Lola Anne (Sobak) McKnight

She was born on October 15, 1941, in Clarksburg, WV, to Mary Ellen Frum Sobak and Zygmunde Charles Sobak. She lived until college in the town of Salem, WV, located in what she would call the "hollers" of West Virginia. Her parents, as well as a sister, Helen Haislip Sturm of Cary, NC, preceded her in death. She is survived by her children: Gregory (Sally), of Santa Monica, CA, and Anne, of Riverside, CA; as well as grandchildren: Alistair and Monroe of Santa Monica; and niece, Cathy, of Knoxville, TN.

Lola was a majorette during her high school years and was Salutatorian of her high school class. She was especially close to her high-school English teacher, from whom she learned to sew and tailor with great creativity and attention to detail. She would visit that house in Salem in later years, getting great pleasure from the sound of the train whistle and its rumble going by. Her facility with clothing and its construction led to her BA with an emphasis on technical writing on textiles at Margaret Morrison Carnegie College, the women's college part of what was then known as Carnegie Tech (now Carnegie-Mellon University), where she was a member of the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority.

Later in life she would pursue an MA in Museums, Costume and Textiles at the SUNY FIT (State University of New York Fashion Institute of Technology) in New York City, receiving her degree in 1994. Her master's degree thesis at the FIT concerned the archive of Americana prints, a series of artist-designed modernist textiles produced in the 1920s in New York. The study was significant because it excavated the history of the first major brand of silk fabrics to be produced in the US, a product line that connected vernacular modernist American art to industry in a departure from the then-dominant aesthetic center of Paris.

Lola's interests in fashion and writing had earlier led her to an MS degree in psychology in 1978 from Illinois State University. (Her marriage to William McKnight ended in divorce in 1998.)

During her years in Bloomington, Lola raised her two children. She sewed her children's clothing, baked bread, and restored furniture and stained-glass windows from old churches and buildings in the surrounding countryside. When her children were in school, she worked as an editor at the former McKnight Publishing Co. She maintained connections with her growing-up friends back in West Virginia, and kept her world expansive by travelling to spots all over the Midwest to look at architecture and design, and by participating in the Costume Society of America. At home, she belonged to the History and Art Club. She subscribed to a vast array of periodicals ranging from art magazines to city magazines to psychology journals, and would often finish off the day with a mystery novel from the library or a detective show on TV. She loved her coffee; her quilts and antiques collected from all over Illinois and the greater midwest; dogs, especially her German Shepherd, Cricket; her grandchildren; road trips, especially Chicago for the museums and architecture; and mountains, especially the Appalachians.

Cremation rites have been accorded with East Lawn Funeral Home. A service in her home state of West Virginia will take place at a later date.

In lieu of flowers, memorial contributions may be made to the Old House Society in Bloomington, the Humane Society of Central Illinois, or the Dementia Society of America.

Memories and condolences may be left with the family at eastlawnmemorial.com.