age 97. She was surrounded by her children and other close family members, who kept an around-the-clock vigil during her final days and hours.
She was surrounded, too, by lots of family pictures, travel albums and mementos of a life steadfastly lived, including a prized photo from her visit with Pope John Paul II, and a vintage Last Supper
paint-by-number meticulously done for her decades earlier by her late husband Bill.
Irene’s nearly 100-year-long journey took her from Duryea, Pennsylvania to South Florida’s ocean side – and, along the way, a dairy farm in Hop Bottom, Pennsylvania; a war-time job in a
Baltimore munitions factory; a residence at the nation’s White Sands missile test range; an iconic midcentury modern home in the shadow of Florida’s moon-launch complex; and treasured trips
with husband Bill to see some of the world’s and America's wonders.
Irene Strucko Woerner was the fifth of nine children of George Strucko and Helen Tuminski, who were children of immigrants from the Galicia region, Austria-Poland and Russia, respectively. Irene was born April 11, 1925, in the coal-and-stone mining town of Duryea. She was raised in a large family on the
small dairy farm in nearby Hop Bottom, during the height of the Great Depression. Her father sold the farm when milk prices plummeted and the family moved to Ashley, Pennsylvania.
As she always had a sweet voice, and for entertainment in those impoverished days, she would sing songs around the piano with her mother and sisters. She remained especially fond of big-band
music and entertainers from the 1940s. Like many teens of the era, she endured the disruption of normal
life against the backdrop of World War II. In fact, she left high school to work at a munitions factory in Baltimore, then later worked at Martin Company where she was a standout, with her sister, Theresa, on the company women’s basketball team.
Within a year of the war’s end - on Saturday, July 19, 1947, in the rectory of The Basilica of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary on North Charles St. in Baltimore - Irene married Navy veteran
George William “Bill” Woerner, the sailor she’d met at a dance. Their wedding dinner was in the Baltimore Highlands neighborhood and, according to a relative’s diary entry, cost $45.00. The couple honeymooned in the tourist hotspot of Wildwood, New Jersey.
In the 1950s, Irene moved with Bill for electrical engineering work he landed at the country’s White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. Then came a move to Titusville, Florida, when the U.S. Air Force was developing Cape Canaveral for rocket launches.
The Woerners lived there until the end of the Apollo moon program in the early-1970s. Next came life in Tallahassee, Florida, where Irene began her own career with the State of Florida, earning an associate of arts degree, and retiring after 20 years from the Florida Department of Education. She then served
as an office volunteer for St. Thomas Moore Catholic Church.
Meantime, Irene and Bill took numerous cross-country trips; went to Canada; cruised to Alaska and Hawaii, and through the Panama Canal; traveled with tour groups to England, Italy, France, Spain, Egypt and the Holy Land. And they frequently traveled to visit their children and grandchildren, nieces and
nephews, and brothers and sisters, often driving from Florida to Washington state, or California, or Texas, or Maryland or Washington, D.C., sometimes taking in one of the national parks.
After her husband's death in 2009, Irene moved from Florida’s capital city to South Florida and eventually to an assisted-living facility in Jensen Beach, which is where she died - a little more than month after her 97th birthday party.
She is survived by her brother and his spouse, George Strucko and Nina, a sister, Lucy Fickes; and four children, son Charles Woerner and his spouse Kirsten, son Richard Woerner and his spouse Lou Ann, daughter Joanne and her spouse Daniel McLaughlin, and son James Woerner (whose spouse Renae died in 2018); and also 10 grandchildren and seven greatgrandchildren.
Plans for celebrating her life include a funeral mass at St. Martin de Porres Catholic Church in Jensen Beach, and interment at a Veterans National Cemetery, with a date yet to be announced.
Funeral Mass will be held at St Martin de Porres Catholic Church 2555 NE Savannah Road, Jensen Beach, FL 34957 at 10:00am on August 5, 2022.
COMPARTA UN OBITUARIO
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