Save the date, Chicago!
Sister Jean is heading to center court again.
Only this time, the 104-year-old basketball icon from Loyola University Chicago is being inducted into the Chicagoland Sports Hall of Fame on Oct. 4th at Chicago’s Wintrust arena to honor her incredible sports ministry. She will share the stage with Gov. J.B. Pritzker, who is being honored for his lifetime contribution to sports.
So, it seemed an appropriate time to chat up the good sister!
“I was 13 when I fell in love with basketball,” said Sister Jean in a phone interview with Sneed last Thursday.
The Catholic nun recalled a childhood in San Francisco, decades before her spiritual, cum mystical motherly presence on Loyola’s basketball court.
“I was little and short and never got to be a forward when we played basketball back then,” said Sister Jean Dolores Bertha Schmidt. “I was never a forward; only a forward got to make baskets,” she said. “It was such a slow game for girls back then.”
Gov. J.B. Pritzker (right) smiles at Sister Jean Dolores Schmidt after giving remarks during Sister Jean’s 103rd birthday celebration in 2022.
Tyler Pasciak LaRiviere/Sun-Times file
She decided she would become a nun in third grade. Her childhood was devoted to family. But that family also included a baby monkey named “Jerry” they fed coffee and toast each morning and a pet alligator who loved raw beef.
When she was a young nun and Catholic school teacher in the early 1940s, Sister Jean said city elementary schools lacked “real estate for sports.” She recalled “an era when marbles and jump rope met a child’s school’s exercise needs.”
In 1946, while a Catholic school teacher in North Hollywood, California, Sister Jean suggested the grammar school needed sports “for both the boys and the girls to keep busy, something other than ping-pong and yo-yo.”
“Our principal suggested I talk to the pastor. The pastor stated ‘It’s OK, if you take care of it,’” she recalled. “So, I did and joined up with the CYO [Catholic Youth Organization] and got into a conference where both the boys and girls played basketball.”
Sister Jean Dolores Schmidt waves to Loyola students, faculty, alumni and reporters, during her 103rd birthday celebration in 2022.
Tyler Pasciak LaRiviere/Sun-Timess file
Eventually, Sister Jean pivoted from a classroom to the chaplaincy on Loyola’s basketball court, praying with the team before each game, asking for God’s help and requesting no one be injured on either team. They also pray the team members do all the work necessary to keep their grade point averages up.
Does she have a first memory in her century-plus life? Something she thinks of during the quiet time she spends looking at Lake Michigan from the window of her room?
“My first memory as a child is of my mother during her own mother’s funeral … and my brother, who had whooping cough,” Sister Jean recalled. “Despite fear of contagion, Mother refused to leave his side and put him in a chair next to her during the funeral.
“Well, he didn’t cough once. And he didn’t later. And my mother felt my grandmother had something to do with this because she firmly believed God never leaves our side … ever,” added Sister Jean. “We are never alone.
“And we all need each other. Every one of us … all of us brothers and sisters. And if we want peace, we have to talk to each other and take care of each other. Especially now.”
Sister Jean Dolores Schmidt sits for a portrait in The Joseph J. Gentile Arena in January.
Jessie Wardarski/AP file
It sounds like the prayer of a winning team.
And one last serendipitous note from a journalist who will be 80 years old in a few months: Sister Jean is the same age my mother would have been if my mother was still alive.
Knot News…
Attorney Dan Kirk, who was Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez’s second-in-command for eight years, tells Sneed he is NO longer eyeing a bid to replace outgoing State’s Attorney Kim “Get me out of this Foxhole” Foxx.
“I’m taking a break from politics,” Kirk said. “I’m getting married instead.”
Brian Wolff (left) and Dan Kirk.
Provided.
Thus, instead of tossing his hat in the ring, Kirk, 52, is putting a ring on the finger of his longtime beau, landscape whiz Brian Wolff, 44.
“We are finally sealing the deal,” chirped Kirk, whose nuptials are taking place next Saturday at the Ritz Carlton hotel in front of 300 guests.
Kirk also claims to be setting a record.
“I believe our wedding will be the first in Chicago history conducted by five officiants [judges] from the Circuit Court of Cook County,” said Kirk, emphasizing “the judges are all women!” They are Circuit Court Judges Angela Petrone, Peggy Chiampas and Elizabeth Budzinski and retired judges Kay Hanlon and Clare McWilliams.
P.S. Alvarez, Kirk’s former boss, “is also a member of the wedding party.”
Over and out, Dan.
Sneedlings …
Putt Putt! State Rep. Sara Feigenholtz’s new modus operandi for zooming around neighborhood events and chatting up her 6th District constituency is called “Lola” the Scooter, which she claims is a check off her bucket list … Saturday birthdays: Nick Jonas, 31; actor Mickey Rourke, 71; actor Ed Begley Jr., 74; David Copperfield, 67 … Sunday birthdays: Baz Luhrmann, 61; Patrick Mahomes, 28; actor Kyle Chandler, 58.
