Legacies of amazing women often go unnoticed

As we edited this month’s edition of the Catholic Review commemorating Women’s History Month, I realized there are several women who had a huge impact on my life, but you won’t read about them in the history books.

One of them, Anna Margaret Ternes, was born Sept. 9, 1896, in Chicago. Her family often spoke German at home, because her grandparents had been born in Germany.

When she was young, she had an operation on her left eye because she had strabismus (crossed eyes). After the surgery, she stayed at her aunt’s house because it was closer to the hospital, she recalled in a memoir. She claimed that the morning after the surgery, her left eye fell out of the socket, so she went back to the hospital, where it was fixed.

“It was OK for years,” she said, “and then, all at once it started to turn to the left, which is the way it is now,” she wrote in the 1970s.

By the time I met her, she was known as Margaret Kohs, and she was my grandmother. Her left eye always pulled to the left. She was embarrassed about it when she was young because she said people didn’t think she was looking at them. It never bothered
her grandkids.

She never finished elementary school. At age 14, after seventh grade, she started working in a five-and-dime on the South Side of Chicago. Eventually she worked as a secretary at several companies, and enrolled in a business college for typing and shorthand. The program should have taken nine months, but she finished it in six. “I have a diploma from college but not grammar school,” she wrote.

I know very little about her early years, but I got to read about what it was like to bring buckets of coal and wood up to the second-floor apartment where her family lived. We learned that she and my grandfather stayed in touch during “the war” – World War I, that is – and they got engaged and married not long after he returned from duty, though he had not served overseas.

It’s fascinating to read about the fun she and her friends had, maybe because we don’t often think of our grandparents as ever having been young and crazy. She recalled a time when she and some friends were in a play, and they took the streetcar to travel to a parish on the North Side to perform. As they rode, they all sang, and other passengers joined in. “The motorman did not want to end his route, (and) some people went further than they had to, they hated to get off the car,” she wrote.

I got to know Granny Kohs much better when she moved to an apartment about a mile from our house after Grandpa Kohs died. She was close enough that we could walk or ride our bikes to her place. She crocheted doilies almost constantly, taught us card games and got around with what she called her “Rolls Royce” – her walker. Her worn Bible bulged with dozens of prayer cards from all the wakes and funerals she had been to, and she prayed every day for each of those people.

Many of my favorite memories were when my friend and I spent time visiting Granny after bowling across the street from her place. We got to just sit and chat, have a soft drink, and soak in her wisdom.

My mother, Therese Gunty, one of Margaret’s daughters, was born in the family home on the South Side in 1927 (I’ve written about her before).

Both these women have had an enormous impact on my life – even now, years after they have both passed away. Their quiet dedication to their faith, family and community always impressed me and continue to
inspire me. I realize women like my amazing mother and grandmother don’t have to make history to influence others and leave a legacy.

Email Christopher Gunty at editor@catholicreview.org

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