Marie Prunty Mitchell Morgenson

Service Details

Visitation: Saturday, December 10, 2016 at Draeger-Langendorf Funeral Home from 9:30 – 10:30 am

Service: Saturday, December 10, 2016 at 11:15 am in Sunset Ridge Memorial Park Chapel

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Somers – Marie Prunty Mitchell Morgenson, 104 years old when she departed in her sleep on December 2, 2016, was born into a ranching family in the mountainous high country of northeastern Nevada. Orphaned at twenty-three, during the Depression and shortly after marrying William C. Mitchell in Chicago, Marie and her brother Bob, later with a younger sister Leta, raised their remaining nine brothers and sisters. She and Bill Mitchell brought her siblings into their full house in Berwyn, IL, along with their own five children, later living in Riverside, LaGrange and Western Springs. Many of her siblings always called her Mother. When her last child began school, she went back and finished her college degree, attending some classes with high school daughters. William C. Mitchell, then Vice-President of Libby, McNeil and Libby, died when she was in her forties and she married a family friend, Tom Morgenson, CEO of the Sturtevant Bank, outside Racine, WI. She served as President of the Racine Women’s Club, and then, widowed a second time, she opened her own Century 21 real estate brokerage in Racine WI, where she taught real estate law and mined her classes for salespeople. When she celebrated her 100-year birthday she said, “If I’d known I’d live this long, I never would have retired.” Asked what she had hoped to teach her own children, she said, “How to work.” She often traveled internationally and adventurously with her sister Pauline and husband, General John Phipps of Mattoon, Illinois. In her nineties, she took a planned trip to Machu Pichu right after the Sept 11 attack, saying she refused to live in fear. There, on top of the world, the oldest in the group by far, she set herself to keep pace up the mountain with the guide. Raised in the mountains, she clipped along, leaving behind the puffing younger tour group, unaccustomed to altitude. She insisted on walking three miles daily and remained alert for 104 years, telling any listener the story of her life. Her odyssey is celebrated by her children, Minnie Marie Mitchell Hayes of Chicago; Zulieka Pauline Mitchell Burke of San Diego; Bill (Elaine) Mitchell of Arlington Heights IL; Esther Mitchell Taylor of San Diego; Richard (Susan) Mitchell in Upper Montclair, NJ; and by their eleven children and her eighteen great-grandchildren, two about to be married. Such a blessing.

Visitation will be in the Draeger-Langendorf Funeral Home on Saturday, December 10, 2016 from 9:30 – 10:30 am. A procession to Sunset Ridge Memorial Park will begin at 10:45 am. A service will follow in the chapel of the cemetery with Rev. Kathleen Gloff officiating.