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A gift planning newsletter for alumni, parents and friends of Loyola Academy
T 19 0 9
| Spring 2023
A Legacy for the Generations By James M. McMenamin, LA ’68
M
y great grandmother, Frances Bridget Walsh McNamee, was widowed at the age of 40 with five young sons to raise. But she knew the worth of strong values and a good education. According to family lore, when she learned that the Jesuits were to open a new prep school on the grounds of Loyola University early in the 20th century, she held back sending my grandfather, Peter McNamee, to any other high school so that he could enroll in what she knew would be a superior Catholic institution of learning. So keen was she to have her son register that he was the first four-year student to enroll at the Academy. When he graduated in 1913, he was already 21 years old but a good scholar and a great lover of Loyola baseball, where he pitched on the school team. Peter McNamee went on to earn a law degree from Northwestern University and practiced family law for over 50 years. When my mother and her two sisters were teenagers, the Academy was still an all-male institution, so all three went elsewhere for high school. During World War II, she married my father, Bob
Class of 1913
McMenamin, a farm boy from DeKalb County. In 1949 my parents were sent abroad as expatriates with their three children by International Harvester for 14 years to New Zealand (where I was born in 1951), to Australia and finally to France. When our family of 14 later returned to the States, my mother made certain that the six of her seven sons young enough to attend the Academy (Peter, Jim, Joe, Tom, Rich and Bill) received the same rounded education and strong values her father had at LA, by then relocated to Wilmette, Illinois. Of the six of us who attended the Academy, we went off to continued on Page 2
Inside: • Have You Reviewed Your Beneficiaries Lately? Seven McMenamin brothers
• Support Loyola, Save on Taxes