Linda Patton (Sigrist) McLean was born on August 20, 1937 in Franklin, New Jersey, the only child of Beatrice (Moran) Sigrist, an early career-woman, a mild, hilarious, and meticulous mother, and David Sigrist, a self-made man, the tabletop-tapdancing owner of a Mercedes-Benz-Packard dealership, the son of recent German immigrants. They called her Cindy from the beginning. She grew up in Verona, New Jersey on Mallard Lane just up the street from a small lake with boats and ducks. It was the idyllic beginning of what she admitted was a fairytale life.

As a child, there is a famous story of Cindy driving to Yankee Stadium with her father to deliver a new Packard to a baseball star of the day. Later, she attended Verona High School then Mount Holyoke College, majored in Religion, and after a foreign exchange in Switzerland, graduated in 1959, followed by a degree at Columbia Teachers College. While at Mount Holyoke she met Marsh McLean on a blind date. She married this shy future doctor and current baseball star in 1961. She supported him through medical school as a teacher to the sixth-grade children of Chapel Hill professors. It was said the dean of the medical school threatened to flunk Marsh if he went off to Chicago with Cindy as planned. The kids could not do without this wonderful creative teacher with the electrifying smile.

She strolled their four kids around Chicago as Picasso erected his famous steel Horse downtown, as riots raged that year. She got free tickets for Marsh not only to the Blackhawks in the Stanley Cup but to sit with the owners in the sky box. They were picked up in the limo. She’d met the daughter of Blackhawk owner while doing laundry, had been offered tickets, but had no idea who the woman was. When Marsh and a friend froze the courtyard of the downtown Chicago apartment building, she tied the skates. She saw him off to Vietnam and back safe.

They moved to a huge beautiful house on Moss Avenue in Peoria, Illinois in 1971 where they built a tennis court in the back, froze the front for skating, dug gardens, vegetables for him, roses for her. They stayed for 45 years. There Cindy was committed to all manner of creative, political, community activity. She ran Broadway Theater League that brought acclaimed plays to town. She was an early member of the NAACP and Urban League and she worked for Planned Parenthood and the Peoria Park District. She was a decades-long leader of the Moss-Bradley Historical Society, but worked city-wide to save important buildings from the demolition, such as The Peoria GAR Hall where Lincoln-Douglass debates were heard before the Civil War. She championed the successful application of the McLean Farm in Sedalia, North Carolina to National Register of Historic Places, the work of many years. She rose to be president of the Illinois State Medical Auxiliary. In later years she crusaded for environmental causes. She and Marsh supplied a Peoria Area Food Bank every Tuesday for decades, hauling canned good and baby formula up and down stairs well into her 70s. They slept monthly in a homeless shelter in the basement of the Westminster Presbyterian Church down the street. The list of her civic work goes on, but her greatest commitment was always to Marsh and their four daughters.

She died on August 15, 2018 in Amherst, Massachusetts where she had moved as a result of illness. She is survived by her beloved husband, John Marshall McLean, daughters, Betsy McLean Vielhaber of Middleway Scotland, Robin McLean of Ikes Canyon, Nevada, Debbie Mclean of Sunderland, Mass, and Kim McLean of Peoria, Illinois, six grandchildren, Marshall McLean O’Leary, Carlyn McLean O’Leary, Sophie McLean Converse, Kate McLean Converse, Leo Vielhaber and Ella Vielhaber, and one dear cousin, Betsy Barr of Upper Saddle River, NJ.

A Celebration of Life will be held at the Abbey Chapel at Mount Holyoke College on September 22, 2018 at noon. All are welcome to attend. All gifts should be directed to The Fisher Home of Amherst or The Alzheimer’s Association, or the Peoria Area Food Bank.