Hollywood's "Movers and Shakers" included Millie Leisz

Think about it. Millie was born in 1922, at home in a farmhouse in Turtle Lake, Wisconsin. She helped her parents Anton Leisz and Sophia Donaker Leisz milk the cows, harvest the crops, cook, clean, and endure frigid winters.  In the cold winters, Millie and her siblings jumped out of bed in the morning and raced downstairs to dress for school by the wood stove. She lived through the Great Depression. Electricity didn't come to the family farmhouse until 1928, so the family used oil lamps for the first six years of Millie's life. Millie was only 13 when she watched her older sister Julia "Jewell" Leisz Harnden die tragically at age 27 from cancer in 1935. By the time she reached young adulthood, Millie had lost her father to heart disease in July 1942. 

It makes sense, then, that Millie might want to see new sights and enjoy new experiences. So she traded in her barn boots and overalls for high heel shoes and fur wraps.

In the early 1940s, Millie's eldest sibling Sophia "Bobbi" Leisz Kelly was living in St. Paul with husband Emmett. Millie went to live with Bobbi, and there she graduated from the Minneapolis Business College. With a business degree under her belt, Millie took a job in Washington, DC in 1942. It was an exciting time to be in the nation's capitol. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was president, and the United States had entered World War II with the December 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. 

By 1944 Millie was living in Los Angeles, California, a city of dreams. It was the "Golden Age of Hollywood," an era when stars were born and careers in cinematic motion pictures were celebrated. Her sister Helen moved to California with Millie. Both girls took the train from the Turtle Lake Depot across country to Los Angeles, arriving in early January 1944. When their widowed mother Sophia Donaker Leisz took ill with cancer a few years later, both Millie and Helen quit their West coast jobs, and returned to Turtle Lake to live and nurse their mother through her terminal illness. Sophia died on April 7, 1948. After she passed, Millie and Helen returned to live in California.

In the mid-1950s, their youngest sibling Marian Leisz Hammang joined her two sisters in Southern California. By that time, Millie was married to John E. O'Malley, who worked in the motion picture industry. Marian too was married, having wed Cumberland, Wisconsin native Vincent Hammang in 1947. The couple had three boys at the time the Hammang family relocated from Indiana to California. They went on to have four more children, all born in Southern California—six boys and one girl.

Millie's sister Marian noted in February 2019 that Millie received an annulment from the Catholic Church because John refused to have children. "He told her on their honeymoon, 'You better not get pregnant because I don't want any children,'" recalls Marian. 

Millie built a flourishing career as a Los Angeles realtor, focusing on the affluent Brentwood neighborhood of LA, where many Hollywood stars then lived and live today. In fact, January 2019 news reports reference Hollywood actress Jennifer Gardner as purchasing an $8 million home in Brentwood. Millie's offices were located at 11973 San Vincente Blvd. in the heart of Brentwood, in the famous Barry Building, a landmark commercial mid-twentieth century modern building located at 11973 San Vicente Boulevard. Millie went on to manage the entire Barry Building during her career. In 2007, the Barry Building was listed as a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument,(Historical Cultural Monument #887), making it one of the few mid-century modern commercial buildings to gain such status. It was identified by the Los Angeles Cultural Heritage Commission as being a well-preserved and notable example of the California-style modern design. See HERE for more about the historic landmark Barry Building that Millie managed during the late 20th Century. See HERE and HERE for very interesting recent news about the Barry Building today.

By early 1992 Millie moved to Murrieta, California, about 100 miles southwest of her home in Brentwood to retire and live closer to her sisters. She left a luxury two-bedroom apartment Millie had called home for the past 27 years, since 1965. It was located at 11916 Gorham Ave, Los Angeles; today these apartments are valued at more than $1 million. Read THIS letter that Millie wrote to family and friends about making this major move when she was 70 years old. Also check out THIS article from a Brentwood newspaper about Millie and her indelible impact on the neighborhood.

She had no children of her own, yet Millie was a much-loved aunt to sister Marian's seven children, and the children of her sister Gladys Leisz Wick, who remained in Turtle Lake to live out her life in that village where she was born. 

Millie lived another 14 years after her retirement in 1992. She attended the 2002 "Homeward Bound" Leisz Family Reunion. In her later years Millie developed Parkinson's Disease, and passed away on July 2, 2006. Among her mementos was THIS article about St. Mildred, whom she is named after. Online sources cite Mildred as an Anglo-Saxon name of Old English origin, meaning "gentle strength." It reached the rank of the sixth most popular name for girls in the United States in 1912 and maintained that popularity through 1920, but then its popularity dropped quickly afterward. (Millie was born in 1922.)

Read Millie's eulogy HERE, written by nephew Kevin Hammang. Millie Leisz O'Malley is laid to rest in St. Ann's Cemetery in Turtle Lake, Wisconsin.