By Lauren FitzPatrick
Staff writer
If centenarian Margaret M. Popjoy knew the secret to a long life, she
certainly kept mum about it.
Mrs. Popjoy’s children speculated it might have been her good genes.
Her father lived to 98; a sister died within eight days of turning 100. So
maybe it was hereditary.
But it also could have been extraordinary gusto — traveling through
her 80s, drumming through her 90s — that kept her going so strong past
her 100th birthday.
“She danced; she played the drums; she sang,” daughter Lois Janotta
said. “She loved to dance.”
Mrs. Popjoy died Feb. 7 in Orland Park where she was living with her daughter Mary Jo Purcell and son-in-law.
The youngest of nine children, Margaret Drexler was born Nov. 17, 1904, at 82nd Street and Maryland Avenue in Chicago’s Chatham community.
She came prematurely, weighing only a few pounds at birth.
With a mother who tuned organs and a father who built the cabinets housing the piped instruments at the old Lyon & Healy organ company, Margaret grew up in a very musical household. The Drexler brood were raised to sing and play musical instruments at night after dinner.
Margaret learned the violin and piano as a child, and she then took up the drums in high school.
While singing in the choir at St. Lawrence church in 1933, she spotted Walter Popjoy across the room. They married six months later.
“If you knew the reason he was there, you’d laugh,” she would tease her children, refusing to tell them.
The Popjoys were staunch Democrats who followed politics closely from Chicago’s 8th Ward. They hosted a campaign luncheon for then-Sen. John F. Kennedy and his wife, Jackie, and were then invited to Kennedy’s 1961 presidential inauguration in Washington.
Later that year, Walter Popjoy died, so Mrs. Popjoy found ways to keep busy.
For one thing, she golfed.
“She wouldn’t take a cart; she would walk,” her son James Popjoy said. “She knew the starter so she’d be able to tee off whenever she’d want.”
She often went alone, and found charming ways to get herself invited to play with groups — and then eat lunch with them afterward.
“She met more people that way,” he said.
Mrs. Popjoy also loved to travel dating back to the 1920s, when she worked in the dining car department of the Rock Island Railroad, a job that afforded her free train tickets. Among her first destinations were New York, Denver and Colorado Springs. She would later travel with her sister or a friend through most of Europe.
She and her sister were two of 81 passengers on a 1980 Delta Airlines flight to Miami that was hijacked and rerouted to Havana, Cuba. Only Mrs. Popjoy thought the pilot said they were stopping in Savannah, as in Georgia, and was surprised to see the Cuban military around the grounded plane.
But even Cuban guns didn’t stop her from going places, always dressed so beautifully.
If she couldn’t get to Marshall Field’s, she would look in the magazines for the latest styles, Janotta said.
“Everything matched: earrings, purse, rings,” Purcell said.
Mrs. Popjoy spent later years at the Leisure Center near her home in Wheaton, where she joined other senior citizens on outings and musical activities, including singing for people in nursing homes.
There the optimism and energy of the 80-something lady made her very popular, Silvertones director Georgia Hamilton said.
“Radiance emanated from her,” the singing group’s director said. “The glass was always full with her. She was always very sharp and had wonderful stories to tell.”
Mrs. Popjoy continued to dance in shows and play a mean set of drums to accompany the singers and in solos until age 95 when she conceded to move to Orland Park.
“She was on her own until then,” her daughter said.
Somewhere in her nineties, Mrs. Popjoy worried her great-grandbabies wouldn’t know anything about her, so she wrote a letter to new baby Emily spelling out her own personal history, said granddaughter Margaret Leddin who read the letter at the funeral.
“The first time I ever saw or heard a radio was when a friend of mine invited us to listen to a broadcast,” the letter read. “As you can guess, this was a long time ago. I was married and had three children before we had a television.”
She turned 100 with great aplomb and ever-matching outfits, and was lauded by Chicago City Council, which passed a resolution for her centennial birthday.
“She was a hell of a woman,” Purcell said.
Mrs. Popjoy also is survived by grandchildren Kathleen Miller, Thomas Janotta, Margaret Collins, Patricia Kelly and Christopher Popjoy; 10 great-grandchildren; and many nieces, nephews and friends.
Arrangements were by Palos-Gaidas Funeral Home, (708) 974-4410.
