Betsy Waffle vividly remembers the chain-link fence at Angel Guardian Orphanage, the Rogers Park institution where she spent her childhood from the age of 12 on. Six feet tall and covered with high bushes, it divided the playground, separating the boys from the girls. “My brother Tom lived on the other side,” she says. “After dinner, when everyone would go out to play, I’d go to the top of the slide to look for him.”
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In its heyday Angel Guardian housed as many as 900 children in communal cottages on a 40-acre campus near Devon and Ridge (the site belongs to Misericordia today). It closed in 1974 after a 109-year run. But some of the orphans have made an effort to stay in touch, and last month nearly 50 of them got together for lunch in the party room of a Best Western in Elk Grove Village. Waffle, now 53, was there, wearing a name tag with “42-9” written in Magic Marker in the upper left corner. Others wore similar combinations of numbers, the first designating what cottage they lived in, the second their case number. “The nuns, they’d only call you by your number, never your name,” Waffle said. “It was on all my clothes, in my underwear.”
“Baby House! Baby House!” a trim man in glasses shouted across the room, his voice cracking with emotion. “Do you remember me?”
At a nearby table, Maria Bailey, a realtor from San Diego, was introducing herself by the name most people knew: Mary Jo Piludu. The oldest of ten children, she was placed at Angel Guardian in 1960 after her father, a merchant marine, was deported for having an expired green card. Her mother was subsequently institutionalized after suffering a nervous breakdown. Maria was in seventh grade at the time. Six of her brothers and sisters joined her at Angel Guardian; the other three, who were younger, landed in foster homes.
“It was a harrowing experience, growing up at Angel Guardian,” he continued. “But it gets to be almost family. It’s more than just this is the guy I went to school with. This is somebody I went to school with, ate with, went to church with. Slept in the same dormitory. Angel Guardian was home, believe me.”
