No matter where Meta E. Demaree lived, she connected with a church to practice her faith and to do good works. At the suggestion of her church while living with her husband and family in New Jersey, she volunteered to transcribe Braille devotional texts and Sunday school lessons for the blind. She continued that work as her family transferred to different places and after they settled in Lake Forest in 1965. Mrs. Demaree, 85, died of vascular failure Monday, Jan. 31, in Westmoreland Nursing Center in Lake Forest. She was born in Iowa, the eighth and last child of her German immigrant parents. Her father was a Lutheran minister who preached on different circuits in Iowa, Nebraska and Kansas and he often brought her with him. She graduated from high school at 17, too young to enter nursing school, so she moved to Chicago to be a mother’s helper for her sister. A year later she joined St. Augustana Hospital’s nursing school. She met her husband, Frank, at a church social and they married in 1943. His position with the Bell System required many job transfers from Blue Island and Northbrook to New Jersey and New York. Mrs. Demaree worked as a nurse before her children were born. “She was like a supermom,” said her daughter Susan. “She did everything really well. We had these fabulous birthday parties.” Already schooled in piano and organ, Mrs. Demaree became a flutist while her children attended school. She also loved to garden and was a gourmet cook. Her husband built her boxes that she turned into miniature rooms, some representing her home, another an artists studio and a gazebo. He died in 1989. Other survivors include her son, Frank; two other daughters, Anne Demaree-Cullen and Mary Jane; two grandchildren; six step-grandchildren; and seven great-grandchildren. Visitation will be held from 10 a.m. Saturday in Faith Lutheran Church, Deerpath Road and U.S. Highway 41, Lake Forest, until a noon funeral.
