Individual Details

Death

Donald MussayShaped City SkylineAugust 09, 2000|By James Janega, Tribune Staff Writer.For a while in the early 1970s, Donald R. Mussay Sr. had the best view of Chicago the city had to offer. He worked on the outside of the Sears Tower as it was being constructed.As foreman of a team of glaziers, it was his job to ensure the giant building's windows were set correctly, just as he had for the John Hancock Center and a number of other architectural titans in Chicago. In fact, in a city famous for its glass-and-steel skyline, Mr. Mussay set in place an awful lot of the glass.Mr. Mussay, 70, died of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma Tuesday, July 18, in Howard Young Medical Center in Minocqua, Wis.A puckish man (to needle an office worker inside, he once pretended to hang on for dear life to the outside of a skyscraper), Mr. Mussay spent much of his life specializing in the exacting work of building skyscrapers.He said it was because such work paid an extra few cents an hour, said his daughter Kathleen Johnson, but the job was also a challenge. In the two years Mr. Mussay spent working on the Sears Tower, wind would rock the building back and forth as much as 18 inches, while glare from the sun would cause window openings to expand from the heat.But the work had its rewarding moments, his daughter said."You can actually see so much more than on the inside of the building," she said. "He could see in every direction, and sometimes, there'd be a cloud coming in, and it was like, oh gosh, you're going up to heaven."Mr. Mussay was raised in Chicago near Fullerton and Central Avenues, then the edge of a city that bordered on farmland.He never graduated from high school, instead hitchhiking as a teen down Route 66 to California, then making his way up to Seattle, where he worked a series of odd jobs. He was a busboy, a gas station attendant and a shipyard repairman before becoming a glazier in the mid-1950s.Back then, setting glass wasn't as glamorous for Mr. Mussay as it would one day become: His first jobs were boarding up windows after late-night fires in rough neighborhoods. One night, the floor of a building literally moved with rats trying to escape from charred walls soaked from the fire hoses.And though he worked so much in the city, Mr. Mussay was at heart an outdoorsman, the teen who traded his home on the edge of the prairie for a hand-to-mouth existence among the towering firs and redwoods near Seattle.He went mushroom picking in area forest preserves and smelt fishing in Lake Michigan harbors. After retiring in 1992, it was to northern Wisconsin, where he and his wife of 47 years, Doris, spent so many of their summer vacations.All that time in the outdoors gave him a sense of perspective that standing on top of skyscrapers never did, his daughter said. For all the tall buildings he helped create, she said, "I think he was more impressed with the redwoods."Besides his wife and daughter, Mr. Mussay is survived by two sons, Donald Jr. and David; another daughter, Susan Simpson; a brother, Marshall; a sister, Virginia Grizzaffi; 11 grandchildren; and a great-grandson.A memorial service will be at 11 a.m. Saturday in Northbrook United Methodist Church, Cherry Lane and Western Avenue, Northbrook.