State Street Santa for 35 Christmases
You could say Jim Roetheli’s memorial service was the last “Ho, ho, ho!”
At the center of the parlor rested his walker, decorated with a North Pole sign. The mourners — some wearing red and green — spontaneously burst into “Santa Claus is Coming to Town.”
“I think that’s a first,” said funeral director Tim Harrington of Barr Funeral Home, 6222 N. Broadway, where the service was held Monday.
It was an appropriate sendoff for Mr. Roetheli, who spent about 35 Christmas seasons — through last year — as a State Street Santa at Macy’s and its predecessor, Marshall Field’s.
Generations of kids sat on his lap, the skeptics among them tugging on his white beard only to find it was real and shrinking back in awe.
“I feel real pride in being a Marshall Field’s Santa,” Mr. Roetheli told a reporter in 2005. “This is the Cadillac of Santa- dom.”
Over the years, he coped serenely as his red pants grew damp from leaky diapers and nervous bladders, explaining to fledgling Santas: “You smile, you get through it — and you put another uniform on.”
When kids gave him their Christmas lists, he hung onto them. And not just till the end of his shift. For years.
“I think he still had a file at home with them,” said Dan Welter, a Macy’s Santa who’s also an Archdiocesan deacon and former Cook County judge.
People who years before had their photos taken on his lap would bring their kids to Macy’s to continue the tradition, according to Welter.
And if Mr. Roetheli called in sick, Welter said, “People were coming in and saying, ‘ Where’s Santa Jim?’ ”
“People loved him — there were requests for him all the time,” said Andrea Schwartz, a Macy’s executive. “He truly loved being Santa.”
Mr. Roetheli, 69, who had rheumatoid arthritis, died March 14 at Advocate Illinois Masonic Hospital from complications during hip- replacement surgery, said a friend, Rhonda McCarty. Sometimes, kids told him heartbreaking things, confiding, McCarty said, “they just want a meal for Christmas, or they just want their mommy and daddy to have a good meal.”
Mr. Roetheli would pass word to store officials to ensure that a holiday dinner would get to their families, Welter said, or ask for help at his Edgewater parish, St. Gertrude’s.
“Is Santa Claus real?” Welter said. “He is with a guy like Jim.”
When coaching junior Santas, Mr. Roetheli instructed, “We never promise anything to a child, but we never say no to them either.” A good answer, he said, was “I’ll see what I can do.”
If kids requested a hot toy, he had a ready reply: “There’s been a big demand for it, so we’re going to have to do a raffle. And hopefully your name will come up.”
If children asked for a pet, he’d say: “We can’t take pets up in the sleigh because they’ll freeze, but you talk to the big kids with you.”
Young Jim grew up in Missouri, where he was a Boy Scout who achieved the rank of Eagle Scout. “He carried his Eagle card, still,” McCarty said. “I found it in his wallet.”
He left home at 13 to attend a Catholic seminary downstate. Later, he earned a sociology degree and worked briefly as a social worker, but the job wore him down, said his sister, JoMarie Becker. One client arrived, kids in tow. “My wife left me,” he said. “Now, what do I do?” Mr. Roetheli experienced so much stress, a doctor told him to find a new career, Becker said.
He wound up in Chicago, working as a baker. When it wasn’t Christmas, Mr. Roetheli worked at Thorndale Deli, Burny Brothers Baking, Mary Ann Baking Co., White Hen, 7- Eleven and a newsstand near the Granville L stop. Welter said he also worked in the “Ministry of First Im- pression” at St. Gertrude’s, answering phones and greeting visitors. And he volunteered at St. Teresa of Avila church’s soup kitchen.
Sometimes, Macy’s customers hired him to play Santa at their private Christmas parties. “They had invited him to be a family Santa at their dinners for years and years and years,” his friend Amir Rafizadeh said.
After decades living in Edgewater, he and his wife, Lennora, married since 1984, moved several years ago to the Zelda Ormes apartments, 116 W. Elm, McCarty said, where Mr. Roetheli sometimes had hallway “sword fights” with other cane- wielding residents. His wife died last year.
In his hospital bed in his final moments, “All of a sudden, it started snowing,” Rafizadeh said, “and two minutes later, he took his last breath. I know it sounds bizarre. He just really rode off in his sleigh.”
McCarty said, “Like: Santa’s gone.”