(1934-2023)

Marlene Ann Kuhnlein entered the world at just six and a half months’ gestation on March 2, 1934, and spent the first three weeks of her life in an incubator at Lewis Memorial Maternity Hospital in Chicago. She was the only child of Anthony and Irene (Lowen) Kuhnlein, who lived in the Jackson Park area of Chicago’s South Side.
 
Tony and Irene officially met at a dance in Chicago, although they may have crossed paths earlier since there was a very distant family relationship. Tony worked as a streetcar conductor and, in his younger days, played baseball for the Chicago White Sox, while before their marriage, Irene was a telephone operator. 
 
When Tony was a youngster, he was hit in the head with a baseball, and as an adult, a streetcar accident gave him another head injury. This led to seizures, which ultimately proved fatal; he died in 1937 at the age of thirty-three, when Marlene was just three years old.
 
“Naturally, I have regretted never really knowing my father,” Sister Marlene wrote in her autobiography. “I have always believed that my vocation was a gift that God bestowed on me due to my father’s prayers for me before His throne.”

Read more about Sister Marlene (PDF).

Memorial gifts may be made to Adrian Dominican Sisters, 1257 East Siena Heights Drive, Adrian, Michigan, 49221. 

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