Here’s the answer to a question you never thought to ask.
Who makes the cape for the queen of Chicago’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade?
The answer reaches back into the 1950s, into St. Gertrude parish in the Edgewater neighborhood, to a woman named Eleanor Plank Duda, who in this story will be known as her granddaughter knew her, as Gram.
Gram was a St. Gertrude parishioner and professional seamstress when organizers of the St. Patrick’s Day Parade recruited her to make the queen’s cape.
Year after year, Gram laid out the material in her Edgewater apartment, snipped, sewed, ironed and in the course of a few intense days conjured up the sweeping garment that would turn some Chicago Irish lass into royalty.
The key ingredients of majesty: 5 yards of green slipper satin, 5 yards of gold slipper satin, 3 yards of interfacing, three 1-inch rhinestone buttons.
Gram was still the St. Patrick’s Day cape wizard in 1976 when her granddaughter, Kathy Anderson, moved to Chicago and took an apartment nearby. Anderson quickly learned that Gram’s cape-making time came with rules.
“If I wanted to come over, she’d say, ‘No, there’s nowhere to sit down because fabric is all over.'” Anderson says. “If I said, ‘Do you want to do something?’ she’d say ‘No, I have to do the cape.'”
Gram was nearing 90 when she had what may have been a stroke. She spent months in the hospital, then in bed at home. As the parade approached, someone from the committee called Anderson’s uncle. He called Anderson.
“The cape people want to know if Gram is going to come up with a cape,” he told her. “Can you help out?”
“Uh,” said Anderson, who had never even seen the cape, “I guess.”
That year, 1985, Anderson, who had grown up making her own clothes but given up the practice when blue jeans came into vogue, made her first queen’s cape, with no advice from Gram, who was unable to communicate.
“It looked nothing like what Gram had done,” she says. “Mine was the typical what I think of as Halloween costume cape, gathered at the neck, cloth-covered buttons.”
Gram’s capes, in contrast, were sleek, with a graceful hood and those snazzy rhinestone buttons.
As it turned out, the keepers of the cape, knowing Gram was getting old, had requested two capes the previous year; they used Gram’s backup instead. Gram died a few months later.
Anderson’s first cape might have been her last, but before the next St. Patrick’s Day rolled around, Gram’s cape pattern turned up.
Anderson tried again, aided by the pattern and a cape borrowed from a previous queen. She has made the cape every year since.
It’s a simple ritual: Lug the bolts of green and gold satin from an upstairs bedroom to the dining room table. Set up the ironing board and the aqua Fleetwood sewing machine she used as a teenager.
Cut. Sew. In Gram’s tradition, tell everyone to stay away.
“One year I did something out of order,” she says, “and satin is not a forgiving fabric. If you have to take a seam out, it has to be redone exactly where you sewed it before because you can see every one of those needle holes. You have to iron on the underside; depending on how hot your iron is, it’ll leave a mark. Don’t let it get wrinkled. Once it’s wrinkled, it’s wrinkled. Satin is not a forgiving fabric. Did I say that already?”
You might expect the cape-maker to the St. Patrick’s Day queen to be a parade enthusiast.
“I went to one St. Patrick’s Day parade many years ago,” Anderson says, “and decided I didn’t need to do that again. The weather is usually miserable.”
Until a couple years ago, when she was invited to the January pageant where the queen is chosen, she’d never even seen a queen wear one of her capes. That was the year that the style changed to a shorter, knee-length cape, no hood, with pockets on the inside.
“Probably so the queen would have a place to put her cellphone,” she says.
When Anderson finally saw a pageant and her cape in action, she liked it.
“It was pretty cool,” she says, “just thinking about how long this has been going on.”
This year’s parade is on Saturday. Anderson won’t be there, but her cape, worn by this year’s queen, Erin Mulcahy, will be.
So will the spirit of Gram.
Twitter @MarySchmich