Highlighting individual stories

At 92, Ruth Lamar still worked. She addressed envelopes for a mail-order business, and even though she didn't need the job, she took great pride in it.

"I would say, 'What did you do today?'" said her niece, Gwendolyn Desvignes, who lives in Matteson. "She would say, 'Oh, I addressed about 30 envelopes.'"

Lamar's absence at work on July 18 led to the discovery of her death. When she didn't show up at the home-based business in Riverside, her employer called the manager at the Hyde Park apartment complex where she lived.

Lamar's niece said she had offered to bring the elderly woman to her home the day before, but she declined.

"I tried to get her to come, but she said she had the fan going and that she was fine," Desvignes said.

James Nance made one concession to age: he programmed his telephone to speed-dial a daughter and a neighbor.

But he refused to leave the Bucktown bungalow where he had lived for 45 years, even though, at 85, he was so frail that he rarely left his bedroom.

Perhaps this independent streak clung from his youth, when he traveled out west to seek his fortune as a gold prospector (but ended up penniless and had to wire his mother for the fare home) and kept his wife waiting for dinner while he danced away evenings at the bars.

After she died in 1988, he often told his neighbor, Phillip Matson, how much he regretted the way he had treated her.

Nance had health insurance but fought any attempts to get him to a doctor.

His neighbor believes medical care could have prevented Nance's death but said Nance hated the idea of being dependent.

"One thing's for sure," Matson said. "He did it his way. He wanted to die in that house and he did."

Mary Tontlewicz had a surname familiar to many Chicagoans. It was her 4-year-old grandson, Jimmy, who survived after being submerged for 20 minutes in icy Lake Michigan in 1984. She died with the mementos of her long-ended show business career close by her in her Logan Square apartment.

Born to Polish immigrants in Chicago in 1918, Tontlewicz grew to be a 5-foot-7-inch statuesque woman with long, curly black hair, blue eyes, and bones so flexible she could position her long legs behind her ears and turn herself into a human pretzel.

That skill served her well in vaudeville and in tours all over the U.S. with the USO. During World War II, she had been asked to go overseas with Bob Hope and the USO.

"Even her own mother told her she should go on the trip," said Catherine Tontlewicz, 38, one of her six children.

But Tontlewicz said no. She was afraid to fly.

And though Tontlewicz never dated anyone else after her husband moved out in 1968, Catherine did her best to get her mother to have fun. Catherine took her to punk rock clubs.

"She danced with the young guys, and they thought she was the coolest," said Catherine Tontlewicz. "She didn't want to leave."

In recent years, however, she became less interested in life and frequently would tell her daughter, "I want to die."

Tontlewicz grew increasingly frail and ate less and less.

On July 14, she came downstairs, her waist-length, salt-and-pepper hair tied back in a ponytail. She wasn't much interested in the pizza Catherine was serving and eventually returned to the upstairs apartment of the two-flat where the family lived.

The next day, she did not come down or answer repeated knocks on her door. Her daughter suspected the worst when she saw that the light was still on in her mother's apartment.

Only death would have stopped Mary Tontlewicz from turning out the lights.

Outsiders might not have considered Genoveva Mota's life remarkable. She spent most of her 87 years on earth crocheting, cooking, and caring for her family.

She moved to the United States from her family's ranch in Guanajuato, Mexico, in 1926, with her mother and brother, and rarely ventured from her Logan Square neighborhood. She had traveled in a car just three times in her life.

"What foot do I put in first?" she asked her grandson David Mota, 28, as she tried to get into his car for a trip to the grocery store last year.

Mota and her husband, a foreman on the Milwaukee Road Railroad, who died years ago, held old-world values. They had scrimped and sacrificed to make sure all five of their children attended Catholic schools.

She kept her faith even though she had seen her share of tragedy. She had two miscarriages. Her oldest daughter, Antonia, and a granddaughter were murdered, shot to death by Antonia's husband.

Friends and neighbors knew her as "Abuelita," or "Granny," their nickname for the tiny woman with shoulder-length, white hair peeking out from beneath her babushka. Every day, they saw her waiting outside the apartment building on Western Avenue for the mail carrier's arrival. She gathered the mail for all five apartments in the building and distributed it to the families, so neighborhood vandals couldn't get to it.

The morning of July 13 was the last time she clambered down the three flights of stairs, wearing a gray raincoat and scarf, despite the heat.

By the next morning, she couldn't get up from the sofa. Her son, Frank, 50, who lived with her, put cold packs around her and gave her cold towels and lots of water.

She never went to the doctor, and she refused to go to the hospital now. She died on the couch the following morning.

Although James Barker had few possessions on earth, his family and friends believed he had stored his treasures up in heaven.

He had devoted his life since the age of 12 to serving his church. For 28 years, he worked as a missionary in Venezuela. He was a deacon at the North Side Gospel Center and a leader in the AWANA Clubs, a nonprofit religious organization that sponsors church youth clubs.

But, at 71, when most people are retired, he still struggled to make ends meet for his family, working part-time for the Garrett Popcorn Shops in the Loop.

He lived with his wife, Rosie, and two of their four children in a small three-bedroom apartment on the top floor of a three-story building in the 2100 block of North Mozart Street in the Logan Square neighborhood.

Barker, who was overweight and took medication for high-blood pressure, died of heat stroke a week after he collapsed at his family's apartment. They had a window air-conditioning unit but ran it only a few hours a day because of the expense.

"They were very poor financially," said David Broome, pastor of the North Side Gospel Center, which Barker had attended since his family moved to Chicago from Tennessee when he was 12, "but very rich otherwise."

Barker brought so many children to weekly Bible study and AWANA Club meetings at the church that it often took several trips in the car he borrowed from a friend to ship them all there and back.

"Here's a fellow that didn't have a lot of natural abilities at all," said Art Rorheim, president of AWANA Clubs, an international group headquartered in Streamwood. "He wasn't a good speaker. He wasn't sports-minded. He didn't seem to have a lot going for him. But as far as winning the hearts of kids, he was second to none."

Crime had bitten so often at the heels of James Madison Thomas that he posted a sign in his St. Lawrence Avenue apartment that read, "If anybody comes in my apartment and takes any of my possessions, I will see you in hell."

Robbed at least twice in his building, the 91-year-old man had boarded over most of his windows and once wrote a nephew, "I am living in sort of a frightened condition."

Yet, he refused his daughter's attempts to move him into her home. "He felt if you did something for him, he owed you, and he never wanted to owe anybody anything," said his daughter, Bernice Stewart.