(l tor) Former Lithuanian President Valdas Adamkus, Maria Race, Alma Adamkus, Tim Race, 2011

One of the most interesting people I have met through this blog is Maria (Fry) Race, a Springfield native and fourth-generation Lithuanian-American who lives in Elmhurst. Ill. and is director of environmental services for Edison Mission Energy, owner of 4 coal plants and 31 wind farms.

Maria grew up in the Laketown neighborhood, the older of two daughters of Jeanette (Tonila) Gooch and Frederick Fry. Her grandmother, Agnes (Tonila) Gooch, grew up on Reynolds St., one of nine children of John George Tonila and Agatha (Mankus) Tonila, who immigrated separately from Lithuania around 1900. Great-grandfather Tonila was a coal miner. One of his sons, John Tonila, (Maria’s great uncle and a Golden Gloves champ, according to family lore) gave his life in the WW II Battle of Monte Cassino near Rome, Italy in May 1944, and was memorialized with other parish war dead on a special plaque in Springfield’s Lithuanian-Catholic St. Vincent de Paul Church.

John Tonila death telegram

Maria’s parents were married and Maria was baptized at St. Vincent de Paul’s. “My younger sister Stefanie and I were the first in our family to go to college,” she recalls, “and my mother pushed us hard to be successful because she wished she had gotten the chance to go.” Stefanie had straight “A”s at the U of I in Champaign (Bronze Plaque 1987) and went to UIC for her medical degree. (Stefanie is now saving lives as a cardiologist in Boise, Idaho.)

Maria pursued a double major in art and physics at Parkland Community College, then got a B.S. in physics at the U of I Champaign, followed by a master’s in environmental technology at the New York Institute of Technology. Maria’s spirituality conflicted with the defense work that would have been the easiest application for her physics degree. So she moved into the environmental field, working in hazardous waste management. Now at Mission Energy, Maria says, “I manage people, compliance, and policy. It’s a very difficult field–very challenging–but very interesting.”

Over the years, Maria explored many religions: Judaism, Buddhism, and Unitarianism. But she says, “I have gone back to my Catholic roots, as the ancient voices called me from my ancestors on both the Lithuanian and Irish sides of the family.”

Jesus icon painted by Maria

About a year ago, she started painting icons, which has become a passion. She is also an oblate at Monastery of the Holy Cross in the Chicago Bridgeport neighborhood, where there once was a Lithuanian church. Maria explains, “This means that I follow liturgy of the hours and St. Benedict’s Rule as closely as I can as a lay person living in the world. I regularly go to the monastery for classes. I am particularly devoted to St. Hildegard of Bingen, and have been to visit her relics. She was an artist and scientist and I feel she guides my life.”

Starting in the mid-1990s, while Lithuania was re-establishing itself and struggling to escape the grinding poverty of the long Soviet era, Maria began donating to medical relief charity Lithuanian Mercy Lift. http://www.lithuanianmercylift.org/about.html Then she began helping LML president Ausrine Karaitis locate older or discarded medical equipment in the UIC labs, where both women were working, to send to Lithuanian hospitals and nursing homes. In 2011, just after LML disbanded, Maria accompanied Ausrine to visit some of the facilities and people they had helped.

During that trip with her husband Tim, who also has Lithuanian roots, Maria got to visit with former Lithuanian President Valdas Adamkus and his wife Alma. (Mr. Adamkus was a Lithuanian-born U.S. citizen and a regional U.S. EPA administrator when he ran for and was elected to Lithuania’s presidency.)

Agnes Tonila rosary, black & white, center, Hill of Crosses, Siauliai

While in Lithuania, Maria also took a rosary that had been at her grandmother Agnes’s grave at Calvary Cemetery and placed it at the famous Hill of Crosses in Siauliai. “It was hard to leave it there because I had had it for a long time, but it felt right,” Maria recalls. She has four sons: 17-year old twins Austin and Alec, who are high school seniors going to ISU and DePaul University next year. Her other sons are Ian, 15, and Julian, 12.

Inspired by role models like his father, a pre-War Lithuanian Border Control Officer, Limey Nargelenas has pursued a life-long career in police work, rising to the rank of Superintendent (commander) of the Illinois State Police. Some in Springfield might also remember his years as Director of Police Security and Safety at LLCC. Limey also has served as Deputy Director and Manager of Governmental Relations and Training for the Illinois Association of Chiefs of Police.

Only a few years after the restoration of Lithuania’s independence in 1991, Limey had the privilege of traveling back to where his family story began to assist the fledgling independent police forces of Vilnius and Kaunas as a consultant and trainer for the Pointman Leadership Institute.

Limey’s father, Antanas Nargelenas, born in Ukmerge, Lithuania, was taken prisoner by the invading German army in 1941 in the line of duty securing Lithuania’s border. After the Russians invaded Lithuania for the second time in 1944, Antanas and his wife Jadvyga Snabelyte Nargelenas (born in Ruminskis, Lithuania), ended up in a displaced persons (DP) camp in Watenstedt, Germany, where Limey was born.

While refugees from the Nargelenas and Snabelys families were scattered across the world, Limey and his immediate family ended up in Georgetown, Ill., due to the kind sponsorship of the Gustaitas family. It was there that five-year-old Limey faced the prospect of learning English at St. Mary’s Grade School, after already having learned Lithuanian and German. Limey’s father, like so many other former professionals, had no choice but to become a factory worker (and build homes on the side) to support his growing family in the U.S.

However, local Lithuanian-American Illinois State Troopers became friends of the family and gave Limey’s father a continuing connection to police work. Limey still remembers looking up to local officers Walter Lumsargis, Leonard Balsis, Vernon Cook, and John Matulis. Their reputation for upholding the law in the face of small-town corruption made Limey aspire to be a state trooper when he grew up. “I will never forget the time, as a Boy Scout in Georgetown Troop 16, when I was given the opportunity to ride along with Trooper Walt Lumsargis, who later became Sheriff of Vermilion County. I got to be the acting Georgetown Police Chief that day.”

Limey also recalls with pride how his parents “faced the challenges of coming to America to start a new life, how quickly they learned to speak English, and how proud they were to earn their U.S. citizenship.” After both his parents passed away, Limey’s younger brother Paul, now a pilot for Delta airlines, lived with him for a time. (He has another brother, Romas, and two sisters.)

Limey says he’s been grateful for the opportunity to travel the world teaching classes or consulting for police departments in China, Mongolia, England, Korea, Japan, Canada, Mexico, Peru, Australia, Germany, and Lithuania. He has also served as adjunct faculty for UIS, the Northwestern University Traffic Institute, Southern Illinois University and the University of North Florida. Limey is a former president of the Illinois Campus Law Enforcement Administrators and the Illinois Retired State Police Officers Association.

A graduate of the FBI National Executive Institute, Limey earned his M.A. in legal studies and B.A. in social justice from UIS. (His life story also includes varsity football at U of I and restaurant ownership in Springfield.) Today, Limey coordinates the legislative agenda for the Illinois Association of Chiefs of Police as president of Capitol Consulting, Inc., and is completing a Ph.D. from SIU-Carbondale in vocational education.

Back in the 1970s and ’80s, many of us read movie reviews in the Illinois Times by Rich Shereikis. While others in Springfield knew him as their professor of English and a charter faculty member of Sangamon State University, I am sorry to say I only knew him from his IT byline.
So when Rich died recently at 76, IT ran a full-page article, which helped me get in touch with his daughter Rebecca, who grew up in Springfield. http://www.illinoistimes.com/Springfield/article-11238-the-right-combination-of-sensibilities.html

Rebecca holds a Ph.D. in African history from Northwestern University, my own alma mater, and works as an administrator for NU’s Program of African Studies. She sent me the obit below, written by her mother, Judith, which will appear in the May 9 issue of the Washington Island Observer:

Rich Shereikis grew up in the Marquette Park neighborhood of Chicago, the only child of Lithuanian immigrants. His father John had left his war-torn country at age 18 to find work in a South Side factory; his mother Thelma had moved to the big city from a small town in southern Illinois, where her father was a coal miner. Little could they have imagined that this boy who grew up in a home almost devoid of books would become an avid reader, a gifted writer, and eventually a professor of English literature.

John and Thelma with son Rich

Rich was not just a bookish boy. He excelled in basketball and baseball, and was a varsity athlete for Harper High in the tough Chicago Public League. He pursued this love of athletics throughout his life, coaching track as a young high school teacher, pitching 16-inch softball in the summers, running marathons (including the Boston), and organizing inventive home Olympics for his children John, Michael and Rebecca. And when two “fake hips,” as he dubbed them, curtailed these activities, he took up long-distance biking.

His love of reading led him to a degree in English at Northern Illinois U. and to his first teaching job in a high school in the south suburbs of Chicago, where he met his wife Judy. During the summers, while working construction jobs, he completed coursework for his M.A. in English at the U. of Chicago.

After earning his Ph.D. in English in 1965 at the University of Colorado at Boulder and teaching three years at University of Wisconsin, Whitewater, in 1971, Rich was enticed to Springfield to become a charter faculty member at Sangamon State, where he stayed for 25 years. He was a dedicated teacher, with equally high standards for his students. His courses ranged from 19th century English literature (his beloved Dickens and Hardy) and Midwestern literature, to the short story, and sports in the American Culture. He also mentored aspiring high school teachers.

For twenty years he was movie and book reviewer, columnist, feature writer, and entertainment editor for Illinois Times, as well as the books and humanities editor and writer for Illinois Issues. Meanwhile, he also published in scholarly journals and wrote essays and reviews for the Chicago Reader, Mother Jones, and the Columbia Journalism Review that were picked up by papers from Boston to Malibu.

After he retired as Professor Emeritus from the University of Illinois, Springfield, in 1995, Rich and Judy moved to Evanston. In 1996, they bought a summer home on Washington Island, where Rich spent the last (and particularly lovely) autumn of his life (2012) before being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

A dear friend aptly eulogized Rich as “a man with a fierce intolerance of injustice and pretense, a deep appreciation for immigrant cultures arising from his Lithuanian heritage, a lifelong devotion to sports, an omnivorous love of literature and film, and an intense commitment to his family. Those of us who cherished him as a social critic, and sometime curmudgeon delighted to see the tender and doting grandfather he became. We will miss not only his blunt honesty but his deep generosity and humor.”

Rich is survived by his wife and children, as well as grandchildren Nicholas, Rachel, and Anya, to whom we offer our fond memories and deep admiration for a full and passionate life so well-lived.