Lillian K. Jaderberg

Lillian K. Jaderberg passed away in her sleep, gently and without pain, on Friday, May 31. She was 98 years old.

Born K Elsie Lillian Akergren in Chicago, Illinois, on March 4, 1926, to Emil and Agnes Akergren, Lillian had one half-brother, Uno, who grew up in Sweden.

At the age of 2, she visited Sweden with her parents for a year, but returned to live in Chicago with them for the rest of her early childhood.

Soon after Lillian turned 13 years old, they all moved back to Stockholm, Sweden, and she spent summers in northern Sweden at her grandmother’s house in the town of Bergvik, where she enjoyed the company of her cousins, Margit and Inger.

After graduating from high school, being fluent in both English and Swedish, she secured a coveted secretarial job with the American Embassy in Stockholm where she met many diplomats and helped Embassy personnel understand the Swedish way of doing things.

At around age 20, Lillian returned to Chicago with her parents where she took a secretarial job at the University of Chicago. She often saw Enrico Fermi, a physicist who had a major role in developing the atomic bomb, and while filling in during the switchboard operator’s lunch break, she was asked to place a call to Albert Einstein and was surprised that Dr. Einstein picked up his own phone instead of having his secretary do it for him. She was embarrassed to have to ask such an important person to hold while she put the call through.

One autumn day in 1947, a friend of Lillian’s set her up on a blind date with a young man whose family was also from Sweden. She and Roland Jaderberg hit it off right away, and in May 1949 they were married.

They raised two daughters in the Chicago suburb of Homewood. Linda became a rocket scientist and helped design the space shuttle’s main engine, among other projects; Barbara became a molecular biologist and did research in neurodegenerative diseases at UCLA.

After retirement, Lillian and Roland lived briefly in Tampa, Florida, as well as Edmonds, Washington, and up and down the California coast, mostly buying houses and fixing them up to sell a few years down the line.

They finally ended up living in Pacific Palisades near their daughter, Barbara. A few years after Roland passed away, Lillian moved to Sparks, Nevada, to be closer to her other daughter, Linda.

Lillian is survived by her two daughters, Linda St-Cyr and Barbara Schaffer; her three grandchildren, Gaetan St-Cyr, Anne-Elisa Yeager, and David Schaffer; and three great-grandchildren, Tesla Yeager, Rex Yeager, and Arrow Schaffer. She will be buried in Chicago’s Oak Hill Cemetery.