Sylvia Engel

Interview Date: February 19, 1988; June 21, 1988
Interview Location: Narrator’s home, 9403 Shermer Road, Morton Grove
Interviewer: Yvonne Ryden
Duration: 59 minutes

Introduction

Sylvia Engel has been an organist at St. Matthew’s Lutheran Church in Niles since 1954. She began giving piano lessons in our community earlier than that. Sylvia still makes her home in the farmhouse her grandparents moved into after their marriage in 1882. This farm had been bought earlier by her great-grandfather.

The house has been enlarged twice. There is still a farmyard behind the house with several out-buildings — chicken-and-pig house, small barn, pump house and a summer kitchen. In this interview Sylvia tells about how her home came to be in Morton Grove when the village boundaries were extended westward in the fifties.