Photo courtesy of Bill Savage.
Editor’s note: In the Nov. 5 issue, The Beacon launched a series profiling some of Alger County’s centenarians. The series continues with Eileen St. Amour.
By Jennifer Champagne
Managing Editor
For her 100th birthday, Eileen St. Amour’s children put out a call for cards — and more than 238 came in. Nearly all of them carried the same message: gratitude for her kindness, her steadiness and the quiet ways she has spent a lifetime helping others.
Raised by Joe and Georgiana Pelletier, St. Amour grew up in a Munising defined by mill whistles at noon, fire hall curfews at 9 p.m., snow forts and Sunday picnics that connected both sides of her extended family. At 100, she remembers the earliest contours of the town as clearly as the family she poured her life into.
“I went to the Catholic school, and I graduated in 1943,” she said.
Childhood was a mix of chores and adventure — delivering cookies on Saturdays for a neighbor, hauling coal from the sawmill for her mother’s laundry stove and saving her younger brother from a “soft spot” near the saw pile. “You saved my life. You saved my life,” he told her afterward.
She walked everywhere, including to the Jericho House, which served as the Catholic church after the 1933 fire.
“That was a great tragedy that we lost our church,” she said. Her sisters sang in the choir, and she recalled sitting with them in the loft when she was young.
After graduation, she joined the World War II workforce and followed her sister to Detroit.
“I worked on ball ends on airplanes,” she said. “They have to be changed every so often … and we had a machine that we could use to see any flaws in them.” The work was technical and precise, part of the nonstop wartime manufacturing that defined the city at the time. She also picked up shifts on a lunch wagon in Detroit, juggling long hours and extra jobs.
“I got paid for the hours that I would have worked,” she said, remembering the hustle of those years before she returned home.
She had known Henry “Hank” St. Amour since childhood.
“We went through Catholic school together, and I kind of had a hunch on him,” she said. They reconnected in high school — “We just kept marching along together” — and married in Colorado Springs, Colorado, where Hank was stationed. She was 18; he was 20.
“He wasn’t at the right age to get a marriage license,” she said. “We had a chapel, had a priest and had seven people in church.”
Hank deployed to Europe as the war continued.
“He got into Germany, France, but he never saw any firing,” she said. He was en route toward the Pacific when Japan surrendered. “That boat he said just did a 90 degree turn and turned right around.”
Eileen lost their first child at home in 1945.
“Across the street had a telephone, and they had to call the doctor,” she said. “I lost the baby at home.” Their children came later: Mary Jo in 1948, Sue in 1950, Hank Jr. in 1954 and Karen in 1963.
After the war, Eileen worked for a period at the paper mill, including early production work on a new product called Marvelon.
“We were the first ones to work on Marvelon,” she said. Hank also worked at the mill but left to help run his parents’ business, the Hillside Grocery.
“His father was very sick … and we bought the store from his mom,” she said. The couple lived above the store, later expanding it.
“They built the apartment then,” she said. That apartment became the backdrop for years of family gatherings, friends coming and going and a steady stream of nieces and nephews.
Eileen’s children say she created the kind of home people gravitated toward.
Sue Passinault said Sundays were always spent together: “It was always a family gathering.”
She remembered simple childhood games: “Whatever kind of a stick we could find … you skipped rocks in the lake, played tag, whatever.” She said her mother was “loving … giving … and when you hurt, she hurts.”
Karen Maxon described the values woven into their home.
“Family first,” she said. “Don’t eat the whole cake, but enjoy a piece. … Everything in moderation.”
She said her mother never held grudges.
“You pray about it … think about it … is it worth letting it go?” she said. “And pretty much it was always let it go and forgive and move on.”
Karen also recalled her mother’s steadiness through hardship.
“It was the faith that got them through,” she said. “My dad was just as strong in faith as my mom.”
Hank Jr. said determination defined her.
“If you correct her, she’ll say, ‘Let me think about this,’” he said. “She’s very determined … to accomplish what she has her goal set on.”
He credits his mother with raising a family that remains tightly connected.
“Every Sunday, we’d always head down to Grandma and Grandpa’s,” he said. “I think that’s how we were raised — we just all keep connected.”
Eileen and Hank built and rebuilt several homes over the years, including two across from the store, a chalet in Brown’s Addition and another in Irish Hills. They also helped build homes in Marquette through a small corporation Hank helped form. One of those building projects became the scene of a frightening moment when a falling tree crushed the truck where her grandson Troy was asleep.
“The tree fell right on top of that truck,” she said. “The little guy was just shaking. ‘Don’t move. Don’t move.’”
Karen remembers the story clearly: “Luckily he was asleep and laying down. If he had been sitting up, it would have been a different story.”
Karen said her mother was every bit her father’s partner in the work they took on, including the two laundromats he built.
“She was Dad’s right-hand man,” Karen said. “He taught her everything — how to fix things, how to keep everything running.”
She remembers walking in to find her mother flat on the floor under a row of machines, tools spread out beside her.
“Nothing scared her,” Karen said. “In the mornings, she’d be out there plowing so Dad could get to work. She just did whatever needed to be done.”
The laundromats succeeded despite early skepticism from a local banker telling Hank, “You’re never going to make money on a bunch of change.” Later on, he came back, shook his hand and congratulated him.
Eileen also remembered the debates around Munising’s first low-income housing project, the Windjammers.
“They didn’t want that traffic … they didn’t want this and that,” she said. But once the building was complete, she helped manage it.
“Some of the first ones that declared they didn’t want any of that … were some of my first customers wanting to get into the building,” she said.
Recreation was part of their rhythm too.
“Go dancing,” Eileen said. “Square dancing. Bowling… snowmobiling.”
She recalled the old dance hall, Mr. Doucette calling square dances and a six-lane bowling alley located under what later became the community center. During Hank’s term as mayor, that building was remodeled for public use.
Through every period — wartime, the store years, the mill years, building homes, raising four children, managing apartments and navigating politics — Eileen leaned on faith.
Sue recalled a recent moment with her: “She says, ‘I don’t want you to cry for me. Cry for those who are left behind and don’t believe in God.’”
That legacy shows in all four children. Karen said it simply: “Living God’s word … that’s how we learned to handle things.”
Hank said it shows in how they treat each other.
“We are a can-do family. … We will always try to make it work,” he said.
Sue described it as a presence.
“She was always there,” she said. “She would do anything for us.”
A century of work, faith and family is the through-line of Eileen St. Amour’s life. It shows up in the homes she helped build, the machines she kept running, the neighbors she welcomed and the values she passed to her children. Her legacy isn’t loud — it’s steady. It’s in the way her family stays connected, in the faith that carried her through hardship and in the 238 birthday cards that all seemed to say the same thing: She made life better for the people around her.