When a young Gilbert Harvey first laid eyes on Mary Elizabeth Dyas, he knew immediately that she would someday be his wife. There was just something about her, he said.
“A pretty little picture leaning against a tree, quite removed from the crowd,” he recalled, 78 years after he met her during recess on the first day of 5th grade. “She offered, and I accepted, an animal cracker from her box. I walked her home that night. A mile out of my way and a mile back.”
Harvey says his life was forever changed that day on the playground at Collett School in Danville, Ill. Now, it has changed again. Mary Harvey died Sunday at Victory Lakes Continuing Care Center in Lindenhurst after a stroke. She was 88.
When the young couple met, Mrs. Harvey had recently moved from Andis, Ohio, where she was born. In her young suitor, Harvey says, she found a wide-eyed listener for tales of exotic adventure from the Blue Ridge Mountains to the Ohio River.
“With her personality, she was invited everywhere,” Harvey said. “And I, as a sort of appendage, found myself suddenly popular by association.”
For a time during elementary school, Mrs. Harvey returned to Ohio to be with her grandmother, who was ill.
The young couple swapped letters every week for five months until she returned.
By the time they were 12, they were generally “accepted by everybody as a couple,” Harvey said.
“By 13 we had decided that when we got old–like 20–we would get married.”
As soon as they finished school, they got married. A year later they moved into a small four-room house in Danville and furnished it with hand-me-downs from parents.
As the couple started a family, money was scarce and Mrs. Harvey often sewed her own clothes and those of her children.
“Her friends later confided that she was known as the best-dressed one in her group,” Harvey said.
Near the end of the Great Depression, the Harveys started a furniture business near the Beverly neighborhood in Chicago, and Mrs. Harvey managed the office.
In the early ’60s, they moved their home and business to the South Side’s historic Pullman Village, where they restored a number of houses. In 1968, they moved to Lake Bluff, where they lived until 1990, when they moved to Gurnee.
“She had a charming twinkle,” Harvey said. “Some of our friends called it Mary’s million-dollar smile.”
In addition to her husband, Mrs. Harvey is survived by a son, John; three grandchildren; two great-grandchildren; and one great-great-grandchild. Visitation will be from 7 to 9 p.m. Thursday at Wenban Funeral Home, 320 E. Vine Ave., Lake Forest, and at 1 p.m. Saturday at St. James Methodist Church, 504 N. Vermilion St., Danville, with services at 3 p.m.
