Jane Byrne

Her father, William Burke, rose from salesman to vice president of Inland Steel. She attended Queen of All Saints Catholic School near her Sauganash neighborhood, then St. Scholastica high school before graduating from Barat College of the Sacred Heart in Lake Forest. On Dec. 31, 1956, she married William Byrne, a young graduate of the University of Notre Dame who became a Marine pilot after graduation. Their daughter Kathy was born the following New Year’s Eve. But tragedy struck on May 31, 1959, when young Lt. Byrne, returning to Chicago in a military airplane from Cherry Point, N.C., where he was stationed, died in a plane crash in a Glenview cemetery. Byrne joined the Daley team officially in 1965, accepting a job as a recruiter and a Washington-Chicago liaison worker for the Chicago Committee on Urban Opportunity, a poverty program post of little stature and meaning but, still, her first governmental job. Daley died of a heart attack in his doctor's North Michigan Avenue office a few days before Christmas 1976. Bilandic, a relatively unknown alderman from Daley's 11th Ward, was selected by his fellow aldermen to become acting mayor until an election was held. Byrne walked into the mayor's office in mid-April 1979, surrounded by some of the people who had joined her in her campaign. The first 100 days, and even six months, of her administration were spent tearing down the Bilandic administration and engaging in political feuds. After leaving the mayor's office, Byrne made a few more stabs at returning to public office, but they were unsuccessful as she was unable to capture the magic that had put her in office in the first place.