ORLAND PARK, Ill. – Anna Duffner was the warm-hearted kind of matriarch who received calls from her grandchildren when they were facing a tough test at school.
“Grandma,” they’d ask, “can you say a prayer for me?’’
Even when they were older and more streetwise, the calls came.
“Grandma,” they’d say, “can you crank up the novena machine?”
(This beautifully written story from Dec. 1, 2011 appeared in The Chicago Sun Times on Dec. 28, 2011.)
Mrs. Duffner prayed her rosary for them and nursed their ills with endless cups of hot tea, her famous “lello” (yellow) cake, and caraway-studded Irish soda bread. She taught them that there was no shame in washing a floor until it shone, and that the ability to diagram a sentence could help you with the English language all your life.
She could perform kitchen alchemy with a little gravy, rice and tomatoes, somehow turning modest ingredients into a meal that made mouths water.
And she could make her hairstyle last for a week, thanks to a sleeping cap that was sometimes supplemented by a “skin” of wrapped toilet paper that would make any Chicago architect admire her skill at buttressing a foundation.
Mrs. Duffner, who raised a family of six children on her husband’s job as a stationary engineer at Nabisco and her waitressing at banquets at the Beverly Country Club, died Tuesday at age 85 at Autumn Leaves assisted living facility in Orland Park.
She was the youngest of three daughters born to Irish immigrant parents in Chicago. Her father, Thomas Flood, from County Carlow, was a trolley car driver, and her mother, Anna Flynn from County Roscommon, was a governess for the Borden Milk family.
Anna Flood spent her early years in St. Rita’s parish at 62nd and Fairfield. She remembered that when a new house was built next door, bulldozers weren’t part of the equation. “They would rig up a team of horses and scrape out the foundation,” said her son, Bill.
She attended St. Casimir High School, and she liked to go to films featuring dark-and-handsome screen supernovas Tyrone Power and Clark Gable at the Colony Theater at 59th and Kedzie and the Capitol at 79th and Halsted. Her favorite movie was “The Quiet Man,” said her daughter, Kathy Mathes.
Anna blossomed into a beauty while Bill Duffner Sr. served in World War II. He fell in love when he spotted her at a 1946 St. Sabina church social and took her home in the rumble seat of a friend’s car.
They wed in 1948 and settled at 80th and Richmond and raised their family in St. Thomas More’s parish in a home with a crucifix on the wall of each room. She could stretch a dollar with a little meat and a lot of starch. She had a special flair with potato dishes. “That was the essential ingredient to life,” her son said. “It could be boiled, it could be roasted, it could have parsley and be buttered, it could be anything — but not deep-fried. Somehow, that’s a violation of the potato law.”
Mrs. Duffner worked banquets at the Beverly Country Club, sometimes serving actors Elke Sommer and Forrest Tucker, who dropped in after appearing at the Drury Lane Theatre in Evergreen Park. Later, she worked at neighborhood bakeries.
In 1993, Anna and Bill Duffner Sr. moved to Orland Park. “Whenever you’d go there,” their son Bill said, “She’d ask you, ‘Would you like to sit down and have a cuppa tea?’ ”
When the grandchildren asked her to pray, she’d get out her favorite wooden rosary with the shamrocks on each bead, and recite the beautiful plea to the Blessed Mother known as the Memorare.
And when she ate breakfast with her husband, she’d often place a framed portrait of one of her 19 grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren on the table, rotating the pictures so all the kids had a turn. She’d report: “We were eating breakfast with Aidan this morning.”
In addition to her husband, son and daughter, Mrs. Duffner is also survived by her daughter, Judith Balogh, and her sons Gregory, Thomas and Patrick.
Visitation is 3 to 9 p.m. Thursday at Robert J. Sheehy & Sons Funeral Home, 9000 W. 151st St., Orland Park. Her funeral mass is at 10 a.m. Friday at St. Mary Church in Mokena. Burial is at Holy Sepulchre Cemetery.
Died and Yet ... 