Had we 4 kids been Irish through and through, things would have been different.  The marriage of Lolly and Rich was a mixed marriage.  She was Protestant and he was Catholic.

When Dad first met her in a soda shop in Waukegan, he was enchanted by this lively cutie.  She was taken by this good-natured law school graduate.  Each side contributed a distinct ethic to our family – the hard scrabble Irish grit on the one hand and a more reflective morality on the other.  For the Irish, loyalty to the Church of Rome was central to our resistance in Ireland.  The priests, nuns, schools and charities here in America helped the Irish to work their way out of urban misery.

The Swedes were horrified at the social disorganization of Irish neighborhoods.   Mom repeated a quote from her father’s mother, “I don’t know why God made the Irish”.  At holiday meals, Mom reminded us that her family’s name for the tail of the turkey is “the pope’s nose”.  Her brother, my uncle Bus, had warned her never to send her kids to Catholic school because “that’s when they get their hooks in them.”

My mom was a descendant of a tight knit community that thrived in the North Park neighborhood near Foster and Kimble in Chicago.  Those Swedes were members of the Evangelical Covenant Church.  They didn’t drink, smoke, gamble, or dance.

My grandfather, Alfred, was born in Sweden and brought to Chicago as a baby.  The family lost their home in the Great Chicago Fire of 1877.  One of my sons’ favorite bed time stories was about the fire.  It always ended with mom’s grandparents,  Farmor and Farfar, trying to escape across the Chicago River crying out, “Run little Alfred.  Run! Run!”  I still have the only possession that remained in the ashes, a silver spoon.

As a workingman at the time of the depression, Alfred Olson was a strong supporter of the New Deal.  He was a union guy, often on strike or unemployed.  He was one of the legions of Swedish wood workers who built up Chicago’s housing stock in the first part of the century.   He later worked as a janitor at the Merchandise Mart.

The Covenant Church was founded in opposition to the authoritarian state Lutheranism of the King of Sweden.  This breakaway church emphasized the role of the congregation members, not the king, in interpreting the Bible.  They also had a strong missionary component which manifested itself in a doctrine of understanding and tolerance for other cultures.

Like my dad, Mom lost her mother at an early age.  My grandfather moved his family in with the family of his sister, Aunt Yanda.  In that household, mom had a cousin named Bud, who took seriously the Covenant morality of brotherhood.  Later in life, after demobilizing from service on the Burma Road, he would be fired as a hiring manager at Fanny Mae Chocolates because he brought on African American workers.

His son, Danny, is a hero of mine.  Under the nom de guerre of James North, he wrote Freedom Rising, an anecdotal look at life under apartheid in the 70s.  Now he is crusading as a journalist against sweatshops in Bangladesh.  Mom had two other cousins, John and Paul.  She said they were never right after coming back from the mustard gas trench warfare of World War I.

Mom and her sister, Ruth, became high achieving students.  My mom could quote Chaucer and made sure that we kids were learning Latin in high school and constantly reading. She graduated from High school at age 16. Like most post war middle class women, she didn’t work a job outside of the home.  Instead she devoted herself to civic issues in Waukegan.  She baked the best loaves of bread twice a week.

The goodness in her heart knew no bounds.  She was like a modern day suffragette, serving for years as a president of the League of Women Voters.  One of her earliest causes was with the Legion of Decency.  Drawing on the taut morality of her Swedish Covenant roots, she was unafraid to confront newsstand owners about the skin magazines that they kept hidden under the counter.

She reminisced about her time in the maternity clothes department at Marshall Fields, “They told us to never attend to colored customers until all whites were served.”  In the ‘60s and ‘70s, she joined efforts for interracial understanding and against the war.  She was always organizing – from huge family parties to civic efforts like voter education.

I could always count on her for words of encouragement – until it became clear that my opportunities to start a family and settle down were dwindling.  I was deflated when she told me that I was “not a very good catch”.