Alice Dolores Kilty Casey
May 1, 1911 -- Dec 1, 1989

Father: Patrick Kilty
 b. Mar 16, 1859, Labrisheeda, County Clare, Ireland
 d. Oct 31, 1911, Chicago, IL (buried Mt. Olivet Cemetery)
Mother: Winifred Hunt Kilty
 b. Jun 1, 1873, County Mayo, Ireland
 d. Jul 21, 1945, Chicago, IL (buried St. Mary's Cemetery)               

Education: St. Thomas the Apostle High School,
           Hyde Park, Chicago, 1929
                     
           St. Xavier School of Nursing,
           Mercy Hospital, Chicago, 1939 (RN)

Married:   George Raymond Casey,  Jun 13, 1945

Children:  Eva Winifred Casey,  Jun 13, 1946
           Mary Daniel Casey, Jul 3, 1947


Alice shared her life with all who knew her.  Her bedtime stories gave us
details: the waffle wagon and the lamplighter coming down Loomis St., her dogs
Bruno and Billy William, her best friend Helen Phillips, the boarders her mother
took in to supplement her widow's pension of $62.50 per month.  Mom told us
about ice skating at Ogden Park and about her beloved St. Thomas's where she
made friends she would keep all her life.

Sundays, Alice and her mother would take the streetcar to the North Side to
visit Aunt Mary (where there were five cousins), Aunt Annie, or Aunt Alice.

The Stock Market Crash was "one bad thing that didn't happen to us--we didn't
have any bank account at all."  She remembered going downtown with a friend to 
join in the festivities when Prohibition was repealed.

We heard about Nurses' Training:  how strict the rules were, her roommate Sully
and their illegal radio.  She described the makeshift oxygen tents she set up as
a young Public Health Nurse.  She made her rounds by streetcar.  (Alice never
did drive a car.  She got along fine with public transportation, her network of
friends, and her Reeboks.) We knew the diseases of her patients (Diptheria and
Whooping Cough) at Contagious Hospital, which we thought had a wonderful name.

On the maternity floor of Mercy Hospital in 1938, patient Lydia Guinan
introduced her nurse Alice Kilty to her brother George, when he came visiting.

The years of courtship were filled with hope and then despair, on her part, when
George would call and then not call.  She was with him when they got the news of
Pearl Harbor.  Then he was gone for 3 and a half long years.

From George's diary, somewhere in England, Sat, Oct 30, 1943: Took Alice's
picture down! Then the next day: Mass at 10:45 A.M.; Worked in office all
day. No mail from Alice for a month! Many, many years later, when the
diary first came into her hands (1973), Alice blacked out those words entirely.
(Luckily for amateur historians, she used pencil.)  There was a happy ending: a
letter was eventually received, the picture went back up, a ring was brought
back from England, they were married.

An only child herself, she cherished the many nieces and nephews that marriage
into a large family brought.  She loved it when Aunt Lyd told her about comforting 
a crying Patrick: Your mother and father love you. Patrick, through his tears: 
There's someone else, too. Aunt Lyd, curious: Who's that? Patrick: Alice Kilty.

Mom played the piano, and sang along, for her own pleasure and ours. She passed
on her Irish heritage through musical phrases now imbedded in memory:  "Of
priests we can offer a charming variety...";  "She was fair and fat and
forty...";  "I owe ten dollars to O'Grady.  You'd think he had a mortgage on me
life."

About her own mother Alice once said, "She wasn't one of those great copers."
The apple didn't fall far from the tree.  Once when we were little and she was
spitting mad at us, she was taken aback when Eva told her, "Well, you always
wanted two little girls, and this is the way they are."

By the time she was 72 she had multiple myeloma as well as a heart condition,
but wrote to me after her trip to California and Arizona: "I still feel much
peppier than anyone expects.  Everyone I visited was wondering where I get all
the energy.  I appreciate it as one of my gifts, and I know it is from the
goodness of God."

And just a year before she died she made me laugh when she wrote, "I'm not very
well and no sense in telling you that I am.  But I kind of get my second wind
when there's a party in the offing."

I was aware of the power of female friendships because my mother had them. She
told us, "I have known such great nurses in my lifetime."   She believed in
honesty, and her friends were honest with her. That's what she loved about them.
"Everyone said I talked too much.  So I prayed to change.  My friend Mary
Coughlin said, "You expect the Lord Himself to come down and shut your mouth."
I saw her grapple with problems of self-esteem, and saw her draw strength from
her female friends.

When Alice died, her friend Carrie Cistaro wrote to Eva and me: "Alice was
charismatic before anyone knew what charismatic was." And from Marie Donoghue
Whitehead: "Alice continues to inspire my journey."  I could not put it any
better myself.

MaryDaniel Casey Cooper, Rochester, NY  05/2000

For more, see http://world.std.com/~eva/alice.html