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Her parents believed in the old ways, and so they arranged a marriage, but Margaret was a strong-willed woman even then, and she rejected her parents’ choice. I will marry for love, she said, and she quickly married Vincent Saggio, a dashing young man at the factory who had served in the Great War. He was 13 years older than his 14-year-old bride.

According to family lore, he had a side-hustle as a bootlegger and the police were closing in on him. For whatever reason, he and Margaret left Ohio to make their life in St. Louis. Vincent sold produce at the Soulard Farmers Market. Margaret took seriously the idea that she had married for love. She had 22 babies in 27 years. There were two sets of twins, but still, she was pregnant for most of three decades.

“What’s one more?� Vincent used to ask with a laugh. “We’ll put another bowl on the table.�

The family lived in a three-room house on the south side. Not three bedrooms. Three rooms. And a bathroom. Officially, there was a living room, a kitchen and a bedroom, but in truth, the whole house was a bedroom. People slept everywhere.

Sadly, there were not 22 children. Several had died of various childhood ailments — mostly when they were very young — and one child was hit and killed by a car when he was 11.

Still, the little house was crowded.

Vincent died when the youngest child was 7, but by then, the older boys were ready to step up and help support the family.

Margaret died in 1990. I wrote a column about her. Her surviving children — by then, there were only 11 — looked back fondly on their childhood. Yes, times were often hard, but they had one another. They laughed about multiple teenagers trying to get ready to go out on a Friday night in a house with only one bathroom.

Marie was one of the middle children. She got a job when she was 16 at a shoe manufacturing factory on Washington Avenue. There she met Thomas Americo Amaro. His parents were from Sicily, and his middle name was an homage to their new country.

He was 26. Marie lied and told him she was 18. Marie was not allowed to date, but Thomas would come to the house and visit. He proposed and she accepted. Shortly before the wedding, she confessed that she was 16. He didn’t care. And, of course, her family didn’t. She was two years older than her mother had been when she got married.

Thomas was a hard-working man. His father had died when he was 10. There had been no time for formal education.

He worked his way up from the factory floor to a supervisor’s job, and eventually, he got a job designing purses. He was a craftsman.

He and Marie had six children.

One of them was Antoinette. She is now 75. She contacted me recently. I visited her Wednesday. What is life like for one of Margaret’s grandchildren?

Anne, as she is known, is doing fine. She is married to Irv Goode, a former St. Louis Cardinal football player. He was an All-American at the University of Kentucky, and a first-round draft choice of the Cardinals in 1962. He played on the offensive line. He was twice an All-Pro. He had a falling-out with Cardinal owner Bill Bidwill and demanded a trade. He was sent to Buffalo but was injured in the preseason. He then spent two years in Miami and earned a Super Bowl ring.

He continued to live in St. Louis.

I said it was probably an easy decision not to locate in Buffalo, but Miami might have seemed attractive. Irv gave me a puzzled look. Buffalo was nice, he said.

He is 84. He is still a legend in Kentucky. The Boone County High School football field on which he played long ago has been renamed the Irv Goode Field. He did not tell me that. I saw it in a newspaper story.

Anne is his third wife. He is her third husband.

Anne has one child. Irv had two kids with his first wife, and three with his second wife. In addition, he raised the three kids his second wife had when she married him. He considers them his kids, too.

He seems mentally sharp, but he has difficulty walking. “I’m scared to death of falling,� he said.

I asked Anne what she remembered about her grandmother.

She was always cooking, she said. Children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren would gather at her house, and there would always be a big pot of spaghetti sauce on the stove. It smelled wonderful. My grandmother was a great cook, Anne said. She could make a meal out of a piece of dirt.

Margaret was a large woman, Anne said. Her arms were huge.

The living conditions were not quite as idyllic as Margaret’s children had told me, Anne said. When times were particularly tough, some of the kids would be shuttled off to an orphanage. When times got better, they’d be retrieved.

The Goodes live in a three bedroom, two-bath house off of Olive Road in St. Louis County.

I wondered what the young Margaret would have thought of that.