In 1962, a 65-year-old widow arrived by train in Montana to meet a man that she had never met, but hoped to marry. She had never lived outside of Chicago. The trip was a shock to everyone who knew her. But her faith propelled her to find a new life of happiness.
Her adventure began through a letter-writing club in Extension magazine. Catholic Extension Society has been publishing Extension since 1906 to reveal the great, diverse and changing missionary needs of the Catholic Church in the United States. It has made a powerful impact in countless households across multiple generations.
For example, 6,000 women passionately sewed vestments for priests in the U.S. missions through the Order of Martha that was started by Catholic Extension Society in 1911. One of those women was the mother of the late Cardinal Francis George of Chicago.
Likewise, more than 700 baby boomers remember how Catholic Extension Society recruited them as young adults in the 1960s to spend two life-changing years serving the poor in the U.S. They were called the Extension Lay Volunteers.
But one family’s history with Catholic Extension Society is even more special.
Lolita Hagio is a supporter of Catholic Extension Society. The life of her late mother, Irene, was transformed by a program in Extension magazine called the “Chaperon Club,” which was advertised in the magazine as a “way of making Catholic friends all over the United States and abroad.”
It began in 1927 after readers had requested for years that the publication devise a way to connect them with other Catholics from around the country. Unmarried Catholics over the age of 17 were eligible to join. Interested readers mailed in brief descriptions of themselves and their hobbies. They were assigned an anonymous “club number,” their information was printed in a bulletin, and they could then start a letter-writing relationship with another member.
The program is advertised below in the pages of a 1961 issue of the magazine:
By 1950, more than 40,000 people had joined since the program’s inception. A magazine issue from that year stated, “While we shout from the housetops that we are not a matrimonial bureau, nor do we encourage such a thing, we cannot stop certain acquaintances from ripening into deep friendships, and some into love, and we must admit that hundreds of marriages have resulted.”
It can only be concluded that, for decades, Extension magazine offered the pre-technology version of online dating for Catholics.
It was through this initiative that Lolita’s widowed mother, Irene, found love in 1962 at the age of 65.
Late-in-life love
Irene’s husband had passed away in 1950 after 31 years of marriage. He worked for the Rock Island Railroad in Chicago, where he and Irene raised seven children, including a son who served in World War II. Ten years after her husband’s death, they had all moved away, and Irene found herself living alone.
Lolita recalled visiting her mother one day.
“What would you think if I got married again?” Irene asked.
“Mom, that would be great, but you don’t know anybody,” Lolita replied.
She was surprised and thought her mother couldn’t be serious. Her mother was an intensely shy person and not a risk taker, she said.
Irene told her daughter about the gentleman she had been writing letters back and forth with for several months through the Chaperon Club program in Extension magazine. His name was Albert, a widower himself, and he lived in Montana.
“My mom felt it was OK to correspond with this person. She sensed that it that was a good thing that it was in a Catholic magazine,” Lolita said.
She felt that someone—of course, Himself—was guiding her up there.”
To the shock of her friends and family, Irene cleared out her home, bought a train ticket, and traveled by herself to Montana. When she saw Albert waiting for her at the train station, “she knew she had made the right decision,” Lolita recalled.
They married shortly after Irene arrived. The wedding took place at St. Joseph’s Church, a parish supported by Catholic Extension Society in Choteau, Montana.
In the wedding day photo below, Albert embraces Irene next to his daughter and granddaughter outside the church.
Lolita reflected that Albert was different than her father. He was an outdoorsman, with Chippewa and French-Canadian heritage. He had been a cowboy in his youth. Irene embraced his lifestyle, learning to fish and trap. They shared a strong faith and adventurous spirit.
“He was such a good man. Our family just adored him and accepted him,” Lolita said.
After several years in Montana, they moved to Arizona for the warmer weather. Albert passed away from cancer in 1972 in the care of Irene’s family in Chicago.
Irene lived another 10 years before dying at the age of 85.
Passing on the joy
Lolita feels that Catholic Extension Society is a part of her family’s story by helping her mother, pictured below with Albert, rediscover love and happiness in life.
“Extension magazine made all this happen. It provided a whole new life for her,” she said. “Mom was a woman of faith, and that drove her to make the decisions in her life.”
Lolita’s connection to Catholic Extension Society is still more personal. In 1950 we helped build her own parish, St. George, in a Utah town that shares the same name. Today the parish is a vibrant, multicultural faith community where she serves as a cantor.
She said she is “fascinated” by the work of the Catholic Church in the United States among the poor in the poorest regions.
She knows that Catholic Extension Society’s impact is not unique to her family. It impacts people, like the family served by nuns in rural Arkansas, pictured below, all across the country by building up vibrant Catholic faith communities.
“It makes sense to me to support a mission like that,” she said.
Lolita has joined our Legacy Club, a special group of Catholic Extension Society supporters who have named us as a beneficiary in their estate.
Through this commitment, she is helping other families experience the joy of faith, so they too will know what her mother understood: that love and life is precious at any age, and God is present through it all.
This story will appear in the Spring 2024 edition of Extension magazine.
Catholic Extension Society works in solidarity with people to build up vibrant and transformative Catholic faith communities among the poor in the poorest regions of America. Please support our mission today!
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