thedrifter
06-03-09, 12:00 PM
Gertrude's bargain
Gertrude Crowley has been a nun, a Marine, a teacher and a mother
By DEB QUANTOCK McCAREY
Contributing Reporter
Without missing a beat, 96-year-old Gertrude Kilgallen Crowley says people probably think she's been in hot water her entire life, but in retrospect, it's turned out all right.
Crowley, an Oak Park Arms resident since 2001, has been a BVM (a nun of the Blessed Virgin Mary order), a U.S. Marine during WWII, a school teacher in Chicago and the suburbs, a wife, a working mom with a brood of boys and girls, and a doting grandmother with nine grandchildren and one great-grandchild. The quick-witted red-head is, to this day, sharp, funny and probably the last person anyone would guess is a former nun.
"Gertrude is full of vinegar ... and so loving and supportive. She is unlike any 96-year-old I have ever met," says Jill Wagner, marketing director at The Arms. "She is a woman of conviction and a woman who has done a lot of things many women would not be courageous enough to do."
The defining moment of her life was a bargain with God: Her earnest Irish grandfather promised her to a religious life if God would save her, and a folkloric medical miracle relegated the young girl to a life of solitude and service to others.
"I was born on April 17, 1913, at 5011 West End in Chicago, the part that is called Austin, and when I was 2 years old I fell into a pail of boiling water," recalls Crowley. "They sent for doctors all over who said 'this child will not live, and if she does, she will never walk.' Somehow or other, after I got out of the hospital - I think my grandmother had me setting the table and doing other things - my grandmother got me walking."
She was the oldest of seven Irish-Catholic children, six girls and one boy, and her grandfather, a native of Ireland and the family patriarch, wanted a priest and a nun in the Kilgallen clan. So while his granddaughter was recovering in the hospital, he began praying for a miracle and got it.
"I fought it all my life, but there I was," Crowley said. "My brother, as soon as he graduated from the eighth grade, was taken by the hand by my grandfather over to Quigley, which was a five year high school in preparation towards the priesthood. He said later on in his life that he was pushed into it, but he was a great priest who has written several books."
Crowley herself was sent away the last three years of high school to a boarding school in Clinton, Iowa, removing her from the world of men.
"They said they had to make a lady out of me," she laughs.
At age 17, she went directly from high school to a BVM convent in Dubuque, Iowa to begin her series of vows: poverty, chastity and obedience. She also received teacher training and taught school for them.
Convent life was extremely regimented and spiritual, consisting of attending daily Mass, reciting meditative prayers with the rosary and teaching school all day. It was a rare occurrence when the nuns got permission even to talk at dinner. After meals, they were given an hour to correct schoolwork and one hour of recreation, which the nuns mostly used to sit at the same table and converse.
"The biggest thing of all is whether they would allow us to have a cup of coffee with dinner that night. That was the greatest break in the world," she recalls.
In her 9½ years as a nun, Crowley never had any money until the night before Lent when they put nickels and dimes in pancakes and served the loaded flapjacks to the sisters.
"I must have eaten 15 or 20 pancakes so I could end up with 40 cents," Crowley says. "Now that 40 cents we could spend ourselves. I would go to the dime store, and believe me, I was rich."
Near the end of it all, her brother began worrying about his older sis and obtained permission to visit her at the convent. When he returned to the seminary, his spiritual advisor said, "Don't worry about her; she knows exactly what she is doing."
In 1940, just prior to taking her perpetual vows, Crowley was allowed to travel home to attend her brother's ordination. On March 19 of that year, she left the order, deciding "if you're not doing something right, not to do it at all, and that was it," she said.
She took off her "11 yards of surge" and threw it into the furnace to burn.
"Our habits are blessed, and not to be left lying around," she explains.
Her mother and two sisters drove to retrieve her so she could resume her life as a teacher back home.
"It was difficult, of course. It had been I don't know how many years since I had made any decision for myself," she says. "But I had a wonderful father, and my mother, of course, and five sisters, so it was all right.
"Even my grandfather, who by that time was pretty well ready to go to his reward, said he wanted me to be happy. But it must have been a big shock for him," she adds.
In 1942 when WWII began, Crowley answered another calling, this time to join the war effort by becoming a U.S. Marine. Her first choice for military service was the Navy, so she went to the Navy Officer Club to enlist but was rejected because she couldn't pass the eye test. Across the street was the new recruitment office for women Marines, so she did that. Because of her poor vision, throughout the conflict Crowley says she remained a private making 50 cents a month in the Women Marine Association.
"The men hated it. [We heard] they called us BAMs [broad ass Marines] behind our backs," she says.
Boot camp took place in New River, N.C., and for two years Crowley and her platoon learned how to march, all about airplanes and to identify poison gases. Her first official assignment was at the Marine Corps Institute in Washington, D.C., where she became a teacher again. Soldiers would mail their school papers to be corrected, in an effort to earn their high school diplomas while serving overseas.
As rewarding as that assignment was, Crowley ultimately wanted to join her sisters in California: one was in the Navy and the other, who was underage, worked for the Navy.
"I guess I faked an operation and got there - an appendectomy I probably didn't need," she confesses. "By that time, Washington D.C. was women's town and not too many men. My sisters were having a ball in California, so I got myself to the Marine air base in Santa Ana where we were supposed to fix airplanes."
n
Being a woman marine was initially unsettling for her, but she got used to it, and turned into a matchmaker.
"I was on a soap box all the time," she recalled. "You would see someone getting married to someone she had just met, and I was always yelling my head off," she recalls.
At the base, the females were divided into small groups at the hangars to learn more about airplanes. Clearly, the marine men did not want the job of teaching the gals, so they played practical jokes on the wide-eyed ones. Crowley was told to go around and fill a bucket with "slip stream."
"I went from place to place and just got dirty looks. When I came back, nobody would believe that I didn't know that slip stream was the wind along the wings of the airplane," she laughs. "It was crazy."
She also drove the trucks and painted murals on the walls of the officers club for the art department, which didn't do much for the war effort, she says, but that was California during WWII. She signed up to be shipped to Guam, but the war ended.
Several years ago, Crowley convinced her barracks buddy, Inga Fredricksen Ferris, to pen her memoirs about what took place in their little corner of the war. A Few Good Women, Memoirs of a WWII Marine was published in 2006. In it are more escapades of Mary Gertrude Kilgallen Crowley and the enlisted women with whom she courageously and proudly served.
When she returned home, she taught school until 1950. She met James Crowley, got married and began raising her family: Mike, Patty, Peggy and Jim. To help support the family in hard times, Crowley returned to teaching school when her children were old enough.
During her tenure as a teacher, she accumulated numerous academic credentials and credits, including bachelor's and master's degrees from DePaul University, and continued taking college-level educational enrichment coursework until 1985.
About a decade after she retired in the mid-'70s, she and her husband moved in with their daughter in Oak Park. About three years later, her son-in-law, a young attorney, was murdered while commuting home on the Lake Street el. Gertrude became a widow several years after that.
Nunsensical
Last fall, Jill Wagner and Gertrude Crowley attended a Holy Family "reunion mass" in Chicago. For both, the event was stirring.
"There was a whole room full of white-haired women," Crowley recalled, "and Jill said, 'How are you going to tell which ones are the nuns?' I said, 'Just look around and [look for] the ones who are dressed worse than anyone else."
While most of the nuns were finding long-lost friends and reuniting, Crowley, who was BVM nun number 2,679 (according to the order's records), did not. Every other nun present that day had a convent induction number over 3,000.
"It was a shock in a way. I was hoping I would find at least one person," she says. "All of the nuns there had to be at least 10 years younger than I was."
She laughs. "My sister from California calls me the other day and she says, 'Why are you still alive?' She is blaming me for the long-life family, I guess, since five of us girls are still alive. I hope I can get into purgatory at least."
Still a devout Catholic, she says she hasn't lost her faith, but her long life has certainly contained a lot of changes. Mostly for logistical reasons, she now takes Holy Communion on Sundays at the Oak Park Arms, where she fraternizes with a bunch of pals from her home parish, St. Vincent Ferrer Catholic Church in River Forest.
The group is hard to miss. At meals they belt out songs from their WWI repertoire and recite poetry, including "Quality of Mercy" by William Shakespeare.
Every time Crowley starts a poem, Dorothy, who is 98, confined to a wheelchair and in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease, manages to finish it line for line. Crowley says she does it mostly to keep Dorothy busy.
"What is so beautiful about Gertrude is that her whole life, she is always thinking about and giving to others," Wagner says. "She makes all these sacrifices for other people. She was a nun, so she sacrificed for others. She joined the Marines so she could sacrifice for others. She became a teacher so she could give to others and a mother so she could raise a family and she became a working mother so she could feed them. Even here at The Arms she does the same thing.
"Living, for her, is giving to others."
Ellie
Gertrude Crowley has been a nun, a Marine, a teacher and a mother
By DEB QUANTOCK McCAREY
Contributing Reporter
Without missing a beat, 96-year-old Gertrude Kilgallen Crowley says people probably think she's been in hot water her entire life, but in retrospect, it's turned out all right.
Crowley, an Oak Park Arms resident since 2001, has been a BVM (a nun of the Blessed Virgin Mary order), a U.S. Marine during WWII, a school teacher in Chicago and the suburbs, a wife, a working mom with a brood of boys and girls, and a doting grandmother with nine grandchildren and one great-grandchild. The quick-witted red-head is, to this day, sharp, funny and probably the last person anyone would guess is a former nun.
"Gertrude is full of vinegar ... and so loving and supportive. She is unlike any 96-year-old I have ever met," says Jill Wagner, marketing director at The Arms. "She is a woman of conviction and a woman who has done a lot of things many women would not be courageous enough to do."
The defining moment of her life was a bargain with God: Her earnest Irish grandfather promised her to a religious life if God would save her, and a folkloric medical miracle relegated the young girl to a life of solitude and service to others.
"I was born on April 17, 1913, at 5011 West End in Chicago, the part that is called Austin, and when I was 2 years old I fell into a pail of boiling water," recalls Crowley. "They sent for doctors all over who said 'this child will not live, and if she does, she will never walk.' Somehow or other, after I got out of the hospital - I think my grandmother had me setting the table and doing other things - my grandmother got me walking."
She was the oldest of seven Irish-Catholic children, six girls and one boy, and her grandfather, a native of Ireland and the family patriarch, wanted a priest and a nun in the Kilgallen clan. So while his granddaughter was recovering in the hospital, he began praying for a miracle and got it.
"I fought it all my life, but there I was," Crowley said. "My brother, as soon as he graduated from the eighth grade, was taken by the hand by my grandfather over to Quigley, which was a five year high school in preparation towards the priesthood. He said later on in his life that he was pushed into it, but he was a great priest who has written several books."
Crowley herself was sent away the last three years of high school to a boarding school in Clinton, Iowa, removing her from the world of men.
"They said they had to make a lady out of me," she laughs.
At age 17, she went directly from high school to a BVM convent in Dubuque, Iowa to begin her series of vows: poverty, chastity and obedience. She also received teacher training and taught school for them.
Convent life was extremely regimented and spiritual, consisting of attending daily Mass, reciting meditative prayers with the rosary and teaching school all day. It was a rare occurrence when the nuns got permission even to talk at dinner. After meals, they were given an hour to correct schoolwork and one hour of recreation, which the nuns mostly used to sit at the same table and converse.
"The biggest thing of all is whether they would allow us to have a cup of coffee with dinner that night. That was the greatest break in the world," she recalls.
In her 9½ years as a nun, Crowley never had any money until the night before Lent when they put nickels and dimes in pancakes and served the loaded flapjacks to the sisters.
"I must have eaten 15 or 20 pancakes so I could end up with 40 cents," Crowley says. "Now that 40 cents we could spend ourselves. I would go to the dime store, and believe me, I was rich."
Near the end of it all, her brother began worrying about his older sis and obtained permission to visit her at the convent. When he returned to the seminary, his spiritual advisor said, "Don't worry about her; she knows exactly what she is doing."
In 1940, just prior to taking her perpetual vows, Crowley was allowed to travel home to attend her brother's ordination. On March 19 of that year, she left the order, deciding "if you're not doing something right, not to do it at all, and that was it," she said.
She took off her "11 yards of surge" and threw it into the furnace to burn.
"Our habits are blessed, and not to be left lying around," she explains.
Her mother and two sisters drove to retrieve her so she could resume her life as a teacher back home.
"It was difficult, of course. It had been I don't know how many years since I had made any decision for myself," she says. "But I had a wonderful father, and my mother, of course, and five sisters, so it was all right.
"Even my grandfather, who by that time was pretty well ready to go to his reward, said he wanted me to be happy. But it must have been a big shock for him," she adds.
In 1942 when WWII began, Crowley answered another calling, this time to join the war effort by becoming a U.S. Marine. Her first choice for military service was the Navy, so she went to the Navy Officer Club to enlist but was rejected because she couldn't pass the eye test. Across the street was the new recruitment office for women Marines, so she did that. Because of her poor vision, throughout the conflict Crowley says she remained a private making 50 cents a month in the Women Marine Association.
"The men hated it. [We heard] they called us BAMs [broad ass Marines] behind our backs," she says.
Boot camp took place in New River, N.C., and for two years Crowley and her platoon learned how to march, all about airplanes and to identify poison gases. Her first official assignment was at the Marine Corps Institute in Washington, D.C., where she became a teacher again. Soldiers would mail their school papers to be corrected, in an effort to earn their high school diplomas while serving overseas.
As rewarding as that assignment was, Crowley ultimately wanted to join her sisters in California: one was in the Navy and the other, who was underage, worked for the Navy.
"I guess I faked an operation and got there - an appendectomy I probably didn't need," she confesses. "By that time, Washington D.C. was women's town and not too many men. My sisters were having a ball in California, so I got myself to the Marine air base in Santa Ana where we were supposed to fix airplanes."
n
Being a woman marine was initially unsettling for her, but she got used to it, and turned into a matchmaker.
"I was on a soap box all the time," she recalled. "You would see someone getting married to someone she had just met, and I was always yelling my head off," she recalls.
At the base, the females were divided into small groups at the hangars to learn more about airplanes. Clearly, the marine men did not want the job of teaching the gals, so they played practical jokes on the wide-eyed ones. Crowley was told to go around and fill a bucket with "slip stream."
"I went from place to place and just got dirty looks. When I came back, nobody would believe that I didn't know that slip stream was the wind along the wings of the airplane," she laughs. "It was crazy."
She also drove the trucks and painted murals on the walls of the officers club for the art department, which didn't do much for the war effort, she says, but that was California during WWII. She signed up to be shipped to Guam, but the war ended.
Several years ago, Crowley convinced her barracks buddy, Inga Fredricksen Ferris, to pen her memoirs about what took place in their little corner of the war. A Few Good Women, Memoirs of a WWII Marine was published in 2006. In it are more escapades of Mary Gertrude Kilgallen Crowley and the enlisted women with whom she courageously and proudly served.
When she returned home, she taught school until 1950. She met James Crowley, got married and began raising her family: Mike, Patty, Peggy and Jim. To help support the family in hard times, Crowley returned to teaching school when her children were old enough.
During her tenure as a teacher, she accumulated numerous academic credentials and credits, including bachelor's and master's degrees from DePaul University, and continued taking college-level educational enrichment coursework until 1985.
About a decade after she retired in the mid-'70s, she and her husband moved in with their daughter in Oak Park. About three years later, her son-in-law, a young attorney, was murdered while commuting home on the Lake Street el. Gertrude became a widow several years after that.
Nunsensical
Last fall, Jill Wagner and Gertrude Crowley attended a Holy Family "reunion mass" in Chicago. For both, the event was stirring.
"There was a whole room full of white-haired women," Crowley recalled, "and Jill said, 'How are you going to tell which ones are the nuns?' I said, 'Just look around and [look for] the ones who are dressed worse than anyone else."
While most of the nuns were finding long-lost friends and reuniting, Crowley, who was BVM nun number 2,679 (according to the order's records), did not. Every other nun present that day had a convent induction number over 3,000.
"It was a shock in a way. I was hoping I would find at least one person," she says. "All of the nuns there had to be at least 10 years younger than I was."
She laughs. "My sister from California calls me the other day and she says, 'Why are you still alive?' She is blaming me for the long-life family, I guess, since five of us girls are still alive. I hope I can get into purgatory at least."
Still a devout Catholic, she says she hasn't lost her faith, but her long life has certainly contained a lot of changes. Mostly for logistical reasons, she now takes Holy Communion on Sundays at the Oak Park Arms, where she fraternizes with a bunch of pals from her home parish, St. Vincent Ferrer Catholic Church in River Forest.
The group is hard to miss. At meals they belt out songs from their WWI repertoire and recite poetry, including "Quality of Mercy" by William Shakespeare.
Every time Crowley starts a poem, Dorothy, who is 98, confined to a wheelchair and in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease, manages to finish it line for line. Crowley says she does it mostly to keep Dorothy busy.
"What is so beautiful about Gertrude is that her whole life, she is always thinking about and giving to others," Wagner says. "She makes all these sacrifices for other people. She was a nun, so she sacrificed for others. She joined the Marines so she could sacrifice for others. She became a teacher so she could give to others and a mother so she could raise a family and she became a working mother so she could feed them. Even here at The Arms she does the same thing.
"Living, for her, is giving to others."
Ellie