Clara Eldridge Amendola, beloved wife and mother, died at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago on August 2, 2024, after a month-long battle with COVID-19. She was 97 years old and had lived in the village of Cary for 57 years.
She was born Clara Mae Eldridge in Roxana, Kentucky, on February 18, 1927, the youngest child of John Jackson Eldridge and Lillie McIntyre, a dirt-poor Appalachian family. She was named after her Aunt Clara. Her father was a coal miner and their home did not even have running water. However, she was largely raised in northern Illinois by traveling Christian missionaries, Walter H. Klof and his wife Ellen, so she lacked the Southern accent of her siblings. Relatives called her Clara Mae, friends called her Claire.
Clara graduated from Zion-Benton Township High School in Zion, Illinois, in 1945. She started working when she was just sixteen and held many jobs in the Chicagoland area, mainly in federal civil service. She worked at various times for the Veterans Administration, the U.S. Navy, and the General Services Administration.
While working as a payroll supervisor at Great Lakes Naval Training Center, she met her future husband, David Amendola, whom she married in 1961. She resigned from civil service after her only child David Walter Amendola was born in 1964, and they moved to Cary in 1967. 
Clara had a passion for family genealogy, restoring antique furniture, gardening, and was a voracious reader of romance novels and Louis L’Amour westerns. She was renowned for her baking, especially her homemade bread. She knitted scores of sweaters, socks, hats, scarves, bookworms, and other handmade items. Many friends and relatives lived out-of-state and she was a prolific letter-writer. In her later years she volunteered as an election judge.
She possessed an impish sense of humor and always had a joke to tell – often off-color – keeping cards of jokes in her purse to brighten someone’s day. She was a cancer survivor, but largely enjoyed remarkable health her whole life. Friends marveled at how mobile and sharp she was in her nineties, still walking on her own only using her son’s arm for support, still ready with a joke or a wry comment. She remained that way until the very last month of her life.
Clara was preceded in death by her parents, her husband of nearly 28 years, and by all eleven of her brothers and sisters. Her ashes will be buried with her late husband in Camp Butler National Cemetery at Springfield, Illinois. She is survived by her son, and by the many friends and relatives who treasured her decades of wit and wisdom.
It was Clara’s wish not to have a funeral or memorial service. A few weeks before she fell ill, she wrote the following for her son:
“When I die, remember that what you know of me is with you always. What is buried is only the shell of what was. Do not regret the shell, but remember the woman. Remember the mother.”
In lieu of flowers, her son asks that you spend extra time with your loved ones, for that time is precious and all-too fleeting. Or have a tree planted in her memory, for she loved gardens.