Roseann Klinger

Roseann Klinger was born October 10, 1931 in Chicago, the second child of Lena and Frank Antonucci. She had carefree memories of her childhood: Playing marbles, riding her bicycle to the bakery to buy bread, spending hours with her mother in the kitchen, learning to cook and listening to opera on the radio. When her mother took a part-time job, stitching the red thread on baseballs for the Chicago Cubs, Roseann kept her company. She also sat with her father in the garage as he built intricate cabinets and dressers out of maple wood and infinite patience.

Roseann met John Klinger in high school. John was a talented carpenter and builder, but struggled with book learning. Roseann, an excellent student, helped him with his studies and ensured that he graduated. John, in turn, introduced her to the wonders of Chicago that she’d never explored, including the Field Museum, Adler Planetarium, and the beautiful window displays at Marshall Field’s.

Roseann and John were both hardworking, frugal, and self-reliant. For two young people with little money or guidance, they had big dreams. After marrying in 1954, they had two daughters, then channeled their meager funds into their first house and started a successful garage door business, building both from the ground up.

As partners, Roseann was the one with more determination (some might say stubbornness) and preferred to be in charge of everything, at home and at work; John was usually glad to defer to her, especially when it came to budgeting and accounting.

In the 1990s, they sold the business, moved to Florida, and spent a month each year exploring the country in their RV. Frequent stopovers included Las Vegas, Arches National Park, and the Grand Canyon. The panorama of stars in Montana’s night sky sparked their lifelong interest in astronomy.

Roseann was delighted by simple things – seashells, good mysteries, ice cream. She collected glassware: From crystal flowers, to midnight blue vases, to a huge captain’s decanter that she could barely lift. She loved to garden and John proclaimed her one of the world’s best cooks. Based on intuition rather than recipes, her specialties included unbelievably good pizza, bread, spaghetti, baked chicken, and graham cracker cake, which her younger daughter, Linda, always requested for her birthday.

Her secret wish, however, was to be an engineer, and when the International Space Station (ISS) launched in 1998, two of her passions – astronomy and engineering – converged. If she’d had that engineering degree, she speculated, she might have helped build the ISS.

Roseann eventually abandoned the engineering dream, but remained fascinated with the ISS. Each morning before dawn, when the moon had set, she’d go outside and watch it as it edged over the dim horizon. It sparkles, she’d tell Linda, even more than a star.

She could tell time by its position in the sky. When it crested that hill, she knew it was 4:30 a.m. At 4:50, it was adjacent to that streetlight. And when the day had past and sunset waned, the ISS would rise again on the opposite side of the house, above the lake. That’s when John would watch it with her.

After John died, in 2007, some of the life went out of Roseann. For a while, all that interested her was tracking her constellations and the ISS; their consistency grounded her during an uncertain time. She told Linda that John was up there, watching out for her. But it took a long time before she stopped searching for him in the sky.

Happily, Roseann did find her footing again and more adventures came along in her later years. Although she loved operas, she never thought she’d see one in person. But she did, with Linda, in 2019: “The Magic Flute,” at the Kennedy Center. It was her last plane trip.

One of her greatest thrills was attending a “planet party” with a group of amateur astronomers. They found Mercury through a telescope as it traveled across the face of the sun. “If I’m still here in another few years,” she told Linda, “maybe I’ll see it again.”

And although she had previously been content spending most of her time alone, one of her best decisions was to join a neighborhood book club. She seldom read the books (and none by female authors), but she did make wonderful friends, some of whom she regarded as family for the rest of her life.

After she moved to assisted living at age 91, Roseann built warm relationships with staff and residents, and continued to find serenity in space. When a nurse noticed her rolling her wheelchair to the window each night to look for the “red moon” (a radio antenna), she started wheeling Roseann out to the patio at dusk, and they’d often watch the red moon together.

When Roseann died on June 22, 2025, one of her closest friends from the book club was at her side.

Roger Ebert, another Chicagoan with big dreams, once wrote: “We live not on a planet, but among the stars.” Roseann loved that line. Now that she’s no longer Earthbound, it takes only a little imagination to assume that she’s built a new home in the cosmos, where she can see everything more clearly: John, Mercury, and the ISS. And all of her beloved stars.