Calvin T. Meineke M.D.

Dr. Calvin Thomas Meineke died of natural causes at his home in Palos Park on August 6, 2026. He was 77.

Cal was born in 1948 in Austin, Minnesota, the second of eleven children born to Merton and Jeanne Meineke. His father, who served in the Navy during World War II, worked as a meatpacker in the Hormel plant that produces Spam; his mother raised their seven daughters and four sons.

Independent, energetic, and ambitious, Cal enrolled at Cornell College in Mount Vernon, Iowa, where he met Valerie Moravec, of Berwyn. Cal and Val married at age nineteen at Third Unitarian Church in Chicago and transferred to UIC, where Cal completed his bachelor’s in chemistry followed by a medical degree. He specialized in internal medicine, which allowed him to apply his talents in chemistry as well as his desire to provide primary care.

Cal and Val welcomed their first son in 1975 and moved to Oak Park, where they opened a family medical practice on North Avenue, eventually moving it to downtown Oak Park in the mid-1990s. Val, who had earned an MBA at Northwestern University, worked as the practice’s office manager.

After raising four children together in Oak Park, Cal and Val separated and divorced in 2007. He married Ewa Sukiennik (née Koniec), who also managed the practice and whose family had been close with Cal’s for decades. They moved to a home in Palos Park that became their beloved sanctuary together and the gathering point for their family for fifteen happy years.

In practice for over forty years, Dr. Meineke was the primary care doctor for generations of Oak Parkers, Chicagoans, and west suburbanites. He cared deeply about the importance of primary medicine for patient well-being and believed in health care as a human right. He ran his practice in accordance with his principles, refusing to sell it to a hospital or medical group that would have inhibited his ability to place the needs of his patients first and to provide affordable care for his self-pay patients.

He was also a clinical instructor at Northwestern Hospital. He was renowned among students and residents for his warm bedside manner, extensive medical knowledge, and highly perceptive diagnostic skill.

He was always ready to serve the people in his life not only as a resource for practical help but as a source of reassurance, calm, and deep wisdom. He spent his golden years taking special satisfaction in noting the unique traits in each of his grandchildren that will one day make them extraordinary individuals.

Cal cultivated innumerable hobbies and interests throughout his life, but the one that became a second vocation to him was violin making. For the last three decades of his life, he spent late nights and weekends in his basement wood shop in a quest to understand the physics of string instruments. He developed a theory that, contrary to the common practice among violin makers of fine-tuning each piece of an instrument in isolation, the instrument must be assembled and tuned as a complete system.

He was preceded in death by his parents; two brothers; and his first wife, Valerie. He is survived by his wife, Ewa; his children, Jeffrey, Gregory (Amanda), Lewis (Analeah), and Julia (Nicholas); his stepchildren, Agnieszka (Daniel), Eliza (David), and Adam; seven grandchildren; and eight siblings.

A Memorial Visitation will be held on Sunday, August 30, from 1:00 - 3:00 PM, with a Memorial Service at 3:00 PM, at the Elizabeth F. Cheney Mansion, 220 N Euclid Ave., Oak Park, IL 60302.