Things I Like - Chicago

This week I'm starting a random (as in not every week) series on Famous Chicagoans. In researching this project, I Googled 'famous Chicagoans' and found a number of interesting entries. Note to NewCityChicago - you need to update your list of famous Chicagoans based on Google responses. Barack Obama has moved up.

Wikipedia had the most comprehensive list with many people listed in categories such as politicians, athletes, musicians and entertainment figures. I stopped when I got to the category
"Writers, thinkers, scientists, and cultural figures". Listed here were:

Jane Addams, awarded Nobel Peace Prize

Dankmar Adler, architect

Nelson Algren, writer

Ray Bradbury, author

Gwendolyn Brooks, poet

Daniel Burnham, architect

Mother Cabrini, saint

Raymond Chandler, writer

Michael Crichton, writer

Clarence Darrow, attorney and civil libertarian

Back up, hold on a second. Did you catch that? Chicago has a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, an architect, a writer, an author, a poet, an architect, a saint....
That's right, Chicago claims not only the first, but one of only 8 American saints.

Mother Cabrini first came to the United States in 1889 at the direction of Pope Leo XIII (she had wanted to go to China as a missionary, he thought she should go to New York and help out the Italian immigrant population. He was the Pope.)

Over the next 9 years she established two orphanages, a school and a hospital ministering to the Italian immigrants in New York City. In 1898 she returned to Europe where she established a student's residence in Paris and a school in Madrid. The woman got around. She eventually made it to Chicago in 1899 where

...she opened the city’s first Italian immigrant school. She also transformed a former hotel into Columbus Hospital in 1905; in 1911, she opened Columbus Extension Hospital (later renamed Saint Cabrini Hospital) in the heart of the city’s Italian neighborhood on the Near West Side. Although both hospitals eventually closed near the end of the 20th century, their foundress’s name lives on via Chicago's Cabrini Street.
~Wikipedia

But she didn't stay in Chicago that entire time. Between 1900 and 1917, she traveled constantly to New York, Pennsylvania, Louisiana, Colorado, California, Washington State, Central and South America and Europe. When it comes down to it, Mother Cabrini spent very little time here in Chicago. She did die here in 1917 - in the hospital that she founded. She's buried back in New York.

I'm not sure she should be considered a famous Chicagoan but since I thought she was until researching her, I'm going to keep her on the list. And seriously, the Wikipedia list included the description 'saint'. I'm still laughing.