Too early an exit...

The trouble with burying someone better than yourself is the feeling that you have so much more to accomplish. By the standards by which Aunt Grace was eulogized, I have a long way to go to be the person I want to be. 1923--2005 Housing, racial equality activist By Andrew L. Wang Tribune staff reporter November 26, 2005 When Grace Mertz's son searches for his mother's name in newspaper clips of protests and strikes in Evanston in the 1960s, he doesn't find much. But anonymity didn't stop her from speaking out against inequity--whether it was housing discrimination or racial prejudice, school segregation or lack of minority voting rights. "Every time it says `local Catholic organization,' that's my mom; every time they describe a march as `mostly Negro,' the `mostly' is because of my mom," said her younger son Thomas, a historian. "When you read between the lines, she was there." Mrs. Mertz, 82, died Wednesday, Nov. 16, in Evanston Hospital from complications of skin cancer. She was born in 1923 to a working-class family in St. Louis. Her father, a steelworker, died when she was 5, "leaving behind a pregnant wife and three daughters," her son said. "They made do and scraped by," he said. With a loan from a relative, he said, Mrs. Mertz graduated from Sacred Heart Academy in Springfield in 1940. But without money for college, she moved to Joliet and began working as a stenographer at a procurement office for the War Department. Later, the man she worked for was transferred to Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, where the Manhattan Project was in progress. Mrs. Mertz followed her boss there. After the war, she returned to St. Louis and found work at an advertising company, where she became one of the few female media buyers for the firm and later handled its radio advertising account for Anheuser-Busch, her son said. About a decade later, she met her husband, Edwin, on a business trip to New York. The couple married in 1957, her son said. They lived in New York and San Francisco before settling in Evanston in 1962, when they bought the home they lived in the next 40 years. In Evanston, Mrs. Mertz, driven by her Catholic ethos and informed by the poverty she had experienced, became an activist. As president of the Christian Family Movement at St. Athanasius Roman Catholic Church in Evanston, Mrs. Mertz wrote letters, circulated petitions and organized protests decrying housing discrimination against African-Americans, her son said. In March 1965, as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights advocates walked from Selma, Ala., to Montgomery for voting rights, Mrs. Mertz and her friends chartered a bus and drove with about 40 other activists to join the march. In the early 1970s, her son said, Mrs. Mertz spearheaded an effort to build mixed-income housing on the site of Marywood High School, an all-girls Catholic school that closed in 1970. Mrs. Mertz found investors who agreed to buy the 9.5-acre plot, but the plan failed before the sale was completed because the City Council blocked the rezoning. Still, her son said, it was not a total loss. "She had raised enough public interest to the point where there was no way it could be used for market-rate housing," her son said. Instead, the city bought the land; the building is now used as the Evanston Civic Center. In the 1970s and '80s, she also served on the board of Evanston Neighbors at Work, a group that helps seniors find low-cost housing, and as director of Evanston Meals at Home, a meal-delivery service, her son said. In addition to her husband Edwin and son Thomas, Mrs. Mertz is survived by her older son Michael; sisters Marie Neu Liendecker and Mickey Quinlan; brother William McMullan; and three grandsons. Services have been held. ---------- [email protected] Copyright (c) 2005, Chicago Tribune