The Years with Paul Galvin, 1945-1959

Paul Vincent Galvin was born in a small Illinois town in 1895, the son of an Irish bartender. He dropped out of college because of economic hardship and, after service during World War I, married high school sweetheart Lillian Guinan. A born entrepreneur who valued hard work and common sense, Paul succeeded in his goal to be the first to install radios in automobiles. His company became Motorola, a word that combined motion and radio. With his enormous success, he also suffered incredible loss. In 1942, Paul's only son, Bob, found his mother, Lillian, and her maid brutally murdered in the family home in Evanston. The police never solved the high-profile case.

In early spring 1945, having spoken with Virginia on several occasions while visiting his doctor, Paul invited her to a play for which he had tickets that same evening. Virginia declined, politely explaining she required the courtesy of advance notice. He soon asked again, giving her a full two-week notice, and this time Virginia accepted. Paul's successful courtship of Virginia Critchfield began with dinners, trips to the theater and concerts, or at times just quiet visits with Virginia and her sister on the front porch of their Oak Park home. During one of those evenings, Paul, uncharacteristically shy, confessed to Virginia, "Your company delights me."

On November 21, 1945, Paul, fifty, and Virginia, two weeks shy of her thirty-fourth birthday, were wed in a quiet ceremony in the living room of Paul's home on Normandy Place. This marriage, an uncommonly happy union, would last fourteen years, until Paul's death in 1959. ...

One of the secrets of Paul and Virginia's happy union may have begun with two gifts they exchanged early in their marriage, nonmaterial gifts demonstrating mutual respect and a high regard for each other's well-being: Virginia's conversion to her husband's faith and Paul's loyal support and guidance during his wife's metamorphosis into a new life. Influenced by her grandmother's Christian Science tenets, the new Mrs. Paul Galvin now bore witness to her husband's similar devotion to his Roman Catholic faith. Each night, she watched as this powerful, self-made executive humbly knelt down to pray by their bedside. Nor had she failed to notice how fairly and generously Paul treated his family, friends, and employees. Beyond that, his record of philanthropy was extensive. Observing how genuinely her husband's faith informed his everyday affairs, governed his decisions, and commanded his values, Virginia made a quiet decision to convert to Catholicism. Without telling Paul, she studied and took the required conversion instruction classes, and at Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve 1948, as her husband rose to go to the Communion rail, he turned to find Virginia standing beside him, smiling, then whispering, "Happy Christmas, Darling. I'm receiving Communion with you tonight."...

However quiet and simple it may have appeared, Virginia's wedding represented no ordinary union. The ceremony itself marked a dramatic rite of passage from one manner of life to another. Matters of etiquette, fashion, and personal conduct in "polite society" must have become suddenly essential for Virginia to learn. To Paul's credit, he recognized her need for enhanced social poise in this new and unfamiliar environment, and to Virginia's credit, she worked assiduously to attain the level of conscious dignity and social poise she would become so highly respected and deeply admired for. - Virginia was not an ornament-a "trophy wife." Though she was bright, beautiful, and younger by sixteen years, Paul never saw or treated her as anything less than a full and equal partner in his life.

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