Sheila Mary Fitzgerald prepared timelines for herself and for both her parents, William Fitzgerald and Kathleen Moonan Fitzgerald.
This timeline was re-typed and updated with timeline notes by Brigid, and posted here February 2023.
Sheila Mary Fitzgerald was born September 12, 1931.
Sheila Mary Fitzgerald died February 22, 2024.
Sheila Mary FItzgerald obituary
Sheila's timeline for her mother Kathleen Moonan Fitzgerald
Sheila's timeline for her father William Fitzgerald
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SHEILA’S TIME LINE
(work in progress)
I, Sheila Mary Fitzgerald, was born September 12, 1931, at St. Mary’s Hospital, Rochester Minnesota, fifth child of six. My mother was 38 and my father was 44 when I was born. Dad had a very successful construction company building hospital buildings, churches, commercial buildings, and homes across southern Minnesota. He had built a second home for his young family in 1927 at 622 Eighth Avenue S.W., in Rochester, the house I lived in until I left home in 1949 to go to college in Illinois. This house was not to be his last family home; he owned a lot up the hill from us for the next one, and ten acres on the top of a hill west of town which was to be his dream home overlooking the city. My mom was a former Latin teacher with a M.A. Degree ( In 1915 from Univ. of MN), who I remember was always cooking meals, washing clothes, and ironing—but mostly guiding her children, when she could corral them and worrying about their education.
Mother gave me the name Sheila which was the name of the heroine in a current Saturday Evening Post magazine story, “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.” Sheila was a little known name in Minnesota in 1931, but Mom had used her own mother’s names and dad’s mother’s name for her first two daughters. Years later she told me that she had to convince Dad that “Sheila” was Irish for Cecelia of Julia, two important saints in the Catholic Church. Mother herself ( Rosemary Kathleen) and her three daughters had Mary as part of their given names: “Rosemary Anne, Kathleen Maura ( Irish for Mary) and Sheila Mary. I always have been honored to be named after the Blessed Virgin and to seek her intercession.
As a very young child, I think between ages two and four, I broke my collarbone four times, twice on each side. I fell off the back porch, out of a bicycle basket and down the stairs. My big sister, Kate, ten years older than I, told me that each time I broke my collarbone, I had to wear a wooden cross across my upper back and down my spine which made dressing a squirming toddler very difficult.
Dad was recovering from his first cancer operation, I believe, when I turned six years old. One nice day I was playing tag with my ten year old brother Pat down the block on the worker’ planks around the outside of an unfinished two-story house. I miss a small jump between planks and fell from the second level to the rough ground below. I knocked out my front baby teeth, and my face required plastic surgery by Mayo Clinic doctors. The next year my new teeth started to come in crooked, but I was left with only small scares on my face. I have only a vague memory of the recovery part of that incident when I remember lying on a twin bed in my sisters’ darkened bedroom with something like tar on my face.
Frequently Dad traveled by train out of Rochester or from Minneapolis in the first airplanes that flew out of Minnesota at Wold-Chamberlain Airport( a/k/a Mpls. St. Paul International Airport) on his way to Democratic conventions, and on business trips. He would send me picture postcards from Washington D. C. or Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. I had an important person for a Dad, I thought, and I, who never got mail addressed to me – treasured those postcards. He must have picked up a bunch of picture postcards when he went to an impressive city, because years later when I was examining some of my memorabilia I noticed that a good number of the treasured postcards in my collection were mailed from less than 100 miles away, from Minneapolis.
Elementary School 1936- 1943
My kindergarten teacher was Miss Robinson, and I was excited to go to school like my big sisters and brothers and have a nice teacher. Many years later when I was in college, I worked during the summer in the “Baby Department” of Massey’s Women’s Store in downtown Rochester. During a slack time, I was leaning lazily against a counter top, and a woman walked up to me. When I asked her if I could help her, she said, “You’re Sheila Fitzgerald aren’t you?” When I acknowledged that I was, she said, “I knew I was right. I was your kindergarten teacher – and you haven’t changed much?” I wasn’t sure if it was my looks or my lack of industriousness that helped her recognize me.
I was fascinated at about five years old with the Dionne Quintuplets and Shirley Temple paper dolls. I remember that I got a special postcard in the mail – I usually only got picture cards from my Daddy when he was traveling. This postcard was signed by my special friend Shirley Temple who was inviting me to attend her movie at the Lawler Theatre in Rochester, but to my horror each of my siblings refused to take me downtown, and I didn’t know how to get there. Shirley was going to be so disappointed in me! I suspect that my family was only teasing me, which they were wont to do, but I was truly worried about losing Shirley’s friendship! I don’t remember going to the theatre but Mom probably worked out my dilemma in my favor.
Due to the raging Depression, Daddy’s construction company closed in 1933. Dad and his partner, Martin Heffron, formally closed their Heffron and Fitzgerald Construction Company on April 1, 1933, because since the Crash in 1929 their building contracts had been dwindling. Without a job and living off savings, Dad got more heavily involved with the local political and volunteer organizations he had been heading when he was available. Some of these projects helped people who had lost jobs and incomes. He headed one that gave men jobs cutting lumber that won a National American Legion Award. Both of my parents were able to keep their five, children, or at least the two youngest from most of the worries they were facing, but tension must have been mounting about money for the family needs and future problems that could occur in trying to rebuild their lives. The radio kept them informed about worsening conditions in our country and overseas.
For my last six week marking period of kindergarten in 1936, I attended Emerson School ninety miles from home and from my siblings, but I had Mom and Dad all to myself. Dad needed to live in Minneapolis for his first new job. In late 1935 he had been appointed by the Federal Government Public Works Administration as Project Manager of the huge Sumner Field Housing Project. Because he was still recovering from his first cancer operation, mother need to care for him. So Mother and Dad took me, their youngest at the time, with them to live in the Buckingham Hotel in Minneapolis, coming home for weekends – but leaving the older children with a live-in maid during the school week. I loved having all the attention of my parents, living in a hotel room with a Murphy bed, and spending afternoons or evenings with one or both of them at nearby Loring Park with it pond and swans. What I remember hating was attending half-day kindergarten at Emerson School near the hotel where I was assigned to a “buddy”, a precocious little girl who bossed me about everything we were expected to do. Even at that young age I couldn’t stand being told what to do! I must have cooperated with the teacher, however, because on my final report that Mom saved, she remarked that I showed some talent for language activities and singing; interests that showed up again when I was teaching language arts in elementary and college level classrooms, even developing a reading programs through singing for young children.
Later, when Dad came home from Minneapolis, he would stand on the front lawn and throw in the air all the pennies he had saved during the week and watch me scoot around picking them out of the grass.
I remember that Mom was always there when I got home from Edison Public School, just one block away from 622, and she usually had mile or cocoa and cookies ready after I changed from my pinafored school dress into play clothes. One day she missed the bus from downtown and I was home from school before she arrived, too frightened to stay in the house without her so I sat out by the garage to do my worrying until she found me.
When my sixth birthday was coming in September 1937, Mom told me that I would have to make a choice of two possible presents: a new winter snowsuit or a baby brother. I was disturbed because I had wanted a baby in the family for a long time, but I knew that winter was not far in the future and the old snowsuit was too small and worn out. Anyway, bravely I told my parents that I wanted them to give me a baby. But the night before my big date, I got out of bed and came downstairs to them sitting in the living room; I told them that I had to change my mind: “because it was starting to get cold outside, so I better ask them to get me a new snowsuit.” The next day I got a wrapped package at my family celebration day and a birthday cake with a dime cooked into it ( a family tradition) – and six days later, September 19, 1937, Mom went to St. Mary’s Hospital to get my baby, Michael Joseph Fitzgerald. Mom was 45 years old and Daddy was 51.
In his heydays as a construction company owner and my young years, Dad must have had a convertible because I have a memory of stretching my leg to reach a metal piece and pulling myself up to get up into the rumble seat of that car. Often he would put brother John’s big springer spaniel in the seat with me. This must have engendered a love for convertibles which I bought for myself when I was in my twenties and thirties.
When I was turning seven in September 1938 (corrected from 1937), after a second cancer operation, Dad was losing hope of recovery from cancer. He was told that fall, probably by Mom, that his body was shutting down; she had lived with the knowledge for many months but didn’t want him to give up. Her mother, Rosemary Moonan, had come from Waseca to live with us in Nov. 1934 to be under Mom’s care and to receive hew own cancer treatments at the Mayo Clinic; she died in our house in Rochester in July 1935. In August of 1936, Dad’s own dear mother died in the house Dad built for her in Rochester. Mother and Dad had experienced close-at-hand the heart ache and responsibilities of those who suffer along with those dear one who were dying.
Dad was being cared for at home by Mom and nursing help from St. Mary’s Hospital. As Christmas approached, he struggle to keep going for the sake of the family, but he knew that time was running out. Mom tried to keep us children quiet so he could rest, but she made sure that we stayed attentive to our schooling and the other activities in our lives. There was a Christmas tree with lost of small gifts under it, and the usual treats. Dad sent John and Rosemary downtown to Blickle’s Jewelry Store to buy a present for him to give Mom, but what he could afford to pay for the gift no longer could purchase something like the former gifts he bought for her, and he chastised his oldest two for their choice. Mom calmed their hurt feelings and quietly took the gift back to the store and purchased a garnet pin and ring for the kids to show him; then he reluctantly was satisfied with ‘their’ replacement purchase. He died on Jan. 7, 1939 with the house full of relatives and friends participating in more of a celebration of him than a sorrow-filled occasion. Mom hid behind clothes in a closet upstairs to cry for a time and then came downstairs to accept condolences. I remember in the days following his death when his coffin was in our sun room. I looked a this body, which seemed to me, for the first time, to be very short. Littler me had never realized that the monumental man in my life was short! When I asked Mom about his height, she only said that he was taller than she was when she was wearing heels. Later I asked his friends they said, “he was short, maybe five feet, six inches,” but his driver’s license listed him at 5 feet 2 inches. Mom confirmed the 5’2”, but added, “no one dared to look down on him!”
As Daddy’s death approached in early January, I was sent to stay with Mom’s friend Leota Eaton who lived just two houses from ours, but I was devasted to be sent away when something seemed to be wrong at home. Now I remember that for me the Eaton house was painfully quiet – which ours never was with all the coming and going of children; that is was darkened by heavy curtains on all the windows- but ours had lots of light coming in all the windows throughout three story house . Worst of all while at the Eaton house, I missed my Mom and all those few older siblings who usually were helpful to me when they weren’t teasing me – and that baby brother Mike needed his sister most of all.
I got to come home the night that Daddy died when the older five children went in to his bedroom to see and talk to him for the last time. As we all walked in, I broke from the group and climbed on the bed. Daddy groaned and Mom calmed me down. He talked to each of us, but I couldn’t understand what he was saying, so she translated: be a good girl and behave your Mom.” Many years later I found his wallet that mother had kept for years. Preserved in it was a note he had written and I had scrawled my signature to it: “I promise I will not play with_____ _______ ( the younger girl who lived around the block from us) Obviously, I was a handful, but my father seemed to believe that when his youngest girl got in trouble, it was the other child’s fault!
After Dad’s funeral, Mom did everything to get all routines quickly going again in the family and to live as if we weren’t looking back but to the present and the future. She had little time to mourn her own loss or worry about the financial future of her large family. Dad’s picture was always on the table in the living room but I don’t remember being crushed over his death, probably because he had always been away for days or weeks with his job or more probably because the household was usually lively and noisy before and after he died. However, when I didn’t get my way, I would lie sideways on my antique bed and cry, saying to myself, “This family couldn’t do this to me if Daddy was here.”
As I got older, I spent each summer morning at the Soldier’s Field Park free swimming program. Dad had been responsible for the American Legion purchasing the property for that park and as a gift to the city. He want to Washington D.C. to apply for funds to open a public pool in the park for Olmsted County residents that would be free each weekday morning for the children’s swimming lessons and competitions. At noon I would walk the eight blocks home for lunch and then head to the free program at Edison School playground to participate in the hopscotch and running competitions, sports and craft activities and doll parages. On long summer evenings, the neighbor kids of all ages would gather on the hill across from our house ( that was the Keith family’s backyard) and we would play kick-the-can until sunset. In the winter, the softball field at Edison was flooded for an ice skating rink; we would go home after school change clothes and get our skates, skate until supper, walk home and into the kitchen on our skates and runners, eat, then return to the rink until the lights were turned off and we all were sent home to bed. There was good help and supervision at all park and rink activities, often older high school kids who earned money for planning and conducting the programs. Mom was busy and she never seemed to worry about us on our own, making our own choices and solving our own problems because there wasn’t much danger if we kept our promise to be where we told her we would be – and there were enough older kids or adults who would tell on us if we misbehaved.
At about age seven and on, I was baby-sitting, earning ten cents an hour. My favorite little one lived across Seventh Avenue from our house, Ed Merritt, a cute little boy whose mother was from Waseca, my Mom’s hometown. Her husband was a doctor and was serving in the South Pacific during World War II. Later my little brother Mike and our next door neighbor girl, Weezie Lowry, both six years younger than I, became my charges, and I delighted having them as my students when I was playing school.
At home we often had a monopoly game going at a card table or a marbles war on the oriental rug in the living room. The school district offered instruments and free lessons so – after deliberating ( because Mom was very slow in letting us quit anything we had decided to start) I chose to learn the violin. Mom would play our grand piano to try to keep me on pace with my violin, reminding me when I was off pitch. I don’t think it was more than a year before she decided I could/should quit the violin.
I have no memory of how I got it or what happened to it in the long run, but I owned a bike at about age eight or nine, and it was a treasure. ( Pat had a heavy Liberty bike that I got to use infrequently as I got older). My bike was a boy’s model that looked somewhat like a motorcycle with its ( imagined) motor encased in red metal container between my thighs, widespread handlebars, and balloon white-sidewall tires. I was sure that a real motorcycle would be in my future someday; that never happened.
Mom would send me to the Buy-lo Grocery, two blocks away, to get last minute groceries we needed. Mr. Fjerstad ran a tab for our purchases. I loved seeing the old men sitting in the back by a little pot-bellied stove, and my mouth watered as I looked into the glassed in candy counter. Mom, however, usually trusted Kate for bigger grocery shopping requirement at the Piggle Wiggly which was closer to downtown - because Kate could be trusted to make purchases at a good price and only according to the list Mom had given her, not adding in any extras.
John enlists and I turn in my old coin to save him. (BMF comment 2/21/23 - this must refer to when her older brother enlisted in the Air Force during WWII. JMF’s pilot log books show pilot training starting October 4, 1943 at Oklahoma Air College.)
Junior High School
Figure skating lessons and programs at Mayo Civic Auditorium.
Spelling bee in grade 8, a demo lesson for our parents; when I failed to spell ‘Committee’ correctly in the 3 chances given by the teacher – I was very embarrassed in front of my classmates and Mom was not pleased!
I played the lead in the 9th grade play, “Spring Fever” not very successfully because I was scampering around the dressing room looking for my lost garter belt when I was supposed to be on stage!
Senior High School
I was elected secretary of the sophomore class.
I was president of the Girls Club senior year.
Like my siblings who also attended Rochester High School( except Rosemary and Mike who followed up six years later) I did not get chosen by the teachers for the National Honor Society. Unlike our mother, scholarly and dedicated student, most of us worked a lot on sociability instead of honors for coursework.
Rosary College 1949-1953
River Forest, Illinois
Rosary College had also been the college Mom attended – but at that time it had been called St. Clara’s and was located in Wisconsin, in 1921 it was renamed and moved to Illinois.
I majored in English (I also met all the requirements for the American studies major and for an Illinois teaching certificate.)
First love was Phil whom I met at a freshman college dance.
I was elected President of the Junior Class.
My senior year at Rosary, my friend, Fr. O’Connell, our chaplain and professor “flunked” me in his course on Marriage Problems because I didn’t agree with his pronouncements in class. He said to me, “ With your thoughts on marriage, you never will be married!” But the failing grade he claimed he turned into the Registrar’s Office turned out to be 98/100 points, which was the grade he promised to the girls who were engaged by the time of graduation! About fifteen years later when he came to dinner at my apartment in St. Paul, we had a big laugh about his prognostication that obviously had come true!
I was selected for membership in Kappa Gamma Pi, a national honorary service sorority.
In 1953 Mom made a good sale of undeveloped lots that belonged to Dad, property she used as collateral to borrow money from Olmsted County Bank, for years to raise and educate her six children after Dad’s death. With four children graduated and the properties finally selling, she used some of the money to buy a college graduation present for me ( a 2 toned Oldsmobile) and a family car (a large Oldsmobile), our first family car since Dad had died. She didn’t drive!
University of Minnesota 1953- 1955
The fall following my Rosary graduation I was a young and eager student but naïve and somewhat fearful. I was the youngest of those entering the two year M.A. program in English Literature at the University of Minnesota, facing a new culture at a huge institution, trying to study to catch up to those more widely read than I and doing my paid job of counseling undergraduates. I succeeded in the coursework, though not excellently and survived the traumatic two day written exam that covered all of English literature from earliest times to the present. At the end of the first day of the largely essay exam ,I called Mom long-distance and, through heavy tears told her I had wasted two years of my life and that I wasn’t going back for the second day of the test. She counseled me that I wouldn’t flunk out any more if I suffered through the second day of the exam, so I went back) When I saw my name on the posted list of those who had passed, I drooped, weak-kneed, against the wall! I also passed my first experience in an oral exam, with my advisor and two other professors, covering my written M.A. Colloquium Papers. In a final consultation with the professor who admitted students to PH.D studies in English, I was told I would be admitted if I spent some concentrated time in reading more English literature than my youth had provided, but in spite of my love of literature, I had no intention of ever driving through the University campus let alone advancing in English Studies! Besides, I wanted to teach young children in elementary school!
My four M.A. Colloquium papers : Kenilworth: Scott’s Treatment of History; the actor in Dickens; Sources of Character: Thackeray’s Becky Sharp and Amelia Sedley; Persuasion ( Jane Austin).
Trip to Europe with Mom the summer of 1955 ( after Rosemary’s marriage to Frank Morris in Cheltenham, England) correction by BMF: from Kathleen M. Fitzgerald timeline – Sheila and her Mom are in Europe June through September, they started and ended in Cheltenham getting acquainted with Rosemary’s fiancée and in between with a month’s long Cook’s bus tour of the Continent, a week’s Cook’s bus tour of England and a week in Ireland.
Trip to Europe with Mike and Mom in 1956 ( Correction by BMF based on the timeline of Kathleen M. Fitzgerald: this trip was for Rosemary’s July wedding. After, Mike and Sheila and their Mom have a drive tour of southern Ireland. While their Mom returns to the USA aboard the ocean liner Maasdam, Sheila and Mike do a drive tour in a Volkswagen through Europe and fly home August 27th)
Teaching in Minneapolis Elementary School 1955 – 1969, 14 years.
Again under good counsel from m mother that from childhood I had wanted to teach young children, as well as her accusation that I was afraid to apply for elementary teaching jobs in the Twin Cities, I reluctantly turned down a telephone call offering me a position teaching English in a Twin Cities Catholic High School and drove to Minneapolis and St. Paul to apply for positions in public school elementary grades.
Because I did not have 12 credits required for a teaching license in Minnesota, I was given a temporary license and took evening classes at Macalaster College while I was a new teacher in Minneapolis first as a 3d grade teacher at Cooper Public School.
10/56 – 6/62 - Cooper School, Grade 3, Principal Rebecca Bergman, alter George McDonough; started taking courses in the evenings at the U. of MN toward another U. of MN M.A. ( illegible)
9/62 – 6/63 Cooper School, Grade 4, principal George McDonough; guided student teacher
9/63 -6/66 Helping teacher for new and second year fourth grade teachers , travelling across the district; television teach on the new KTCA (television channel) , planning and teaching 15 minutes programs piped into school classrooms to educate teachers as they faced their students.
9/66 – 2/67 on sabbatical leave to continue M.A. work at the U of MN and supervise student teachers in Minneapolis area public schools.
2/66 – 6/67 Tuttle School, Grade 4 teacher including demonstration teaching with the children that were observed by U of MN education classes; also summer school teaching with demonstrations for university classes
9/67 – 6/69 Morris Park School, Grade 1; for more practical teaching in the early grades I
mentored student teachers.
Mother’s Death
I had just arrived at Morris Park School on Friday morning May 28, 1968 when I was called to the office to take a long distance phone call. It was my mother calling in a weak voice telling me she had been very sick for days with the flu and thought she had to go to the hospital. I told her to call our neighbors and I would pick up the suitcase that was ready at my apartment and get on the road for the ninety mile drive to St. Mary’s Hospital in Rochester to meet her there. She didn’t call our neighbors or get the phone back on its cradle, so an operator contacted her supervisor to tell her about the sick lady on the line. When that supervisor, my friend Martha Finch’s sister, Carol, found it was Mrs. Fitzgerald, she called our neighbors and the ambulance, so Mom soon was taken to the emergency room at St. Mary’s Hospital.
All of her six children had been born in that hospital that Daddy’s company had built, and her husband had been taken there for operations for cancer before his death at home on January 7, 1939 at age 51, twenty-nine years before. Also, in the 1920’s Dad’s company, Heffron and Fitzgerald Contractors built St. Mary’s buildings including the Chapel, Auditorium, Nurses’ Home and Surgical Pavilion, , center building front ( the place Mom’s own operation would soon take place.
(illegible)
Mom was very agitated when I arrived at St. Mary’s surgery and the team of doctors and nurses working on her quickly dispatched me out of the area( illegible) She was taken to surgery. It seemed an eternity before my Minnesota siblings joined me as I waited for outcomes of the operation that placed a pacemaker in her chest. I knew that no matter what the outcome was, none of us would let her live alone in our family home in the future – as she had since her youngest, Mike, left for college at St. Louis University in ? ( BMF: from Kathleen M. Fitzgerald timeline, Mike began at St. Louis Univ the fall of 1955.) As they were taking her to her hospital room from surgery, she glanced up with eyes half opened and mumbled, “ I’m ready to go.” Indeed, she seemed anxious to meet her Maker to whom she had been faithful all of her life.
Later that evening, each of us children in the waiting room was allowed to go in separately to see her for a few minutes. When my turn came, I made a plea to her that she not leave me, the only single child in the family. She slowly turned her head and stared at me, seeming to indicate that she would be very disappointed if I, at age 36, could not go on successfully without her. She died later that night, May 24, 1968 at the age of 75.
Closing the house after her funeral and selecting items that shouldn’t be left in the empty house was accomplished at the discussion of five of us, sitting around our childhood dining room table. It would be over a year until Kate who lived in Illinois her seven year old daughter Katie, and I would spend a summer emptying every nick and cranny of 622 and savoring many memories. Our three brothers came when they could to help out. Near the end of the summer, we invited neighbor ladies to come to a coffee party to honor Mom. Then the Fitzgerald house, built by Dad’s company in 1927, as I was becoming four years old, would be made ready for sale. Years later, her third lawyer son, Mike, told me that he was responsible for selling the 10 plot on the hill outside of west Rochester by the country club. She had never sold the land in spite of financial problems possibly because it was a dream for a family home by our dad.
Mother had encouraged me to go on with my education and earn a Ph.D. degree, but I loved teaching young children, and for another year I held to that goal. But increasingly I pondered my future, my interest in teaching teachers, and future possibilities for life as my forties were appearing on the horizon. I applied and was granted a three years’ unpaid leave from the Minneapolis Public Schools to pursue a doctoral program. I was accepted into the Ph.D. program in Curriculum and Instruction and could complete my second Masters Degree as I started coursework for the Ph.D. The department chair Ronald Lambert, my advisor, hired me to review records of applicants for Masters Degree programs. Along the way in the following three years, I was hired to teach undergraduate introductory courses in education, supervise new teachers in their schools and teach language arts and children’s literature courses on campus.
The M.A. in Elementary Education that I completed as I began coursework for the Ph.D. program in Teacher Education with a minor in English language Arts was a good addition to the Master Degree in English Literature that I had received in 1955 in the University of MN English Department.
M.A. Colloquium Paper: “Original Case Studies in Elementary Education” ( 1970)
I completed coursework for the Ph.D. degree in December 1971 then conducted planning, research and statistical analysis of data for the dissertation in 1971-2.
Ph.D. Dissertation: “ A Career development Study of elementary School Teacher.” ( 1972)
Michigan State University 1972 – 1997
( illegible handwriting……… expected to move into higher levels)
I was hired to teach English Language Arts courses at the undergraduate, masters and doctoral level; to advise graduate students; to do research; and to serve the community at the local, state and national level ( See Vita for details of these 25 years, and also the travels list for overseas trips I enjoyed from 1955 – 2008) ( a bit illegible handwriting….. and for the MSU faculty in the elementary and Special Education Department)
Assistant Professor 1972-1978
Associate Professor 1978 – 1983; Illegible handwriting … elected * year ***. Officer of MI Council of Teachers of English 1979 – 1982; MCTE ( Michigan Council of Teachers of English) President 1982
Professor 1983 – 1997; elected for a 4 (?) year term; Officer of the National Council of Teachers of English ( NCTE) 1983-1986, NCTE President 1985
GOALS FOR RETIREMENT
Arrange to sell my Lansing condo, sort and pack all at the office at MSU and at home; sell my 1973 old mercury convertible to make room for storing boxes in the garage as I got them packed. Hire a MSU student for help carrying boxes to the garage.
Order a new mattress for my ¾ antique bed; buy a new Buick
Hire and supervise a moving company; get the condo in saleable condition; hire a realtor and a real estate attorney
Study my financial situation and seek advice on what my future promised if I didn’t plan to work.
Locate an affordable, comfortable and convenient condo ( Illegible *) in south suburbs of the Twin Cities; resettle all of my belongings
Reconnect with my three brothers/their families and “old” friends that I have been in contact with for the 25 years I lived in Michigan.
Select a convenient Catholic church and get a little involved with members of the church and its programs, but learn to say “no” so I don’t get over committed.
Take part in the rich arts opportunities in the Twin Cities, particularly theatre, concerts, and visual arts because in Lansing I was short of time for these activities.
Increase my time for reading, particularly non-education fiction and non – fiction
Research my genealogy with the long-range plan of interviewing my four living siblings and writing a book about my Mom and Dad
Write my Timeline and write up family genealogy records
( Comments on results of all goals so far)
DEATH OF SIBLINGS AND IN-LAWS
Rosemary Anne ( Fitzgerald) and Frank Morris
Cheltenham, England
DoD __/10/2003
?
age 72 and 67?
John Moonan Fitzgerald and Mary A. Mach Fitzgerald
New Prague, MN
DoD 06/16/2008 --- 06/06/2013
DoB 01/20/1923 --- 12/06/1929
age 84 and 83
Patrick William Fitzgerald and Veronica Kocon Fitzgerald
Golden Valley, MN
DoD 01/22/2010 --- 03/27/2018
DoB 08/05/1927 ---
age 82 and 91
Kathleen Maura ( Fitzgerald) and Conrad Terrien
Elmhurst, IL
DoD 7/6/2011 --- 10/14/2011
DoB 12/01/1924 --- DoB 12/14/1920
age 86 and 90
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