Alice McAvoy dead: Chicago mother of six never let anyone leave her house hungry

No one left Alice McAvoy’s house hungry.

“If you walked though the door, you got a plate of food and stayed for dessert. No one left hungry, whether you wanted to eat or not,” her son Tim McAvoy said with a laugh. 

“She baked two things every single day: brownies and cookies, or two different types of brownies, for desserts in school lunches and to eat at home,” said her namesake daughter, Alice McAvoy.

Mrs. McAvoy was also known for adding a delightfully oversized scoop of ice cream to dessert plates.

A homemaker, she cut out her coupons faithfully on Thursdays, laid out the week’s menu with six kids and her husband in mind, and walked one mile to Jewel, where she confidently navigated the familiar aisles, filled two carts, tallying prices as she went, and paid with cash.

Mrs. McAvoy knew the folks at her Jewel because, like she did with everyone she encountered, she asked about their day, their kids, their lives. So when Mrs. McAvoy, who didn’t drive, told them she’d need a ride home or she wouldn’t be able to shop there anymore, they loaded her goods into an employee’s car and gave her a lift, family said.

Everyone on the block knew they were welcome to stop in anytime.

Mrs. McAvoy died Dec. 20 from natural causes. She was 88.

For some kids, the McAvoy house, near Waveland and Cicero avenues in Chicago, provided the structure and consistency they lacked at their own homes. It was fun, too — she invited children to help her bake. 

“She was welcoming and treated them like her own,” Mrs. McAvoy’s daughter Bridget White said. “We all went to the same school together at St. Bartholomew.”

If her kids — three boys and three girls — got a little noisy playing in the gangway, Mrs. McAvoy might grab the water sprayer from the kitchen sink and give them a shower through the window.

If one of her kids was goofing off while attending mass, she’d move the youngster next to her and wait until the child put a hand on the pew “and she’d ever so slightly put her hand over your hand, or a finger, and mush it into the pew and look at you like ‘knock it off,’” Alice McAvoy said.

On her kids’ birthdays, Mrs. McAvoy cooked anything they wanted for dinner, like homemade onion rings, steamed crab legs or steak.

“My birthday was the seventh of December and my sister Alice’s was the eighth, and she never made us combine,” Bridget White said. 

“She’d take us once a year on the Addison bus to Lake Shore Drive and transfer to go to Water Tower Place to go shopping,” Alice said.

Another annual visit was made to the Lincoln Park Zoo, where the family would sit by the seals and eat a packed lunch that was washed down with cans of soda wrapped in tin foil to keep them cold.  

A huge baseball fan, Mrs. McAvoy watched every Cubs game on TV and kept score when she attended games at Wrigley Field. She delighted in their 2016 World Series win but later vowed never to watch another game when the team parted ways with several of the players she adored, especially Anthony Rizzo.

Alice Ruth Poppelreiter met her future husband, Jim McAvoy, at a dance at St. Andrew Catholic Church, 3546 N. Paulina. He was a senior at Foreman High School when they locked eyes. They were wed in 1955.

When her husband retired from his 64-year job as a union plumber decades later, the couple drove across the country in a conversion van.

If Mrs. McAvoy saw a news article in the three papers she read every day that might be especially good for a friend to read, she’d cut it out and keep it for them in her purse.

“She always used to say, ‘Patience is a virtue. Step back and take a breath. You can’t react all the time. You need patience with each other and things that happen in life.’ I don’t know how my mom stayed so calm,” Bridget White said.

Mrs. McAvoy went to the now-closed Notre Dame High School for girls and was training to be a nurse but decided against the career after seeing a child who’d been hit by a train come into the hospital where she was training, family said.

Mrs. McAvoy was born on Dec. 31, 1934. Her mother, Ruth Poppelreiter, died during childbirth.

Her maternal grandparents took care of her for five years until her father, Chris Poppelreiter, who had a white-collar job for a utility company, got remarried to Betty O’Malley and brought his daughter home, family said.

Mrs. McAvoy once contemplated becoming a nun, but she told the Sun-Times in 2017 for an obituary published on her husband: “We really liked being with one another, so it just turned into a love connection.”

Mrs. McAvoy, in addition to Bridget White, Alice McAvoy and Tim McAvoy, is survived by sons Patrick McAvoy and James McAvoy, and daughter Mary Schultz, as well as 14 grandchildren and 13 great-grandchildren.

A visitation is planned for Thursday from 3 to 9 p.m at Willow Funeral Home, 1415 W. Algonquin Rd., Algonquin. A funeral mass is planned for Friday at 10:30 a.m. at Saints Peter and Paul Catholic Church, 410 N. 1st St., Cary.