Chicago says goodbye today to Sister Jean Dolores Schmidt, a nun who became a national sports icon for her work as chaplain of the Loyola men’s basketball teams during their NCAA Tournament runs. She died Thursday at age 106.
This made us wonder: Who else has lived to be 100 years or older in the Chicago area? A new report from the U.S. Census Bureau states there were 3,428 people aged 100 or older living in Illinois in 2020.
A search of the Tribune’s archives found some fascinating personalities who are still defying their age. (Though we didn’t trust an advertisement published in 1903 that claimed malt whiskey was “the elixir of life” for those who desired a long one.)
Edith Renfrow Smith was the first Black woman to graduate from Grinnell College in Iowa. At age 111, she’s studied by the University of Chicago’s SuperAging Research Initiative for her strong memory and cognitive abilities.
Activist Mary Morello, mother of Rage Against the Machine co-founder Tom Morello, is 102. She voted
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in last year’s presidential election. In the 1980s, she organized Parents for Rock and Rap, in response to a Tipper Gore-led campaign aimed at policing the sale and packaging of albums with explicit content.“When censorship starts in a democracy,” Morello wrote in a letter published in the Tribune in 1990, “where does it stop?”
Other centenarians with local ties include Hall of Fame football coach Marv Levy, 100; activist and professor Beatrice Lumpkin, 107; jazz musician Johnny Pate, 101; and former state representative DeLoris Doederlein, 100.
The people profiled below are deceased, but their lives left a lasting impact on our area. Here’s a look back at 10 notable centenarians with Chicago connections.
Mabel Ball, 108
The Northbrook resident was born in 1908, the year the Cubs had last won the World Series — and died just after the team captured another one in 2016.
Though she followed the Cubs on the radio, she only went to one game, on her 90th birthday, her son Rich Ball told the Tribune.
Sister Jean Dolores Schmidt, 106
Sister Jean, as seemingly everyone on Loyola’s Rogers Park campus and later the sports world knew her, had served as the team chaplain since 1994 until her retirement this summer. For decades she was a fixture at Ramblers games, offering pregame prayers with players and fans.
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She became nationally adored as Loyola made a seemingly miraculous Final Four run in 2018. Her wheelchair was pushed onto the court after each victory, and Loyola players greeted her with gentle hugs as they exited the floor.
Judge George Leighton, 105
A lawyer at one of the city’s premiere African American law firms, Leighton represented Black bus driver Harvey E. Clark Jr., who wanted to rent an apartment in Cicero in 1951. When the man and his family moved in, it enraged their white neighbors and a riot erupted, heavily damaging the building. The National Guard was mobilized to subdue an unrest that lingered for days.
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Leighton, who spent a childhood plucking weeds from the cranberry bogs of Massachusetts before winning a scholarship to Howard University and graduating from Harvard Law School, was indicted and jailed for conspiracy to incite a riot for his role advocating for the Black family. His friend Thurgood Marshall, who later became the first African American on the U.S. Supreme Court, traveled to Chicago to represent Leighton. After a few days, the charges were dismissed, but the ordeal left a lasting impression on Leighton and shaped his long, groundbreaking and influential career.
Leighton was a mentor and inspiration for generations of Chicago lawyers, including former President Barack Obama. Cook County’s main criminal courthouse at 26th Street and California Avenue was named for him in 2012. He died in 2018.
Dorothy Hoffner, 104
When she first sky-dived at 100 years old, Hoffner was pushed out. In 2023, the lifelong Chicagoan wanted to take charge. She shuffled toward the edge and leaped into the air.
When Hoffner landed from the 13,500-foot fall, she popped up quickly, grabbed her walker and shuffled over to the crowd that had just cheered on her historic achievement.
“Age is only a number, ya’ know?” she told reporters.
Hoffner worked for Illinois Bell throughout her working years, beginning in 1938 as an operator, she said. She never had any husbands or children — an essential ingredient she in part credited for her long life.
A week after she broke the world record for oldest skydiver, Hoffner died peacefully in her sleep.
Virginia Halas McCaskey, 102
McCaskey was born on Jan. 5, 1923, making her about three years younger than the NFL itself.
When she graduated from Philadelphia’s Drexel University in 1943, with a degree in secretarial studies, McCaskey’s aspiration was to work for one executive — her father, George Halas, founder and owner of the Chicago Bears and the National Football League.
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The death of her only brother, George “Mugs” Halas Jr., of a heart attack in 1979 at age 54 left McCaskey as the sole heir to the franchise started in 1920. She was reluctantly forced by circumstance to take over her father’s enterprise. McCaskey guarded it with passion, patience and more than a touch of Papa Bear’s legendary toughness and stubbornness.
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On the board of directors, she kept the title of secretary rather than assuming the title of president or chairman, even though she controlled the voting stock. Her late husband, Ed, who died in 2003, once said she quietly “called the shots.” She was the team’s principal owner, but also mother to 11 children and grandmother or great-grandmother to many more.
McCaskey died in early 2025.
Timuel Black, 102
Of the stories that Timuel Dixon Black Jr. told or relayed to generations that have come through the South Side of Chicago, his wife, Zenobia Johnson-Black, said he would often retell the tale of how his parents came to Chicago in 1919 to what is now the Bronzeville area when he was 8 months old, leaving Birmingham, Alabama.
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“He looked around and noticed the injustice,” Johnson-Black recounted. “So he said to his mom, when he was 8 months old: ‘S—, I’m leaving this place!’ He took credit for bringing his parents up here because he didn’t know how to change his diaper, so his mother had to come and his daddy had to come to take care of his mama and him.”
During his time in Chicago, Black went on to become a teacher, writer, lecturer, decorated military veteran, archivist and the city’s unofficial chief historian who chronicled the evolution of Black life and culture. In his writings, lectures and appearances, he was able to describe with great detail what it was like to grow up during moments that became historically significant to the city’s identity.
Black died in 2021.
Cindy Pritzker, 101
Like her late husband, Jay, who built the Hyatt Hotels chain, Pritzker was an architecture aficionado who played a role in the creation of several cultural touchstones in Chicago, among them the Jay Pritzker Pavilion at Millennium Park, which was designed by noted architect Frank Gehry, and the Harold Washington Library Center in the Loop, which came to fruition while she headed the Chicago Public Library Board.
In 1982, Pritzker commissioned Andy Warhol to produce a silkscreen portrait, which now hangs above the fireplace in Pritzker’s namesake rooftop restaurant, Cindy’s, in the Chicago Athletic Association building on Michigan Avenue.
She was Gov. JB Pritzker’s aunt and had homes in the Streeterville neighborhood and Rancho Santa Fe, California. She died in 2025.
Ella Jenkins, 100
Jenkins, a prolific and internationally recognized singer, songwriter and performer, used folk music sing-alongs to teach youngsters about other cultures, in the process becoming known as the “First Lady of Children’s Music.”
She developed the idea of call-and-response singing with children from listening to jazzman Cab Calloway’s performances of “Minnie the Moocher” on the South Side in the 1930s, as well as what she heard from church pastors and parishioners in her neighborhood growing up.
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As a child, she told the Tribune in 1994, she was always beating out rhythms, tapping on tabletops and on the tops of baking soda cans and oatmeal boxes and overturned wastebaskets. She also would whistle in an effort to imitate the calls of birds.
A typical performance for Jenkins took place at the Des Plaines Public Library in 1997. She played a yodeling song from Switzerland on a Chinese harmonica — complete with audience participation — followed by a Hebrew song and some greetings and counting songs from East Africa, taught in Swahili. Frequently she led her audiences with a baritone ukulele or a harmonica in hand.
“I always tell the children: When I go abroad I take growing up on the South Side of Chicago with me,” she told the Tribune in 1997. “I share that and I grasp what I gain from meeting new friends and bring it to the children. Music makes the world go round.”
Jenkins died in 2024.
W. Clement Stone, 100
For Stone, who parlayed $100 and a positive mental attitude into a $2 billion insurance empire and a personal fortune once estimated at half a billion dollars, anything was possible.
The founder and chairman emeritus of the giant Combined International Corp. — since merged with Ryan Insurance Group to form Aon Corp. — Stone was as famous for giving away money as he was for making it with his legendary “success system that never fails.”
Stone’s trademarks were a pencil-thin mustache, a bow tie, an endless supply of Havana cigars, an infectious optimism and political and philanthropic donations estimated to have exceeded $275 million, not including political donations themselves worth millions. To Richard M. Nixon’s campaigns alone, the staunch Republican donated more than $8 million. Stone viewed his gifts to politicians and civic causes as a way to influence events. “I have a magnificent obsession,” he once said. “All I want to do is change the world, make it a better place for this and future generations.”
And what seemed a large contribution to others wasn’t significant to him. “What’s a few million dollars?” he once asked. “Everything’s relative.”
Stone died in 2002, and the Spanish-style mansion he owned on Lake Michigan in Winnetka sold for $12.25 million in 2023.
Ralph Horween, 100
Horween, who was born in Chicago, became the first NFL player to reach 100 years old. He and his brother Ralph both played for the Harvard Crimson football team that won the Rose Bowl in 1920. They then joined the Chicago Cardinals in 1921, playing under assumed names — Ralph and Arnold McMahon — so their mother wouldn’t know about it.
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He became chief manufacturing executive for the family business, Horween Leather Co. in Chicago, which is still in operation, and developed a specialized leather that’s still used in professional football. He returned to Harvard and earned his law degree before establishing a practice in the city.
Horween died in 1997.
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