Wilmette Obituary: Helen Pierson

The following obituary is courtesy of Donnellan Family Funeral Services.

Helen Pierson passed away on March 26, 2015 in Wilmette, Illinois. She was preceded in death by her beloved husband of 60 years, Roy Pierson; she is survived by her children Veronica (Richard) Murphy, Geoffrey (Carolyn) Pierson, Janet Pierson, David Pierson, Stephen(Marcia) Pierson, Brian (Ingrid) Pierson, Mary Pierson (late Harold) Posner; former daughter-in-law Catherine Daly; grandchildren Norah (Jason) Lally, Elizabeth (Anthony) Mackanesi, Sarah (Aaron) Griffin, Amanda Murphy, Roy (Sarah) Pierson, Matthew Pierson, Colin (Marisa) Murphy, Daniel Pierson, Nathan (Jennifer) Posner, Brendan Pierson, Thomas (JoAnna) Pierson, Nicholas Pierson, Helen Posner, Charles Posner, Elizabeth Pierson, Oliver Posner, Emma Pierson and Michael Pierson; great grandchildren Harley (Caridi) Lally, Matthew Mackenesi, Riona Lally, Lola Mackenesi, McKenna Elle Griffin, Raymond Lally, Aiden James Griffin, Rowan Reagan Griffin, Roy Darrell Pierson and Mason David Pierson.

Helen was born January 16, 1918, in Phoenix, Arizona, the child of James and Elizabeth Maginess (nee Daly). James, a native of Belfast, Ireland, met Elizabeth, a native of Springfield, Illinois, at Chicago’s White City shortly after his arrival in America in 1910. They married in Houston in 1912. Elizabeth returned with Helen to Chicago within a year after her birth. James remained in Arizona and the family never reunited. His fate remains unknown. Helen missed her father. Finding and forming friendships with several of James’ nieces in Ireland in the 1980’s was one of the great joys of Helen’s later life.

Helen was raised in the City of Chicago by her mother and her Aunt Mary, known as “May.” Elizabeth was a loving mother but was prevented by health problems from holding steady work. May provided most of the family’s support from her earnings as a bookkeeper. Helen often referred to May as a second mother and to her mother and May as “my two girls.” The small family lived on the south side until Helen was in the third grade, when they moved to the north side. When Helen was in high school, lack of funds compelled them to return to the south side, where they lived at several different apartments and spent nearly a year with the family of Helen’s Aunt Ellie.

Helen was a gifted storyteller and often shared recollections of her childhood. She grew up during the Great Depression. The family lived paycheck to paycheck and pinched pennies. Helen longed for a bicycle but the family could never afford to buy her one. But Helen did not tell Depression hardship stories. On the contrary, her memories were of close friendships, weekly trips to the main branch of Chicago Public Library, books devoured by the shopping bag, ten cent movies, a supportive church community and a home filled with the love of her beloved “girls.” She had a rich imagination, a loving heart and a gift for finding beauty in the people and places in her life. When she told us “we never felt poor” we believed her.

Helen attended St. Mary of the Lake elementary school on Sheridan Road in Uptown and St. Michael High School in Old Town, where she was taught by the Sisters of Mercy and the School Sisters of Notre Dame, respectively. After the family’s move back to the south side, Helen commuted to St. Michael’s by bus and subway. Boys and girls attended classes on separate sides of the building at St. Michael’s. Helen was a bright and eager student, with a special fondness for English literature. She edited the school newspaper and excelled academically.

Helen was grateful to the nuns of St. Mary’s and St. Michael’s for their selfless way of life, the education they gave her and the many kindnesses they showed her. Helen’s aunt Katherine was a Sister of the Good Shepherd convent on Grace Street, where the sisters nurtured and provided vocational training to neglected and delinquent girls. Helen herself once briefly considered joining the Ursuline sisters before realizing her deep desire for a family.

Helen graduated from St. Michael’s in 1936, at the height of the Great Depression. College was out of the question for financial reasons. She got her first full-time job as a clerk at the Continental Bank in Chicago’s Loop, turning over her earnings of $60 per month to her mother for the family’s support. The bank paid partial tuition for employees wishing to further their education. Helen took advantage of the program to take night classes in English literature at DePaul University.

After four years at the bank, Helen left to take a position with the National Youth Administration, a New Deal program established in 1935 to provide training and employment for young men and women idled by the Depression. During Helen’s short tenure at the NYA, Germany invaded France, President Roosevelt declared America the arsenal of democracy and the country began drafting young men into the armed services for the first time in twenty years. The NYA began to wind down.

During 1940-41, London-based American correspondents filed daily reports describing the death and destruction caused by Nazi Germany’s air attacks on London, Birmingham, Liverpool and other great British cities. At the NYA’s Merchandise Mart offices, Helen noticed a posting for a position with the British Intelligence Service in Washington. She applied and was hired.

Arriving in October 1941, Helen spent nine momentous months in Washington. Separated for the first time from family and familiar places, she met people from many different regions of the United States and from Britain and its far-flung Commonwealth. She visited the capital’s monuments and museums, made new friends and had many formative experiences. She was visiting the Library of Congress with a friend when she learned of the attack on Pearl Harbor. She often recalled how, the following day, her employers, British army officers, appeared in uniform for the first time. She felt and shared the feeling of subdued excitement mixed with sober resolve that pervaded the American capital.

Among the new friends Helen made in Washington was Roy Pierson, a young man from Kansas who had also found a job with British Intelligence. Like Helen, Roy was of modest background and means. Having lost his father at the age of eleven, he had spent the Great Depression living with different relatives, riding the rails hobo-style at times, waiting tables and taking other odd jobs. Well read and intellectually curious, he nevertheless didn’t quite finish high school.

Helen returned to Chicago in fall 1942 to tend to her ailing aunt May, who passed away in 1943. For the next four years, she worked briefly for the U.S. Treasury Department before moving to the War Department. Roy did not forget her. They exchanged letters. Roy visited and met Helen’s family and won over Elizabeth, his future mother-in-law. But Roy was trying to build a career in New York and the courtship was slow. A Protestant by upbringing and a skeptic by nature, Roy took instruction in the Catholic religion and formally converted, with Elizabeth as his sponsor.

Roy and Helen were wed October 29, 1946 in a small, modest ceremony at St. Philip Neri Church in Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood. They lived first in Chicago, where Veronica, Geoffrey and Janet were born. They moved to Detroit when Roy took a job with Barry Steel Corporation. David, Stephen and Brian were born there. Finally, they moved back to the Chicago area, settling on the Northshore, where Mary was born. Until her death in 1969, Elizabeth, “Nana” to her loving grandchildren, was always with the family.

Roy was honest, enterprising and bright. With Helen’s support, he achieved success in business, eventually founding Feralloy Corporation, a steel processing company with operations in Chicago, Birmingham and Wilmington. Roy sold Feralloy to a German conglomerate in 1971 and founded Pierson Steel. Roy worked hard well into his 70s. He took a keen interest in politics, the arts and science. He was a well-read man, with a well-stocked library and long list of periodical subscriptions ranging from the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, through the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to the Peking Review. He loved music, especially Puccini and Mahler. He was a loving and attentive husband to Helen and father to his children. For Roy, business was a means to an end. Home with his family was where he always longed to be.

In 1962, at the age of 44, Helen realized a childhood dream when she enrolled at Mundelein College. She majored in English, wrote for the school newspaper and graduated in four years while raising seven children. She then earned a masters degree in English from Northwestern University. These feats were especially noteworthy in that pre-feminist era, when colleges neither applauded nor made concessions to “non-traditional” students.

Throughout her formal studies, Helen remained a loving and ever-present mother to her seven children. She attended classes while they were at school and wrote her required essays after they had gone to bed. She picked them up when it rained, took them to practice, hosted their friends for overnights and helped serve lunch in the Sacred Heart School cafeteria when her turn came. When the kids got home from school, she served tea and a snack in the library, where the day’s events were reviewed, triumphs celebrated and disappointments salved. Without fail, she visited each child at bedtime to make sure all was well and to bestow a hug, a kiss and a final, ritual blessing: “Good night. Sweet dreams. God bless you. I love you.”

Roy and Helen were grateful for their success but never forgot their responsibility for those whom Jesus called “the least of my brethren,” giving generously to many charities and supporting government efforts to alleviate social injustices. They promoted the Civil Rights movement with their time and money. When management at Feralloy’s Birmingham, Alabama plant proposed separate washrooms for black employees, Roy refused. They cultivated Jewish friendships and participated in inter-faith and interracial initiatives. They taught their children to value the dignity of every human being.

By their extraordinary efforts, Roy and Helen were able send all of their children to college. They continued to provide crucial assistance, emotional and material, as their children entered the adult world. When their children married, they welcomed their spouses. Their children had children and they became devoted grandparents and, later, great-grandparents.

Roy and Helen remained at the core of their large and ever-growing family, their benevolent love radiating through several generations of Pierson descendants.
They cherished each member of their family and did all they could to assure that family members cherished each other. The family holiday cycle included Helen’s birthday, St. Patrick’s Day, Easter, Memorial Day, July 4th, Labor Day, Thanksgiving, Roy’s birthday, Christmas and, in any given year, several “supplemental” holidays to mark a special anniversary, graduation, rare visit or other extraordinary event. These intergenerational, high-spirited celebrations featured good food, good wine, music, laughter, occasional heated debate and a pervasive joy. Their purpose was to mark a particular event and, perhaps more importantly, to remind siblings of their shared histories, deepen the integration of in-laws, turn cousins into life-long friends and strengthen the family fabric with fresh strands of affection.

Helen was a practicing Roman Catholic her entire life, faithfully attending mass and taking the sacraments. She delivered her children at Catholic hospitals because, as she later recounted, a Catholic hospital would sacrifice the life of the mother to save a child. The children attended Catholic schools. Sacred Heart parish in Winnetka was Helen’s spiritual home for the final fifty-eight years of her life. She successively befriended a long line of its pastors and curates. A loyal and devout Catholic, Helen was also an educated, progressive, independent-minded woman. She viewed skeptically the Church’s claimed monopoly on salvation, its elaborate hierarchies and its relegation of women to subordinate roles.

Helen engaged in a wide variety of volunteer activities into late old age, including tutoring grade school children in reading and visiting the sick and the aged, the latter often considerably younger than she. Sensitive and thoughtful, she was ever ready with a kind word, a note of comfort, a gesture of friendship and love.

Helen maintained her deep love of books until her death. She loved reading them and talking about them. She believed in the power of literature to expand a reader’s cultural, personal and moral universe, to cultivate empathy and to bridge the gaps of time, space, race, religion and social condition.

The day before he died, Roy appeared in a new bathrobe. Helen playfully remarked, “You look like a king.” “Of course,” Roy replied triumphantly, “I’m married to a queen!” Roy and Helen were married 60 years. Throughout their life together, they loved, honored and supported each other. They took pleasure in each other’s company. Each was the other’s best friend. The example of their loyalty, devotion, friendship and love is an inspiration and a gift to everyone who knew them, especially to their family.

When Roy and Helen started life together, they had no college degrees, no money and no connections. But they were big-hearted, open-minded and exceptionally intelligent; They were resourceful, enterprising and full of hope. Most important, they shared a profound love - for each other, for their children and for their fellow man – that was the firm foundation for all their other outstanding qualities.

Helen’s life was a powerful model of empathy, devotion and charity. Her family will love her and honor and treasure her memory forever. They know God will bless and reward her.

Visitation Sunday March 29, 2015, 5:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. at Donnellan Family Funeral Home, 10045 Skokie Blvd., at Old Orchard Road Skokie, IL 60077. Funeral Mass Monday March 30, 2015, 2:00 p.m. at Sacred Heart Church, 1077 Tower Road, Winnetka, IL 60077. Interment Sacred Heart Cemetery.

Funeral info (847) 675-1990 or www.donnellanfuneral.com.

VISITATION

Sunday March 29, 2015, 5:00 PM - 8:00 PM at Donnellan Family Funeral Services, 10045 Skokie Boulevard, Skokie, Illinois 60077
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FUNERAL MASS

Monday March 30, 2015, 2:00 PM at Sacred Heart Church, 1077 Tower Road, Winnetka, Illinois 60093
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BURIAL

Monday March 30, 2015 at Sacred Heart Cemetery, Lee & Dundee Roads, Northbrook, Illinois 60062
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PRAYER SERVICE & MEMORY SHARING

Sunday March 29, 2015, 6:00 PM at Donnellan Family Funeral Services, 10045 Skokie Boulevard, Skokie, Illinois 60077
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