Another significant family date: Anne O’Malley Hogan, our grandmother,
known to some as "Mighty Anne" (though I guess you’d have to see her
coming at you with a broom or other improvised implement of destruction
to really understand why) would be 106 today. But as I said to some
coworkers, she missed the party by 24 years.
She was a college-educated woman from a working-class
South Side Irish family (sorry for the redundancy there) who raised a
pretty amazing crop of kids first in the middle of the Depression (and
whatever other depression was going on) and later after a series of
tragedies that might have been expected to crush her: the drowning of
one of her six kids (and three other family members) and the death of
her husband when the oldest of the five surviving children was 14. I think the
way she brought them through it — not unscathed, to be sure, but
with a sense they could not only survive but thrive — was what got her
the name Mighty Anne.
I don’t have a digital copy of any of her pictures. If I did, I’d post it.