Lucy Jane Bach

1928 - 2016

(News story) MORENCI - Lucy Jane Bach, a former downtown shop owner and Morenci city councilman who was a mother of 12 and was married for 68 years, died Wednesday in her Morenci home.

She was 87 and suffered from dementia for about the last five years, her daughter Cynthia Fisher said.

Mrs. Bach and her husband, Gerald, owned LBJ Whatever General Store on Main Street in Morenci from the 1990s until 2005. They sold toys, craft and decorating supplies, greeting cards, batteries, clocks, and various knickknacks, including some wooden items that Mr. Bach made. Penny candy was big and their most expensive items were seldom priced above $40.

The store had started as a flea market stand but when the couple rented a small building for it they traveled further and more frequently on buying trips and southwestern and Native American items were among their specialties.

The LBJ name stood for Lucy, Bach, and Jerry, which was what her husband went by.

Mrs. Bach, a Democrat, was on Morenci City Council in the late 1980s and early 1990s. She was chairman of council's police committee when an officer was fired and reinstated and told The Blade at the time: "I don't like to see anybody fired unjustly." The termination had sparked the recall of the mayor and two councilmen and the resignation of a third councilman.

As president of the Morenci Hospital Auxiliary, she helped start the Candy Stripers program in the 1960s. Decades later, she was active with the Morenci American Legion Post 368 Auxiliary; her husband is a World War II veteran.

All the while, she was taking care of a big family. She had 12 children in about 18 years - including a set of twins near the middle. She made many of their clothes, canned produce from their garden that often was about an acre, and cooked and baked.

The babies came at a rate of about one every 18 months from 1949 to 1967 and in those short gaps she sometimes took a job. One such position was in the former Fayette Tubular Products Inc. plant in Fulton County.

Later, she worked much longer-term jobs. She taught physical education to girls at Onsted High School in the late 1960s and then was a telephone operator at GTE in Adrian from the 1970s into the 1990s. She was a security guard at the Adrian Mall for a couple of years and then a screener at Toledo Express Airport before devoting her time to the general store.

She was born Sept. 27, 1928, in Battle Creek, Mich., to Grace and James Smyth, a Kellogg Co. plant worker who helped start the labor union there. She graduated from high school in Battle Creek and went to what was then Murray State Teachers College in Kentucky, where she had an aunt. She got a two-year degree in music and education and met Gerald J. Bach, Sr., a music student from the Lorain, Ohio, area.

They married March 3, 1948, when she was 19 and moved to Farina, Ill., where he started teaching music in the local school district. They moved to Morenci in the early 1960s when he got a teaching job there. He retired from teaching music at Tecumseh.

Mrs. Bach, a soprano, sang in choirs at Our Lady of Mercy Church in Fayette, Ohio, and later at St. Caspar Catholic Church in Wauseon. She had grown up Baptist in Battle Creek, where she was also in a choir, and converted to Catholicism when she married.

She was a bowler, a reader of novels and newspapers, a traveler, and a lover of cats and dogs. She attempted to watch every episode of The Young and the Restless soap opera.

Surviving are her husband, Gerald; sons, Gerald, Jr.; Robert; Peter, Sr.; James, and Thomas; daughters, Margaret Hill, Cynthia Fisher, Mary Jane Neal, Theresa Perrault, and Gena Sproul; brother, Burke Smyth; 35 grandchildren, 11 great-grandchildren, and 14 great-great-grandchildren.

Services are at 10:30 a.m. today at St. Caspar. Eagle Funeral Home, Morenci, is handling arrangements.

The family suggests tributes to Great Lakes Caring Hospice, Jackson, Mich.

This is a news story by Jane Schmucker. Contact her at: jschmucker@theblade.com, or 419-724-6050.