Anna "Lucille" Mohrmann Leininger

Lucille was born Anna Lucille Mohrmann on November 12, 1922 to parents Helene and Richard, descendants of German immigrants, in Beach Lake, Pennsylvania. She was never called Anna. “My mother liked the name Lucille, and it sounded better with Anna first. I guess that was the idea,” Lucille once speculated. “I don’t know—I wasn’t there.”

Like the seven brothers who followed her, Lucille was born at home, at the family farm, where she milked cows and rode a horse and wagon, before her family owned a car.

An avid music lover, Lucille played the clarinet, piano, organ, and accordion, a talent cultivated by her mother. “My mother always liked music,” Lucille said, “and she saw to it that we all had some lessons of some kind.” In the early-to-mid 1930s, Lucille traveled to New York with her school band to play on the popular radio program Children’s Hour. Lucille dreamt of one day playing clarinet in Carnegie Hall.

In her nearly one-hundred-year existence, Lucille lived through the Great Depression, the Second World War, the Space Race, and other major historical markers of the twentieth century. She attended both New York World’s Fairs, the first in 1939—where she recalled for decades riding an elephant—and the second in the mid-1960s. Lucille proudly lived to see the election of the first African-American President and the first female Vice President.

In the early 1940s, Lucille was one of millions of American women who joined the labor force for the first time to support the war effort. She worked at the Corn Exchange Bank on the corner of William and Beaver Streets in Manhattan, a clearinghouse for the bank’s seventy-some locations, while her then-fiancé George served in the Army Airforce. They were married on June 10, 1944 before George returned overseas for the final year of the war.

At the end of the war, Lucille and George moved to the Bronx and later to Queens Village, where they both spent the rest of their lives. She and George were married for nearly seventy years, until his passing in 2013. Lucille was also predeceased by her beloved brothers Johnnie and Roger and her sisters-in-law Joan, Katie, and Joyce.

Lucille is survived by her children Karen (and husband Roger), Donna, and Richard (“Rick”) (and wife Darlene); her grandchildren Marcella, George, and Megan (and husband Ryan); her great-grandson Lincoln; and her brothers Richard, Harold, Joseph, Gene, and Douglas.

When asked on her 97th birthday to make a wish before blowing out the candles on her birthday cake, she responded, “I wish there’s chocolate inside.” When asked whether she had a message for her many “fans” sending in their well wishes from around the globe, she responded, “I hope they know me as a good person.”

We all do.