Obituary of Anne T. O'Toole

Anne Teresa (Pedrick) O'Toole of Horsham, Pa., passed away suddenly and peacefully on Thursday, Oct. 13, 2016, at Abington Memorial Hospital. She was 88 years old. If life comes down to a little dash between the stony faces of two dates, Anne managed to make it a lovely walk, a stately stroll, a long, endearing and admirable perambulation. For well over half a century of a cloudless marriage, Anne was the devoted wife of the equally devoted James Joseph O'Toole, who died in 2010. She is dearly missed by her children James and his wife Maureen Murray; John and his wife Anne Barone; MaryKay Buck and her husband John; and Timothy and his husband Timothy Wilkin. She was the adoring grandmother of nine grandchildren and the proud great-grandmother of two. She is likewise warmly remembered by a dozen nieces and nephews. And she remains the beloved friend of her neighbors and many others in the region. Born and raised in the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia, Anne had a character that was forged during, but never deformed by, the hardships of the Depression. Indeed, she displayed a sweet, optimistic nature and love of life throughout her many years-this, despite suffering from debilitating rheumatoid arthritis from around the age of thirty. Anne was a graduate of Hallahan High School. She worked for a number of years at Philco before turning to raise four children, first in the Tacony neighborhood of Philadelphia, then in Horsham, where she would spend the nearly 50 years that remained to her steering her children to adulthood, lavishing great care on her house, tending her garden, collecting and placing just so a Smithsonian's worth of neo-early-American tchotchkes (pewterware was her weakness), and waging merciless suburban warfare against whatever an upstart Mother Nature might dare to send against the pristine precincts of her home, be it ants (her bugbear), Insecta in general, or the American gray squirrel (never stood a chance really). Small cute outdoorsy mammals of any sort were animalia non grata. Perhaps the dominant trait of Anne's character, the theme we see running throughout her life, was a sort of will to beauty, a natural affinity for flair and style. It is there in the Jackie-esque outfits she sported on special occasions in the 1960s, in the myriad ideas for making her home prettier culled from a range of sources, in the regular repainting, reworking, reupholstering, matching this fabric with that wallpaper. She did almost all of this improvement of her home on her own or seconded by her husband. Even in her so-called retirement, when her arthritic hands had already long been reduced to a welter of twisted fingers, she continued to wield a paintbrush somehow and always achieved excellent results. The day the O'Toole Family Central Steering Committee declared her stepladder strictly verboten was a sad day for Anne indeed. Not just a page was turned; the whole painstakingly illuminated manuscript was coming to an end. The viewing will be held on Friday, Oct. 21, starting at 9:30 a.m. at St. Joseph's Church, 1795 Columbia Ave., Warrington, Pa. The funeral Mass will follow at 11:00 a.m. In lieu of flowers, memorial donations may be made to St. Francis Inn, 2441 Kensington Ave., Philadelphia, Pa., 19125 (stfrancisinn.org).