Oak Lawn resident Loretta Gotfryd officially turns 25 years old Thursday, but it’s taken her a really long time to reach the milestone.
Loretta, who was born Feb. 29, 1924, “used to joke that she was younger than her own children,” said her daughter, Maria Gotfryd.
Her family members gathered a few Saturdays ago to celebrate Loretta’s 25 birthdays and century of life, throwing the party early to accommodate travel arrangements for 65 relatives, many from out of town. It was an advent that even garnered a note from the office of Pope Francis in Rome, imparting a “requested Apostolic Blessing” on Gotfryd.
It’s a deserved honor for someone who’s spent much of the last 100 years working hard and caring for others.
The daughter of parents who immigrated from the Rzeszow area in southeast Poland, Loretta and her family still hold tightly to their Old World heritage. The recent birthday party in the Oak Lawn condo where she lives with her daughter featured a Polish menu including sausage, baked chicken, pork tenderloin and dumplings.
Maria said her own Polish is limited, other than a few swear words, but a live-in caregiver from Poland, Krystyna Skrodzka, speaks to her mom in Polish.
“As she’s gotten older, she’s gotten more and more to speaking Polish,” Maria said of her mom.
Originally a Chicago resident, Gotfryd quit school in 1939 at age 15 after she was named class president of her Catholic school.
“The nuns didn’t like that,” Maria said. “They said class presidents had to raise money for the church.”
So Loretta went to work in a brewery at age 16, traveling to Wisconsin to train other young women in the business. But she always loved math, her daughter said, and at 18 or 19 she went to work as an accountant for an uncle who sold false teeth and stayed at that job until she was in her 50s. Her last job was as an accountant for a general packaging business.
Raising children while working full time wasn’t easy, especially after the death of her husband, Edward, but having a close knit family helped a lot. Loretta and her four sisters all lived on the same street in Chicago.
“It was family, family, family,” Maria said. “We always had somebody with us. She enjoyed having her sisters on the same street, always having coffee, playing cards, playing bingo at church.
Besides Maria, the family includes Loretta’s sons Joe, who lives in Brookfield, and Michael, who lives a few blocks away in Oak Lawn. A grandson, Matthew, lives in Arizona.
Loretta’s longevity isn’t uncommon in her family. Her mother lived to be 98, another sister died at age 92 and her youngest sister recently turned 90.
She’s been relatively healthy, other than an intestinal obstruction that required surgery in 2016. Since then, she’s used a walker to get around and needs a little help standing up. But she still enjoys a big breakfast and lunch, retiring late in the afternoon. Her daughter she’d never taken vitamins or supplements.
She likes watching favorite television programs such as “Cagney and Lacey” and “Murder She Wrote.” She still plays Scrabble with her daughter, and on warm days she enjoys sitting out on their terrace, especially with visiting relatives. She also takes car rides with family members several times weekly.
Though her memory has slipped when it comes to specific details, she shares lots of family stories with her daughter. One of Maria’s favorite stories involves her grandfather asking her mother to fetch his violin.
“She would sit and listen to her father playing the violin,” Maria said. It’s a story she can relate to, as her own favorite memory from childhood is of her mom singing “Mona Lisa” to her.
Maria Gotfryd says she has plenty to appreciate about her mother living so long.
“Just the fact that she’s been around 100 years,” she said. “That she can be here to enjoy her sons and I, and the fact that she remembers things.”
And she’s still creating new memories, such as her extended family gathering to celebrate her 25th birthday. The event received a nice review afterward from the guest of honor.
“The party was good,” Loretta said.
Janice Neumann is a freelance reporter for the Daily Southtown.
