the grandchildren adopted. Whenever a new baby was born, Mother hurried to see that baby as if to bless the child and welcome the baby into the family. She was fascinated by the grandchildren, especially as they got older. Like a good grandparent, she was much more tolerant of her grandchildrens' misadventures than their parents were. I could continue to write for pages about Mother. I admire her. I love her. Some of your grandchildren knew her well, particularly the Spoeries and the Purcells. Others of you were not so fortunate. All of you should know at least this much about her. Angela Lavery was a good, loving and strong person. However difficult her childhood may have been, she did not dwell on it. She was a happy person who knew how to give and receive love. She was inclusive and welcoming. She may not have graduated from high school, but you would not have known that from talking to her. She was articulate, had an extensive vocabulary, read a lot, had solid mathematical skills and wrote very well. She continued to educate herself all her life. She grew with the changes around her. She knew how to respect the past but to live in the present. She is a good model for anyone. (Source: Robert C. Lane) --------------------------------------------------------------- I had the pleasure of working with Angela Lane while we were both employed at the Welfare Rehabilitation Services Office of the Cook County Department of Public Aid. She and I started working there at about the same time in October of 1959, although I was hired just before she was. She would have been 62 years old when she started working there. I recall her saying how nervous she was on her first day of work. I tried to reassure her that she would do fine. I knew her daughter Sheila as a classmate at Loyola University, and knew of her son Robert, who was kind of a "big man on campus" at Loyola. This department had a fairly high employee turnover rate, with some people staying as little as two months, but Angela stuck it out. Within a short time, she learned all of the department's policies and practices and became a valued member of the training unit. In her position, she would work directly with welfare recipients who were candidates for job training. Although the counselors and not Angela, were the ones with the actual "caseload", she helped to oversee many of the counselors' caseloads. She also supervised the flow of people coming into the office and would assign "clients" to individual counselors. I recall an incident when Angela helped me to retain my job. Although everyone who worked in the department was supposed to (in theory) have taken the Civil Service Exam to be hired, the department didn't insist on this until four years after we were hired. So she and I and others took and passed the federal Civil Service Exam and we needed to go through an additional certification procedure. Shortly after we received the news that we had passed the test, I was struck by a taxicab in LaSalle, Illinois, near where the Spoeris lived for a time. This is not that easy to do considering there are only about five cabs in all of LaSalle. But I was laid up in the hospital in LaSalle and was in traction for five weeks. Attendance at the certification session was mandatory and one would be fired if he did not comply. Being in traction, I obviously could not attend. Angela, however, interceded on my behalf by getting my supervisor to allow me to obtain the certification at a later time. Angela especially enjoyed working with the young people in the department and many of them spoke of how much she had helped them in their work. Although the job didn't pay that well, I think it was $352.00 per month, it was honorable work. Angela worked there eight years, retiring in October of 1967 a little before her 71st birthday. (Source: John Geiger as told to John W. Spoeri)
Baptismal sponsors John Lavery & Rose McMahon. The church where she was baptized was destroyed by fire.
Robert Casey Lane states: I do not know much about Mother's life as a young girl. She did not have an easy life. When she was about two years old, her father disappeared. He simply left home. So far as I know, James Lavery was never heard from. It bothered Mother very much. One day when Sheila and I were probably around 12 and 13 years old, maybe a little younger, she told us about her father's disappearance and a little bit about how she grew up. She said that she had not previously told us about her father because she did not want us to think that she had grown up any differently from us. She said that Aunt Sis believed Mother's father must have died because, Aunt Sis said, he had loved Roselia and his children too much to have simply abandoned them. After her father left, Mother lived with Aunt Sis (who had not married) for part of her childhood. I believe my mother's sister Jane stayed with Roselia. I do not know where Charley and Joe were, probably with Roselia or one of the Callahan or Lavery families. I do not know how long Mother lived with Aunt Sis. I don't think it was for too long. I think Mother lived with her mother, sister and brothers for most of her childhood, but the period when she had not lived with her mother had seared her memory. It was something she mentioned to me in the year before she died.
Roselia and her children were poor. However, the Callahan and Lavery families rallied around Roselia and her family after James disappeared. Mother spoke often of her various aunts and uncles and was close to her Callahan and Lavery first cousins all her life. I think they all lived near each other in Chicago. Mother was especially close to the three daughters of Agnes Callahan and Pat Phelan. They were almost sisters to her. The youngest of the Phelan girl, who became Ann Manning, was Mother's maid of honor and the middle Phelan girls, who became Peggy Kearney, and Mother lived in the same retirement home in Milwaukee. The third girl was Marcella. We called all three of them "aunt" when we were children. Another Callahan cousin of Mother's was Franc (pronounced France) Callahan. He became a Chicago politician. He was an alderman for a while and was later the head of the Chicago airport. He and mother were close and he and Dad were friends.
Mother was raised in St. Mel's parish, on the west side of Chicago. Jane Cochrane Lavery must have lived near Mother after Jane came to Chicago because Mother talked about Jane having been a very involved and active member of that parish. Mother was bright and I think she was a good student. She and Dad once told me that each of them had won a medal for excellence in Irish history when they were children. When Mother finished the eighth grade at St. Mel parish school, she did not go to high school. She signed up for a two year commercial course where I think she learned bookkeeping and clerical skills. By this time Roselia was ill. She had stomach cancer and died on December 15, 1911. At this point, Aunt Sis stepped in and basically became Mother's adopted mother. I believe she lived with Aunt Sis until she and Dad married. Mother worked in an office but I do not remember what she did or the nature of the business she worked for.
Mother remained very close to her sister Jane and her brothers Charley and Joe. She was especially close to Jane. Jane married Kyran Conarchy. Uncle Kyran was one of the most delightful people I have ever known. Jane and Kyran had seven children, all of whom Mother, and for that matter my Dad as well, loved very much. We were very close to the Conarchys when we were growing up and have remained so as adults.
Dad and his family were raised on the near south side of Chicago, in a neighborhood known as the front of the yards, the "yards" being the Chicago stockyards. At some point, probably after 1916, his family moved to the west side of Chicago. I think Mother and Dad met each other at a church dance. Mother had become acquainted with Dad's sister Loretta. Loretta introduced them. They were married on April 28, 1923. They were a skinny pair. Mother weighed something like 89 pounds and Dad was about twenty pounds heavier.
Mother and Dad settled on the west side, living in a succession of apartments. This is where Rosemary, Clem, John and I were born. My Dad's parents had bought a two flat on the west side after they had sold their house on south Oakley Avenue. They apparently got caught up in enthusiasm for the real estate boom of the late 1920's and sold the two flat in order to buy a large apartment building with a large mortgage. The 1929 crash occurred and the Depression started. They could not rent their apartments so our parents and my Dad's brother Dan moved into their building to help pay the mortgage. This would have been in 1932 because I was born while my parents lived in Grandfather and Grandmother Lane's building. It was a two bedroom apartment, housing our parents, four children and a "hired girl", Bea Lucas. Most of the apartments in the building must have been empty because, even with our parents' and uncle Dan's rent, the Lanes were not able to pay the mortgage.
Consequently, after I was born they encouraged Mother and Dad to move to larger quarters. Jane and Kyran Conarchy had moved to Evanston and in 1933 Mother and Dad decided to move there as well. Thus we ceased to be Westsiders and became Northsiders. Only people who grew up in Chicago at the same time we did will appreciate the significance of that move. It was not exactly like moving from Tacoma to Mars, but it was close. Our folks rented a house in central Evanston. I think it had four bedrooms. It is still standing and is about four blocks from the hotel where next summer's reunion will be. Shelia was born within a year of our moving in. We must still have been pretty crowded, with two parents, five children, Bea and later our dog Toby Topsy Bunnington Lane. Bea had come to work for Mother when John was born. The strapping lad that John became conceals the sickly infant that he was. He was a very sick baby. Bea came to help Mother with Rosemary and Clem so Mother could spend some extra time taking care of John. Bea was just a kid when she came, about 17 or 18. She was a farm girl from the upper peninsula of Michigan. I think she was hired for three months and stayed for eight or nine years. She was a nice woman.
We stayed in Evanston until May 1939 when we moved back into Chicago. We moved into an apartment on Chicago's far north side. Mother and Dad had the opportunity to buy the hose in Evanston, but they never wanted to have a mortgage. They had seen Dad's parents lose everything they had accumulated in their lifetime when they lost the big apartment building to a foreclosure. Aunt Sis also lost her house during the Depression because she could not service the mortgage. Mother and Dad, particularly Dad, never wanted to run that risk. Consequently, they rented all their lives. Paradoxically, Dad always encouraged each of his children to become a homeowner.
As was the norm in those days, Mother was a stay-at-home Mom. Bea left us when we moved into Chicago. She came out to Seattle to work in the war industry. Consequently, Mother had the full load of doing the shopping, laundry and housecleaning for the family. She was also the family budgeter and bill payer. This was of course in the days when there were no freezers, dishwashers, dryers, etc. Housewives did a tremendous amount of manual labor. They also shopped every day for meat and bread. In addition to these chores, Mother became the family chauffeur. My parents had never owned a car. The religious order to which Mother's cousin, Sister Huberta, belonged was raffling a 1937 Dodge. Sister Huberta sold my parents some raffle tickets. Mother put the raffle tickets in the name of each of the children. Clem's ticket won the car, but it didn't do him any good because he was only ten years old. Dad had driven when he was young, but refused to start driving again, so Mother learned to drive the car and spent a large part of the next twenty-one years driving my father various places. Mother was an assertive driver, perhaps because Dad was the most aggressive backseat driver I have ever encountered. Mother would pull herself up to her full five foot height and yell at the other motorists while Dad would launch into lengthy diatribes at the various lardheads who were inconsiderate enough to be driving on the same street as my parents. I have heard rumors that one or two of their children inherited their compassion towards other drivers.
When Dad joined Alcoholics Anonymous, Mother might just as well have joined. AA was a large part of each of their lives. They spent almost every Tuesday and Saturday night at AA functions and Dad attended an AA meeting almost every Thursday night. Mother supported him totally in his AA work. She also participated with him in all his Catholic activities. They went to mass together every day until Dad got too sick to go.
Dad had his first coronary on July 4, 1956. It was a serious heart attack. He had a stressful job, was overweight and had diabetes. All of this contributed to making his coronary life-threatening. Dad started to recover after a couple of months. They went to Florida for two or three months in early January 1957 (their first winter vacation and one of the few vacations they ever took) and when they returned to Chicago, Dad was well enough to go back to work. He was in good health for nine months but in January 1958, he had a stroke from which he never fully recovered. This was two or three weeks before John and Bess June were married. Mother virtually lived at the hospital with Dad. She spent every night in his hospital room. The only time I remember that she was away from Dad for more than an hour or two was when she went to John's and Bess June's wedding. Dad eventually became well enough to leave the hospital and even go back to work. However, the stroke had weakened him so much that he walked with a cane for the rest of his life. He had a series of heart failure attacks and finally had a massive coronary on October 25, 1958 from which he died on October 27, 1958.
It is difficult for a child to assess the state of his parents' marriage. With that caveat, I believe Mother and Dad had a very good marriage. They spent a great deal of time together and appeared to enjoy being together. They gave every appearance of loving each other. Their treatment of each other demonstrated that they liked and respected each other. Mother mourned Dad. One memory that still pains me is the day that Mother moved from the last apartment in which she and Dad lived. The apartment was empty. Mother, being Mother, had spent hours cleaning it for the next tenant. She closed the door for the last time and started to cry, saying she felt like she was leaving something behind.
When Dad died, his pension from the Daily News also died. Mother got nothing from the Daily News. After a lifetime of raising and educating five children, they had just started to save some money when Dad got sick. Mother had only some life insurance proceeds and some small savings. She was 61 when Dad died, too young to draw social security. She decided to go to work. Mother went to see Dan Ryan (the man for whom the expressway is named). Dan Ryan was the President of the Board of Commissioners of Cook County and, with Mayor Daley, was the all-powerful political boss of Cook County. He had been a friend of Dad. Mother asked him for a job. He made a phone call and Mother was employed in the Cook County welfare department. Asking Ryan for a job and then going to work in an office after a thirty-five year absence from the work place must have been very painful. She worked with people who had gone to school with Sheila. She was the oldest person in the Department by dec
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1896 - 1981 (84 years)
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