The Windy City said a final farewell to its former first last this week.
Maggie Daley, 68, was laid to rest after a public funeral Mass Monday at Old St. Patrick's Church. She died on Thanksgiving after a long battle with cancer.
"If it was unclear whether Maggie Daley was widely appreciated in her adopted city, the question was answered by crowds that queued in lines stretching more than a block around the light stone walls of the former Chicago Public Library. Contemporaries and old friends turned out in well-worn Sunday fashions and mingled with mourners in Bears gear," the Chicago Tribune reported.
Her husband, former mayor Richard M. Daley, stood before a casket "topped by great orbs of green and white hydrangeas," the Tribune report said.
And it added: Standing through public memorial ceremonies comes with being a Daley. An estimated 100,000 people passed the casket that held his father, Richard J. Daley, the longtime mayor and Democratic titan who died in 1976. The death of Richard M. Daley's mother, Eleanor "Sis" Daley, in 2003 again drew crowds to the family's ancestral turf in Chicago's Bridgeport neighborhood."
