A life of purpose: 100-year-old Peoria woman killed by car 'made everyone feel special'
PEORIA – During her 100 years of life, Shirley Meagher spent very little time standing still.
Known for the pink bicycle she got when she was in her 70s and living in Arizona, Meagher was a worry to administrators and her fellow residents at Buehler Home, where she lived the final 12 years of her life.
Meagher was finally convinced to quit riding the bicycle at the age of 98, but for sentimental reasons, she held onto it until this year. After she turned 100, Meagher donated it to the annual rummage sale at First Federated Church.
“It sold first thing Friday morning, the day she died,” said Patty Busch, Meagher’s daughter.
Meagher died instantly when she was struck by a car shortly before 8 a.m. Aug. 11 while crossing the south-bound lanes of University Street. She was on her daily mission to find stray coins to donate to St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, a task she had once done on the bicycle. She visited the area's fast-food restaurants, where people often dropped change when paying in the drive-thru.
It was raining and dark that morning when Meagher took her usual route, walking first to St. Philomena Catholic Church for morning Mass before traversing Hudson Street to cross University Street, one of Peoria’s busiest thoroughfares, without the aid of a streetlight or crosswalk.
"She was hard of hearing and she had kyphosis pretty bad, so she was not an erect walker. She stood in a very stooped position, with an umbrella probably right over her head. There’s just no way she was really seeing what was going on. How she thought she was going to make it across four lanes of traffic, I have no idea,” said Busch.
The driver who hit Meagher was not charged, and the family holds no ill will toward them, said Busch.
“One of my kids said, ‘The only person I feel bad for in this is the poor person who hit her.’ Then another cousin chimed in and said, ‘Shirley would be the first person to insist on forgiveness.’”
A life of purpose
Shirley Ruth Patee was born on March 15, 1923, in a farmhouse near Peoria at a time when people were still traveling by horse and buggy. Growing up during the Great Depression, Shirley developed a strong work ethic at a young age. When she learned that the Journal Star was giving away a Shirley Temple doll to anyone who brought in four new subscriptions, she went door to door for weeks until achieving the goal. The doll was a lifelong possession, and Meagher often told the story of how she got it.
After Meagher's husband, Eddie, came home from World War II, the pair raised five children in Washington. From 1963 to 1973, Meagher wrote a weekly column for the Tazewell County Reporter called “It Could Happen.” Sharing amusing stories from her life, Meagher became known as "the Erma Bombeck of Tazewell County."
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A divorce in the mid-1960s prompted Meagher to go back to school and earn a degree. In 1967 she became the third person to enroll in the newly created Illinois Central College. After her last two years at Eureka College, Meagher was offered a job at St. Patrick’s Grade School in Washington, where she taught for 17 years.
Meagher lived a life of purpose. In the 1970s, she took in a family of Vietnamese refugees who left the country during the fall of Saigon, and in subsequent years sponsored numerous families. When she retired from teaching, she decided to become a missionary and went to Macau, China, in 1987 to work at an orphanage run by Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity.
'She was a pistol'
Meagher was an independent soul who had a lot of fun after retirement. Aided by the fact that her youngest son was an airline pilot who could get her free airfare, Meagher became a world traveler. One trip was a monthlong backpacking tour of Europe.
"She was always laughing, even if she had to spend the night in an airport," said Meagher's daughter-in-law, Ilona Meagher. "She was a pistol, an amazing person. I've never known someone with such energy."
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Meagher lived in Peoria until her parents, who both lived to the age of 100, died, then she moved to Tucson, Arizona, to be close to her daughter Patty Busch. Though the plan was to live out her life there, it changed when Busch’s husband got a job in Colorado.
“She wanted to go with us, but she was already so deep into her daily routine with the morning walk to Mass, and we couldn’t find anywhere that would be safe for her to do that in a climate like that,” said Busch. “Then she just did a complete about-face and said, ‘Well, I’m going to Buehler.’ She had mentioned it in the past, about what a wonderful place it was, and her sister planned to go there. Then, just serendipitously, there actually ended up being five family members there. They all ended up there in the summer of 2011, so we never had any doubt that that was where she was meant to be.”
Everyone's friend
“Everybody at Buehler was a friend of Shirley’s,” said Buehler resident Lynne Marsho. “She was the heart of Buehler. For every holiday, every birthday, she made handmade little cards that she would put in your mailbox — and that’s 165 apartments she dealt with, 200-some people. She made everyone feel special.”
Meagher was quick to befriend new residents, so when Marsho and her husband moved in during the COVID-19 pandemic quarantine that prevented a face-to-face meeting, Meagher put a card in their mailbox.
“I think we finally met face-to-face at the bridge table. She was a very good bridge player,” said Marsho.
Meagher was also good at sewing and knitting.
"She actually just finished knitting a multicolored afghan that’s being donated to the fundraiser at St. Phil’s,” said Nancy Whittry, another friend from Buehler. “She was physically and mentally active. When she was not playing bridge, she was doing jigsaw puzzles. If we could all be that blessed, we will be lucky.”
Determined and noncompliant to the end
Meagher was still living independently in her own apartment when she died. She didn’t have any chronic medical conditions, though she was troubled by poor hearing. Because ambient noise made her ability to understand what was going on around her difficult, Meagher asked that just her children and their spouses attend her 100th birthday party, said Busch.
“She said that the one thing that would make her happiest was to see her five children and their spouses all having a good time together, even if she couldn’t understand anything," said Busch.
In July, Meagher enjoyed a final reunion at the family’s cabin in Wisconsin.
“It was the last weekend in July, and it was amazing. She went for a swim in the lake, the loons were in full glory, and she had a wonderful time,” said Busch. “At the end of it she said, ‘I know this is my last visit to the lake.' She had already started getting rid of all her possessions — she had gotten rid of all her dolls, even the Shirley Temple doll. She said, ‘I’m ready, whenever God is ready for me.’”
Meagher was a free and independent spirit who refused to play it safe during her lifetime, and she would never have been happy living with wings clipped by infirmity, said her daughter.
“After we got over the horror of (the way she died), you just had to smile and say, ‘Shirley was doing what she loved, Shirley was going to be very active to the very end.’ It just seems apropos of her energy, and zest, and determination, and kind of her noncompliance."
Leslie Renken can be reached at (309) 370-5087 or lrenken@pjstar.com. Follow her on Facebook.com/leslie.renken.
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This article originally appeared on Journal Star: Shirley Meagher of Peoria hit by car while collecting for St. Jude
