Steady as She Goes — Red and Eleanor

That August morning was particularly special. The heat had already settled in, the kind that throws long shadows across the fields and makes the clouds look soft and deceptive — because in August, you never know when those gentle shapes will rise into tall thunderheads and drop a hard, sudden rain. Eleanor McLaughlin loved August. By then, the fields had a rhythm again. Hay and straw were being baled, and the strong men of Manhattan Township moved with the easy cadence of people who had done this work their whole lives. It was hot work, but it was good work, and it was done with good people.

Soon, threshing would begin, when farm families stopped being individual households and became something closer to cooperatives — groups of five, ten, twenty-five working as one. Eleanor loved bringing food and cold drink to steady the men as they worked. It made her feel part of something larger than herself, something she had longed for since childhood.

Her mother, Isabelle Delaney, died when she was four. Eleanor remembered running down the back alley screaming, the world suddenly too big and too empty. Her father, Charles, did everything he could to hold the family together while working long shifts in the steel mills. He was a sturdy, reliable, moral man, but he was now a single father with too many hours away from home.

Often, he sent the children out to Manhattan, where they were divided among relatives’ farms. They were shipped around a lot. Eleanor was most often sent to the third Delaney clan — the one with sixteen children. This was the branch of the family her mother belonged to — the sprawling Delaney household of sixteen. She never felt alone there. She learned early how family networks worked, how cousins and aunts and uncles formed a web that held you even when life didn’t.

Communities are often held together by people who carry private wounds. Their strength comes from what they survived, not from what they avoided. Angela responded to Eleanor for that reason. They shared something unspoken — the early loss of a parent, the kind of wound that never fully closes. Angela and Isabelle Delaney had been close, and that connection carried forward into her bond with Eleanor.

On that August mid-morning, she gathered the day’s provisions and headed out to the fields, and it was there, among the workers, that she noticed Ray “Red” Fitzgerald differently for the first time. They would see each other often over the next eight years. They instinctively understood the terrain. Red thought she was beautiful with her bobbed red hair. That spark propelled them into a lifelong partnership that produced four children — of which I am one.

They married in the middle time — 1938 — when America was just crawling out of the Great Depression and beginning to gear itself toward war. Eleanor had known real hardship; a steelworker’s pay didn’t stretch far, and she remembered cupboards that felt bare. Red had known none of that. As the son of Angela and James Fitzgerald, he had grown up secure. But he was aware of his luck, and he carried a quiet instinct for generosity, always making sure others had something to share.

The Ring philosophy — endure, find common ground, build in good times and bad, show up for the community — paid off. But luck favors those who prepare, and the Rings were proof. The Great Depression had been, for them, something held at arm’s length.

World War II changed everything. Every boy in Manhattan became conscriptable. Eleanor’s brother Joe served, as did Red’s brothers Dick and Donnie. Farmers were considered essential to the war effort, but everyone felt the weight of the moment. Manhattan was no different.

After they married, Red and Eleanor moved into the old Ring homestead, already showing its age. They renovated it over the decades. Red rebuilt the foundations, rebuilt the barn, added a cattle barn extension, and tended twenty head of cattle and a couple of horses. He was an entrepreneur in the old rural sense of the word — not a man chasing capital, but a man who couldn’t stop looking for better ways to do the work in front of him. He even built the township’s first weed-killer apparatus, a small invention that got mentioned in the Joliet Herald and captured his spirit: practical, inventive, always improving the work.

Eleanor brought a different kind of strength into the marriage. She had known instability, scarcity, and the ache of early loss. She had been shipped from household to household as a child, learning how extended families worked, how cousins and aunts and uncles formed a web of support. That early training made her the emotional center of the Fitzgerald home. She understood how to hold people together. She understood how to make a house feel like a place where others belonged.

Like many men of his generation, Red struggled with alcohol. It never erased his warmth or his work ethic, but it shaped the household atmosphere in ways we all felt. Eleanor’s steadiness was not effortless. She coped. She kept the rhythm of the home, held the family together, and found her own way through the harder stretches without ever making a show of it. The drinking was part of our family story, but so was her quiet resilience.

Together, they built a life that blended their two histories:

• Red’s steadiness and quiet prosperity

• Eleanor’s resilience and instinct for community

• the Ring philosophy of endurance and cooperation

• the Delaney capacity for large family networks and shared responsibility

Through it all, their civic nature never wavered. Red and Eleanor responded instinctively to their community, upheld their faith, and were generous with their time and attention. To them, this wasn’t virtue — it was simply what you did. They showed up for neighbors, for church, for the township, for anyone who needed a hand. Stepping back now, I see how clearly they carried forward the best of the Ring inheritance: the belief that ordinary people strengthen a community not through grand gestures, but through steady presence, quiet service, and a willingness to share the load.

Over the decades, Eleanor and Red witnessed tremendous change on nearly every front — assassinations, corruption, civil and political riots, the deindustrialization of the Great Lakes, and finally the shock of the World Trade Center attacks. They felt each of these moments together because their values were so closely aligned. Yet they never acted disappointed in the time they lived in. Their family unit was strong, their faith steady, and they kept the local rhythm on beat.

They stayed curious enough to drive to Chicago during the 1968 Democratic Convention, walking through Lincoln Park to see for themselves what was happening. They listened to Abbie Hoffman, watched the SDS crowds, and moved through the tension without giving a thought to their own safety, even though their generation was considered part of the problem. They wanted to understand their country, not retreat from it.

Several decades later, in early retirement, they spent weeks at a time traveling through Europe. They loved being in different cultures, seeing sights they never imagined they would see, and they brought their family along whenever they could. Their world expanded even as the country around them grew more divided and less sure-footed.

They were ordinary people who did extraordinary things — and they did them consistently.

Patrick Fitzgerald is a Buffalo-based writer whose work explores civic responsibility, community life, and the quiet virtues that hold people together. Raised in the Midwest and shaped by the steadiness of farm communities, he writes about proportion, neighborliness, and the shared duties that form the backbone of American civic life. His essays draw on lived experience, family lineage, and a deep sense of place to offer readers a grounded, reflective perspective on how we can rebuild trust in one another.