Margaret Klenck

1925 – 2017

Mom was born on the last day of May 1925, the tenth of twelve children of John Cvetan and Theresa Dragovan. They had emigrated from the Austro-Hungarian empire in what is now Croatia and Slovenia. They met and married in a company town on the Iron Range in northern Minnesota, living in a three-bedroom home owned by the mine where Grandpa worked. Four girls would sleep in one bed.

Every night the family would kneel on the living room floor praying the rosary with Grandpa leading. They lived on a hill the kids would sled down during the long winters. The house was surrounded by the garden, barn, animal pens and summer kitchen where they grew and prepared their food. Through the trap door in the kitchen you could climb into the cellar where they stored food they canned and you could see the logs of the home’s first construction.

The northern Minnesota wilderness surrounded them for miles and miles. Mom was a tomboy and preferred to be in the woods with the boys, camping and fishing. When I would visit her here in Florida and go for walks to the beach or wetlands or hammock, she would always want reports on what I saw and to look at the pictures. She loved her birth month of May when the girls would gather flower petals to be strewn in the church for the procession of Mary. Ojibway Indians would come to their door. The family’s life during the Depression was closer to frontier times than to the life Mom would live watching from her yard men and women fly, and die, going into space.

When she graduated from high school, Mom moved to Chicago to help care for the children of her oldest sister Theresa, and then live with her other sisters, Ange and Mary. She worked at Bell Telephone with many other women in the war economy, and was a member of the Communication Workers union, the same one I would later join. By 22, she bought a house with her sisters and the home became a long-term stayover for other family members who came to Chicago after military service. She would take her nephews and nieces on adventures and created strong bonds with them. Her niece Terry moved to Melbourne and was a lifetime joy for mom. Chicago was a massive change from the tiny, rural village for the shy girl who stuttered and didn’t speak English until she went to school. But she learned the buses and trains and explored the city and loved to dance in the ballrooms.

In 1957, she met Hubert, a recent widower, whose wife Ang had been friends with mom’s sister Fran. Mom suddenly had four step-children and a step-mother-in-law who lived downstairs. And in less than a year, I arrived.
If this hadn’t been tumult enough, three years later her world turned upside down. On a trip to Mexico, I got a boil and had to go to the hospital. Mom got the infection in her nose, and back in Chicago had blood poisoning and an infection in her bones. She had a 105 degree fever and nearly died, but Dad told her she had a little boy she needed to live for. And she did, but she would have many operations on her ankle, arms, shin and tailbone. She was being treated for the active infection in her tailbone until she died. She had to have a colostomy which led to a massive hernia that plagued her. The disease disabled her but she refused to let it define her.

Dad retired from the Chicago police department in 1963, and we moved to rural West Melbourne, Florida with a citrus grove and a garden, next to neighbors with horses and cattle. Mom was a member of Our Lady of Lourdes for the past 54 years, including having communion service at Brookdale. Mom and I would ride our bikes to the parks and to visit neighbors. My best friend Rod Guenther’s mother Sue called my mom, “the lady with the crooked arm,” because Mom always was carrying something she made to give when she visited friends. She would can vegetables from the garden, or bake bread, or make marmalade from the citrus or crochet or knit or needlepoint or do some other of a dozen crafts. She was an amazing seamstress and would make clothes for all of us.

Mom and I would go on adventures together, taking the bus around Chicago when we’d visit family and go to the museums, explore the Loop, try different foods or settle on old favorites like Wimpy’s hamburgers. We’d take the Greyhound bus to Minnesota to visit Grandma and Uncle Louis, and explore her woods and pick berries and eat Bridgeman’s ice cream.

I will miss those adventures with her, including our last which was to find a place for lamb dinner in Melbourne after Easter. Mom would say we were very compatible. We loved each other’s company. She adored me, and I adored her.

Mom convinced Grandma to spend the winters with us in Florida. I wrote this at the table where Mom and Grandma would stretch and stretch the phyllo dough to make apple strudel. I can see them sitting on the couch knitting and hear them talking in Serbo-Croatian. After Grandma died, Mom and Dad and her sister Ange and Uncle Jim traveled to Metlika, Slovenia where Grandma was a girl. Mom said it was just like going home because the winding dirt roads, gardens and barns in the rolling hills of Metlika had been recreated in the rolling hills of Soudan, Minnesota.

After her dear Hubert died in 2003, Mom was justly proud of her ability to live and thrive independently. She never drove, but got to church and shopping with friends. Nancy, who is here, and others became dear friends. She and Nancy arranged to call each other every day to check in, which did lead to false alarm calls to police or to neighbors being put on alert on a couple occasions. Mom enjoyed the social services drivers she would arrange to get to medical appointments and the people she would call to help take care of issues around the house. Eventually, she needed Meals on Wheels, and delighted even more in their company than in the food they brought. And though more limited, she still enjoyed her crooked-armed ways, and would make puppy chow or granola to share with the postman or the volunteers who helped her. She taught me the meaning and ways of generosity.

Shortly after a big bash at her house for her 90th birthday, a series of medical issues helped her realize she needed more assistance. She moved into Brookdale and quickly endeared herself to the residents and staff. They were a great support to her in last two years as her strong spirit was confined to a frail body.

Mom was fiercely intelligent and curious. She was an avid reader and continued with large print books and even read books downloaded to her Nook. Jeopardy remained her favorite show, though she said couldn’t answer as many as she used to. She would freely give her opinion and tell you what she thought, but always wanted to know what others were thinking. She was a devout Catholic but was curious about what others believed and was very respectful to other cultures. She recently told me a story of a cross burning in her town and that the school principal was the Klan leader. I asked why that would happen since I didn’t think any blacks then lived on the Iron Range in Minnesota. She said, “Well, we were the targets, the Catholics and the southern Europeans.” She said throughout her life she felt like an outsider and she taught me to not let others to feel that way. Our neighbors in Chicago were Mexican immigrants and we were always at each other’s homes and became best friends. She was comfortable with whomever she was with.

Family was incredibly important to Mom. She welcomed Jane like a daughter and was the perfect example for us in raising her grandchildren. Two nights ago, Jane and Caroline and I went for a nighttime walk on the beach under a near full moon. As we were getting ready to leave, a mother sea turtle emerged from the surf a couple hundred feet away. As we watched, another came up even closer. We looked behind us, and another was coming out of the surf there. As we watched these, surrounded by mothers on their missions, another silently came crawling right next to us, returning to the water after making her nest.

My earliest memories are of birthday parties at Uncle Joe’s or Uncle Frank’s or Aunt Ange’s or squeezed into Aunt Mary’s tiny, city back yard. I’d be with my cousins in Aunt Theresa’s curiosity shop of a basement while Grandma and her children would be upstairs talking in their first language. But I never met Ann, the sister that Mom said she was closest to. Mom was with Ann as she was dying of a burst appendix. Mom’s eyes would fill with tears as she recalled Ann telling Mom to “move over because Jesus and Mary were coming to get her.”

Mom’s waited 80 years to join Ann. She was certainly ready and we said our goodbyes to each other. I can’t fathom how much I will miss her. I trust she is now resting with family in the rolling hills and winding lanes of home.