Angela Voller Zerad, 1921-2024.
A remarkable life, which her whole family is grateful to have shared.
Angie Zerad on her 100th birthday in 2021, with her daughters Sue (left) and Deb. She died yesterday, after a rich and adventuresome life, with her daughters nearby, at age 102.
Once when Angela Ann Voller was a little girl, in 1920s Chicago, she was walking to her parish Catholic school down the streets of Cicero, on the city’s west side. In those days Cicero was a Bohemian/ Czech enclave, of which her immigrant extended-family was part. It was also home base for Al Capone, then in his heyday.
As little Angie walked that day down one side of the street, she saw a man at a gas station on the other side. He was sitting in a chair and leaning back, reading a newspaper. Then, as she watched, a big black car rolled by. The car slowed, and people leaned out of the windows holding tommy-guns. They emptied their ammo into the man in the chair, finishing him off, and roared away.
It was a Capone-era gangland shooting. Little Angie ducked behind a bush, escaped notice, and went on to school. She didn’t tell the nuns, or her brothers or sisters, or her parents, or anyone. (“How was school today, Angie?” “Oh, fine.”) This was the Capone era. She was canny and tough.
Many decades later, well into her 90s, with all survivors from those times gone except her, Angie finally told that story to her daughters, Sue and Deb. They are the two daughters you see in the photo above, taken in 2021 on the day Angie turned 100. Yesterday afternoon both Sue and Deb were with her, in the same assisted-living apartment as in that photo, on the day their mother died, peacefully of natural causes, at age 102.
Big sister Sue is officially Susan Zerad Garau and has lived for many years in Rome with her Italian husband, Piero. Little sister Deb is officially Deborah Zerad Fallows, to whom I have had the good fortune of being married through most of Angie’s long life.
Below I quote what I wrote about Angie when she turned 100. Her two daughters and their husbands, her three grandchildren and their spouses, and her seven great-grandchildren ages one through 12 are all so grateful for her example and inspiration.
Here are the three women from the photo above some 70 years ago, on a boat near Duluth on Lake Superior. Angie is of course on the left, little sister Deb in the middle, and big sister Sue on the right. The three of them have been exceptionally close.
Angie and her wonderful husband Frank, who was an ideal father-in-law for many decades and who died in 2007, were both from Czech immigrant families that had arrived in Chicago and other points of the midwest before World War I. [Tomorrow, March 27, 2024, would have been Frank Zerad’s 102nd birthday.]
Angie was the fifth child in a family of six, and was born with a neck condition called torticollis that required then-experimental surgery and long-term wearing of a neck cast. Here you see her before and after the surgery and treatment. In the left-hand photo, she is the infant in her mother’s arms. In the right-hand photo, she is the beaming, blonde, and perfectly erect four-and-a-half-year-old standing on the right, next to her lifelong best friend Margie.
Frank was a submariner during World War II. He and Angie were married in their native Chicago when he had a week’s leave from the Navy near the end of the war.
Frank and Angie raised their daughters across the Midwest: in the Minneapolis area; outside Chicago; and then in Vermilion, Ohio, on the shores of Lake Erie. That is the place Deb thinks of as home, and where they all loved to sail and ice skate.
When their daughters had grown and Frank had sold his small business, Frank and Angie spent much of their 60s and 70s in what both of them referred to as the most satisfying thing they had done—apart from raising their children, of course. That was service in the International Executive Service Corps, a kind of Peace Corps for retired business officials, for which they served multi-year postings around the world, including Korea, Indonesia, Kenya, and Egypt.
As Midwesterners for the first five decades of their lives, they were consciously involved citizens of the world from that point on—Frank until his illness and death, Angie even now.
Angie has been a lifelong gifted musician. She went to Mundelein College, outside Chicago, on a music scholarship. Through every day of her life I’ve been aware of, she has spent time at her piano.
Including on her 100th birthday, when she gave a recital lasting one full hour at the assisted-living facility that has recently been her home. [And where she spent her final days—giving an hour-long concert every day until the past few difficult weeks.]
The concluding number in that program was “Happy Birthday.” “I’ve never played that for myself before,” she told us afterwards. Everyone heartily joined in.
Happy Birthday, dear Angie. Many additional happy returns.
March 26, 2024:
This was the bed in which Angie took her last breath yesterday, as it looked after she was gone.
Wow, Jim, my sympathies to you and Deb and your family. It has been moving to read your pieces about Angela the past few years. Your love and admiration for her always shine through.
A beautiful American story. Elegantly told.