Edna Lawler, who became the oldest living person in Illinois in January when she turned 112, died Sunday in Beecher Manor from stroke complications.
Lawler was a supercentenarian, a person who lives past the age of 110. According to the Gerontology Research Group, which regularly updates its World Supercentenarian Rankings List, Lawler was the oldest person in Illinois last month, the 11th oldest in the United States and the 43rd oldest person in the world.
As noted in a Daily Southtown story about her last month, Lawler’s family said she had no secret to living a long life aside from using moderation and hard work.
“She did everything in moderation,” said her daughter, Irma Pestlin. “She ate everything she wanted, but in moderation. She walked a lot and she had faith in God, which I think … played a big part in her life. She turned a lot of her worries over to God.”
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Lawler kept her own checkbook until she was 103, her daughter said.
“Then it started to get a little bit sloppy, which was not like her. She was a to-the-penny person,” Pestlin said.
Born the oldest of six children on a farm in Goodland, Ind., Lawler and her family moved several times to rented farms before her father purchased his first farm in Beaverville, Ill.
Her education started in one-room schoolhouses and stopped after the first year of high school so she could help out on the family farm.
One day when Lawler was a teenager, she picked up the family phone which had a party line and heard some big news shouted through the phone.
“I recall her saying when World War I ended she heard it on the party line and she ran out to the farm to tell her parents,” said Norm Pestlin, her son-in-law.
She left the farm to be a domestic and nanny with the Volkmann family in Kankakee who owned a jewelry store. Lawler worked there until she met her husband, John, who lived in Harvey, through a mutual friend.
In 1934, at the age of 30, Lawler married. The couple settled in Harvey where she raised four daughters and had a husband who worked shift work.
“She never drove. She walked. She would take her shopping cart a mile to the grocery store and haul the groceries home for a family of six. She just set out on her own; rain or shine. That is the stuff that puts the grit in your guts and you live to 112,” her daughter said.
At four feet, 10 inches, her daughter called her “a mighty mouse. It didn’t stop her from doing anything. She was pretty determined and a very strong woman.”
When her third daughter, Connie, contracted polio as a small child, Lawler took the Illinois Central train downtown every day to first Mercy Hospital and then Cook County Hospital to visit her ailing daughter.
“My sisters and I talk about the wonder of that. Here was this farm girl who moved to Harvey, had a sick child and was determined to visit that child every day no matter what it took, even if it meant riding the train to Chicago just to visit her sick child,” her daughter said.
Her husband died in 1988.
Beyond her family, her faith and her church Ascension Catholic Church in Harvey the center of her life, her family said.
Twelve years ago, Lawler moved to Waterford Estates Retirement Community in Hazel Crest.
Her daughter, Marilyn Gridley died in 2011.
Other survivors include daughters Jean Willson and Connie Dalton; 13 grandchildren and 25 great-grandchildren.
Services will be held at a later date.
Patricia Trebe is a freelance reporter for the Daily Southtown.