Angela Turley was a longtime community organizer, social worker and activist in the Uptown neighborhood on the North Side.
Turley helped to found or lead an array of organizations aimed at providing better housing, employment, education and safety for lower-income Chicagoans, including Tri-Faith, IVI/IPO, Jane Addams Hull House, the Council of International Programs and the Uptown People’s Federal Credit Union.
“She was a person of deep faith, but her beliefs did not limit her life of faith only to Sunday services,” said George Palamattam, former executive director of the Council of International Programs. “Every day she lived that: serving the poor and serving the needy.”
Turley, 97, died July 12 at her home in Uptown, where she had been a longtime resident, said her son Jonathan Turley, a legal scholar and writer.
Born Angelina Piazza, she was raised in the small coal mining town of Yorkville, Ohio, where her father worked as a coal miner. After graduating from Yorkville High School, Turley moved with her family to Tampa, Florida, because her father had contracted black lung disease.
While in Florida, Turley met her future husband of 57 years, architect Jack Turley. The two moved to Chicago, where her husband, a Navy veteran, found a job working for noted architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.
Turley worked as a waitress, among other jobs, to help support her family.
Later, she took courses in social work at what is now Mundelein College. She worked for a time at Marillac House, a settlement house at 2822 W. Jackson Blvd. on the West Side that was operated by an order of Catholic nuns. It served a 50-block area, offering a day care center and other services.
Turley’s greatest interests, however, were volunteering in politics and social services. In the late 1960s, she became involved with the Independent Precinct Organization, which had been founded in 1969 and later merged with Independent Voters of Illinois to become IVI/IPO. The group’s mission was to slate independent candidates serving as alternatives to those backed by Mayor Richard J. Daley.
Turley also co-founded Whistlestop, an effort to stop crime on city streets with whistles, and in the early 1970s she chaired the school council at Brennemann School in Uptown. She also co-founded Uptown’s Tri-Faith organization, an employment center.
One of Turley’s most significant achievements was helping to form the Uptown People’s Federal Credit Union, her son said.
“She started the credit union after being told that no bank would extend loans to businesses and individuals in Uptown,” he said. “She did it anyway. She organized friends who seeded the credit union. It helped families create businesses and secure loans for cars and other items denied by the banks.”
Turley served as vice president of the credit union, and later, she chaired the board of the Council of International Programs. Other groups she led included People in Action Together and Organization of the Northeast.
Turley also had a keen involvement with the Uptown community center of the Hull House association, which opened in a former supermarket at 1257 W. Wilson Ave. in 1963. Hull House then opened its new Uptown center in a $600,000 building at 4520 N. Beacon St. that opened in 1967.
“She really did believe wholeheartedly in the work of Jane Addams,” Jonathan Turley said. “It got her deeply involved in campaigns for poor families. She also led campaigns against slumlords and gangs that had taken over Uptown.”
In 1978, Turley threw her hat in the ring for a special aldermanic election in the 46th Ward, to fill a vacancy created by the resignation of Chris Cohen. Although she was endorsed by former alderman and mayoral candidate William Singer, as well as the 46th Ward Citizens Search Committee, Turley was removed from the ballot by the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners after failing to file a required economic interest statement.
Turley ran again in the February 1979 race for a full four-year term as alderman, but ultimately trailed both Ralph Axelrod, who won the 1978 special election and the April 1979 runoff, and future Ald. Helen Shiller.
Turley also was involved in the arts, helping in 1974 to bring to Chicago the St. Nicholas Theater Company, which had been formed in Vermont in 1972 with David Mamet as its artistic director and resident playwright. The theater company’s first performance, staged in 1974 at the Leo Lerner Theater in Uptown, starred William H. Macy.
For decades, Turley welcomed into her home people who needed a place to stay, including international students. Even into her 90s, she continued to host guests.
“She made her house a refuge for people who needed a place to live,” her son said.
Outside of volunteering, Turley enjoyed spending time with her family, he said.
Turley’s husband died in 2005. She is also survived by two other sons, Dominic and Christopher; two daughters, Angela Turley and Jennifer Dziepak; a sister, Giovanna De La Paz; 13 grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren.
Services were held.
Goldsborough is a freelance reporter.
