Shirley J. O'Connor

Shirley J. O’Connor, 93, passed away Tuesday, May 23, 2023, at Liberty Village Retirement Community in Freeport.

Funeral Mass will be 10:30 A.M. Saturday May 27, 2023 at St. Thomas Aquinas Church with Father Daniel P. O’Connor officiating. A visitation will be held from 9:30 A.M. until the time of service at church. There will also be a visitation from 4:00-8:00 P.M. Friday May 26, 2023 at Burke-Tubbs Funeral Home. A rosary service will start at 3:30 P.M. Burial will be in Calvary Cemetery in Freeport.

She was born Nov. 25, 1929, in St. Louis to John M. and Viola L. (Fink) Bergmann. A member of the Silent Generation who stoically and courageously faced down the Great Depression and the global treachery of fascism, she attended Cleveland High School and Harris-Stowe Community College before receiving a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Missouri at Columbia in 1951.

She married John P. “Jack” O’Connor on Jan. 2, 1954, at St. Joseph Catholic Church in Freeport and they had five children.

As a girl, Shirley was a fan of the crusading comic-strip journalist “Brenda Starr” and she was always a wordsmith (she once opened a Christmas present to find a dictionary and spent the rest of the morning looking up words, forgetting about other gifts). It was natural, then, that she determined early on that she wanted to be a news reporter.

But Shirley did what few young single women, especially big-city natives, did in the middle of the last century: She left home alone, boarded a Greyhound bus and traveled seven hours north to Freeport, where she took a job as society editor for the Freeport Journal-Standard, spending a total of more than 10 years at the paper in the 1950s and later, in the 1970s, as editor of the popular “Weekender” tabloid insert, where she earned multiple reporting and writing awards from the Illinois Women’s Press Association.

She later spent more than 30 years at Freeport Memorial Hospital and FHN, mostly in community relations, where she earned the nickname “Hawkeye” for her sharp grammar patrol.

Shirley was a member of the Illinois Association of Business Communicators and had been a member of the Freeport Jaycettes and the Germania Club.

She was active with her husband at St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic Church in Freeport. They enjoyed watching their children participate in sports, choir, band and theater performances; hosting and attending church “round-robin” dinner parties; joining friends to play bridge and other card games; and traveling to see their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. She was particularly excited by the twice-a-year journeys to visit their son, a Catholic priest, and his parish communities in Louisiana, and used the travel time to devour her much-loved true-crime books and the latest literary fiction.

Aside from seeing family, Shirley perhaps had no greater joy than that which she found with Jack and their “potluck group,” a cadre whose friendships were established by Shirley when she moved to town or together with Jack and the bonds of which grew stronger over six decades and more together.

Shirley is survived by her husband, children Susan (Kevin) Meegan of Palos Heights; the Rev. Dan O’Connor of Marksville, Louisiana; Theresa O’Connor of Madison, Wisconsin; and John O’Connor of Springfield; grandson Timothy (Janet) Meegan of Mankato, Minnesota, and their sons Liam and Seamus; and grandson James (Sarah) Meegan of Morton Grove and their daughters Brigid and Riley; and many nieces and nephews.

She was preceded in death by a son, Timothy John, her parents and two sisters, Annamarie Bergmann and Mildred “Mimi” Kiefer; her brother-in-law Kenneth Kiefer; two nieces and a nephew.

In lieu of flowers, the family asks that memorials be made for mass to be said or to St. Joseph Catholic Church, 141 S. Washington St., Marksville, Louisiana, 71351.