Baking up a new life in unusually shaped cakes

During the Bears' dynasty, from 1984-1988, when they compiled the best five-year record of any NFL team and won a Super Bowl championship, general manager Jerry Vainisi followed the same routine.

Every game-day morning, he visited his neighborhood bakery, Danegger's Pastry Shop in Arlington Heights, to purchase his sweet rolls.

The couple who owned the bakery, Anna and Lorenz Eller, always delighted in drawing a member of the Bears' front office.

"He thought it brought them good luck," says their daughter, Annemarie Rand of Carpentersville.

This week, family members reflected on those years of running the bakery and all the customers they drew.

Mrs. Eller passed away Thursday. The former Park Ridge resident, who lived in Arlington Heights for 21 years, was 81.

Her years as a business owner in Arlington Heights, providing specialty cakes and sweets for the surrounding hotels and banquet facilities, as well as a busy walk-in business, was a long way from the teen who was orphaned during World War II.

Mrs. Eller was born in Croatia in 1926, in a village in the Danube River valley, among a settlement of German families. She lost both parents during World War II and moved at the age of 17 to Salzburg, Austria, to live with an aunt.

Although trained as a seamstress, Mrs. Eller found work in a bakery, and it would prove to be prophetic. She met her husband, who also worked as a baker, through friends and they were married in 1948.

The couple eventually followed some of Mrs. Eller's relatives and came to Chicago in 1956.

"Europe and Austria were in tatters in the postwar years," says their daughter, Hildegard Peterson of Fox Point, Wis. "They came to this country to rebuild their lives. Like other immigrants, they thought of this country as the land of opportunity."

Part of that dream, she says, was of running their own bakery. In 1978, the opportunity presented itself, in the Northwest suburbs.

The couple purchased Danegger's Pastry Shop, in the Arlington Market shopping center in Arlington Heights, from Charles and Verna Danegger. The bakery, which originally featured Swedish specialties, soon grew to include Austrian delicacies, such as black forest cake, strudel, stollen and good, hearty German breads.

Over the years, they were commissioned to provide wedding cakes for many of the large hotels and banquet halls, and even a birthday cake designed in the shape of a grand piano for singer Donny Osmond.

"They were sort of the forerunners of that, of making specialty cakes," says Peterson. "They designed cakes in the shape of all sorts of things, even a castle for one wedding cake."

Another Bears administrator, John Bostrom, the senior director of administration, remembers growing up patronizing the pastry shop.

"Attending Danegger's was a family tradition," Bostrom says. "We used to get cardamom coffee cake and a jug of orange juice every Christmas."

The couple owned the bakery for 11 years, before selling it in 1989 to retire.

Besides her daughters, Mrs. Eller is survived by her husband of 59 years, Lorenz of Arlington Heights, as well as four grandchildren and one great-granddaughter.

Services have been held.