‘Meet
your mother’
By Christie L. Chicoine
CS&T Staff Writer
PHILADELPHIA — “Our dinner table was like the president’s
cabinet.”
That is just one of many happy memories Marie Quinn Hunt has of raising
15 children.
“That was one place we found out what they did for the day,”
she said with a laugh, referring to her children’s good —
or mischievous — behavior at St. John the Baptist School in the
Manayunk section of the city.
“They weren’t saints, but they knew they had to obey,”
she said.
Quinn Hunt, 89, a member of St. John the Baptist Parish, also has 47 grandchildren
and 52 great-grandchildren.
Her children include: the late Patricia Stolzer, who died at age 42, leaving
nine children — some of whom Quinn Hunt helped raise; the late Father
Edward L. Quinn, who served as assistant director of the archdiocesan
Family Life Bureau before his death from multiple sclerosis at age 46;
Joellen Stockmal, 64; Michelle Boyle, 63; Sister Edward Quinn, I.H.M.,
61, director of elementary curriculum and instruction for the archdiocesan
Office of Catholic Education; Leona Whalen, 60; Dennis Quinn, 59; Michael
Quinn, 58; Virginia Goble, 56; Timothy Quinn, 55; Mary DiMauro, 53; Pamela
Quinn, 51; Daniel Quinn, 50; Christopher Quinn, 48, and the late Martin
John Quinn, who died with a malignant brain tumor at age 27.
“They’re all wonderful children,” Quinn Hunt said. “They’ve
all turned out so nicely. They’re very close. If one has a bit of
trouble, the other ones are there to help out. They’re a lot of
fun.”
At the same time, their mother added, “they all have minds of their
own.”
One might say Quinn Hunt raised the family she never had as a child.
She was born June 8, 1918, in Philadelphia. Her parents, John and Ellen
McGowan, died when she was a young girl — her mother from influenza,
her father from pneumonia. She had a younger biological sister who died
as a baby, and an older biological sister who died in 1945. She also had
a stepsister.
After her parents’ deaths, Quinn Hunt was raised by a grandmother.
After her grandmother died, Quinn Hunt went to live with her maternal
aunt.
“My aunt and uncle were very good to me,” she said. “It’s
been a good life. I can’t complain.”
She graduated from St. Joan of Arc School in 1932 and from John W. Hallahan
Catholic Girls’ High School in 1936, and married Edward Quinn on
June 22, 1940 at Our Lady of the Holy Souls Church in Philadelphia. He
died in 1988 at age 72.
Her children, she said, “had a wonderful father.” At the dinner
table, Edward Quinn liked to engage the children in discussions about
history and geography. If they couldn’t follow the conversation,
he’d ask them to bring the encyclopedia to the table for a family
review.
On a cruise several years after Edward died, she met Donald Hunt, a widower
from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, who had no children.
After a long-distance courtship for several years, they married. He was
87 and she was 78.
“He was a wonderful man,” she said. “Any man who would
marry a woman with 15 children. …”
She relocated to Cedar Rapids. They celebrated nine years of marriage
before Hunt’s death at 96.
Quinn Hunt returned to her home in Manayunk, where she lives today with
her son Christopher, daughter-in-law Mary Beth and their three children.
She said she relied on her Catholic faith in raising her children. Most
of the work she did outside her home was volunteer work for the Catholic
Church. For many years, she was a teacher’s aide at St. John the
Baptist School, and she also helped organize and chaperone CYO events
for St. John the Baptist Parish.
One summer, while Quinn Hunt was chaperoning a CYO trip to a private swimming
pool in Philadelphia, a boy from outside the parish tried to get on the
parish bus by claiming to be a member of the Quinn family, which lived
in “that big house on Roxborough Avenue.”
Without missing a beat, Quinn Hunt said to him: “‘Oh! How
do you do? Meet your mother.’”
CS&T Staff Writer Christie L. Chicoine can be reached at (215) 587-2468
or cchicoin@adphila.org.