City Councilmember Elizabeth Crowley, one of 15 children, says she loves when her large Irish family gets together for holidays.
“All of my life has been in a large family, so [I] never knew anything different,” she said offhandedly. “It was organized and at the same time chaotic – never a dull moment,” she recalled.
Crowley, the 14th of the 12 girls and three boys, did point out that with their birth dates never more than two years apart, some siblings were going off to college while she was still a tyke.
“But even with the older girls away, until I was 15, there were still at least 10 of us at the dinner table.”
“Mary, the oldest, got married when I was six,” Crowley recalled, rattling off the names of the others: Maureen, Bernadette, Kathleen, Theresa, Margaret, Walter Jr., Patricia, Regina, Claire, Rosaleen, Edward and Francis, followed at last by her younger sister, Alice, born in 1979.
The kitchen was the center of the universe in the Crowley house, “not just for meals, but to meet, joke and listen to mom talk non-stop,” she said.
Holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas brought everyone back together at the family table, with a kiddy table becoming a necessity along the way. “My mother now has 45 grandchildren,” Crowley said, momentarily unsure of the count.
“After dad passed away, mom bought a backyard swimming pool,” she explained. “He was always against it on account of the liability,” Crowley surmised. “It sure brought the grandkids in the summer,” she remembered. “It brought us all.”
“Family is what keeps me going and I’m very grateful for having them,” she said. “My best friends are my siblings,” Crowley declared.
“There’s something about the ties of family – there’s never a point when I’m alone.”
