Lamplighter and Lover Boy

"Nice work, if you can get it", one man said to me. "Regular work, a city job, everybody needs you ", said another. John J. Jr. always seemed to have the simpler jobs ......can maker, clerk, driver; then came the ultimate "do-a-little, feel important" job, that of a lamplighter. Yes, you light the gas lamps in the evening, and put them out in the morning; but what an enterprising young man couldn't get done in the wee hours of the night. John J. Jr., Agnes'

middle child, dinked around with his Dad a good bit, took up some little jobs, but left the career track to his ambitious younger brother. After all, there was love to be made,

and John was especially good at it. He married Annie A. Donnelly in 1894, and produced two daughters with her, Marie and Carrie, in two years. A third child was born that only lasted a few hours, and Annie herself passed away a short time later. Not to be discouraged, John Jr. left the raising of Marie and Carrie to the women-folk, namely The Irish Matriarch and his barren sister, Annie Jane. Wedding bells rang again for him in 1901 and, doing what he did best, he and the former Catherine Pauline Krause produced eight more children in fourteen years, good Catholics that they were.

A few years back, I met one their grandchildren who had been to their very modest Mathews Street home, and he remembered them as "one of the poorest families I ever met". Of John Jr.'s eleven children, two infants would die, and two teens lost their lives unexpectedly, but seven led full lives. I'm thinking that the lamplighter and the Mrs. had their fun along the way.......just look at their contentment in the picture from the end of his life. He died in 1937, a rich man in the ways that count, and is buried in Parkwood Cemetery.