Louisa Ruth McPharlin

Our wonderful mother and grandmother, Louisa Michael McPharlin, passed away on February 27, 2025. A native Chicagoan, she began working at WTTW, the PBS television station, when she was 15 and still at Hyde Park High School. There, she met our dad, Jim McPharlin, a quiet, witty interloper from Michigan, who hung out at Jimmy's Woodlawn Tap while a student at the University of Chicago often enough to be offered a job at the local tv station and quit his graduate studies in English literature for a career as a producer and director. After a couple years at Northwestern University, mom decided that television was where she wanted to be. She was the original Girl Friday, working in production, set design, even acting on screen from time to time, with characters as varied as Studs Terkel, Frank Lloyd Wright, the Everly Brothers, and a Mark Twain impersonator. In the 1960s she almost lost her job for wearing trousers to work. Jim and Louisa were married in 1965 and were the ultimate bohemian couple, holding parties in their apartments in Old Town and later Lincoln Park with their menagerie of dogs and cats. People would pop by and stir their cocktails with the tail of a friendly cat walking by on guest's shoulders. Their favourite retreat was Beverly Shores, Indiana, along the southern shores of Lake Michigan, where they enjoyed a little cottage in the woods, a wedding present from our grandparents and where we spent many cosy weekends and summers together, taking walks and coming home to sit in front of the large fireplace, berry picking, days on the beach, Uno games on the porch, and adding a family of mice and a baby rabbit to our collection of family pets. With Molly and Michael arriving in 1970 and 1973, Louisa became an enthusiastic stay at home mom, always there to make us cookies, homemade pizza, plan elaborate birthday parties and take us to the movies, sometimes deciding a film was so good we had to sit though it twice. She was PTA president at Oscar Mayer School and involved in theatre productions at Francis Parker. After Molly and Michael left for college, she went back to work and successfully bought and sold iconic homes and historic real estate throughout the city for over 25 years, making friends wherever she went. From her first trip abroad with her close friend Aida Berenson, when they rode around London one evening on the back of a couple of mopeds with two local lads, Louisa was an adventurer, travelling first with our father and later meeting Molly all over the world wherever she happened to be living. There was hitchhiking in Israel, exploring England and Scotland and later travelling around the Nordic countries, often bringing her 90+ year old mother with her to make sure she still had new adventures as well. Once her four grandchildren arrived - Max, Maggie, Lev, and Will - she dedicated herself to spending time with them, being the ultimate, indulgent grandmother. She took them to musicals, toy stores, bookstores and the library, always carrying a whole suitcase of presents across the ocean when she went to visit Max and Lev overseas and brought it back equally filled for Maggie and Will. Louisa also enjoyed the theatre scene in the city with a large group of friends, holding season tickets to numerous theatres, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Lyric Opera. She knew people all over Chicago and picked up new friends along the way, often inviting them for holidays and dinner parties, so at points you never knew who might be sitting with you at her table. Always positive and friendly, she loved that she had married the ultimate curmudgeon in our dad, and when he passed away far too young in 1997, she knew that he had been and would always be her true love. There is so much more to say - the elegant parties and events she planned, the intricate gardens she tended to in both Chicago and Beverly Shores, her skills as a cook and eye for home design, her love of opera that took her to Santa Fe each summer for the opera festival. My father's career as a well known television director was something she took great pride in, but as an independent, creative person in her own right, she lived a full and joyful life on her own terms. There will never be anyone who can replace her and she will be missed and loved always, beyond measure.