Joy Nevin Axelson

Bill Pekara (BP): Good afternoon and welcome to Park Voices, an oral history project sponsored by the Northbrook Public Library and the Northbrook Historical Society. Today is March 16th, 2026. My name is Bill Pekara, and I’m pleased to welcome Joy Nevin Axelson, who has lived in Northbrook since 1999. What brought you to Northbrook, Joy?

Joy Nevin Axelson (JNA): My husband, Knute Axelsson, brought me to Northbrook. We got married at the Northbrook Covenant Church at Pfingsten and Techny. March 23rd, 1996. So Monday is our 30th wedding anniversary.

BP: What was Northbrook like when you first moved here?

JNA: We bought an adorable little Cape Cod on Illinois Road, not far from Shermer so we could walk to the train station, and we loved it. We really wanted to buy a house that was walkable. My husband has always said that Northbrook is one of the best suburbs because of their beautiful downtown. That’s quiet with the baseball field and everything and like Little Louie’s and Baskin-Robbins, of course, those things were always there. There was the Garage in place of the Graeter’s  and, you know, all the older things. But Knute loves downtown Northbrook because there’s not just like Glenview, like a road running through it or Libertyville. So Northbrook is really great because it’s walkable and it’s peaceful.

BP: What was your experience like living before settling in Northbrook?

JNA: So I grew up in West Chicago, Illinois, which is a far western suburb just west of Wheaton, Illinois, and I went to Wheaton Christian Grammar School from K through eight. And then I went to West Chicago High School.  West Chicago is a very different demographic. As you know, each suburb of Chicago has very different demographics. So where a third of my high school came from Mexico most of GBN where my husband attended did not. In fact, I don’t think he knew a single Mexican friend. I didn’t know any Jewish people. Actually, when I lived in West Chicago. Turns out my favorite teacher was Jewish, and I found that out much later. So growing up in West Chicago, I had never heard of the North Shore.  Didn’t know it existed. The farthest north I had ever traveled was probably Arlington Heights. My dad worked in downtown Chicago at Moody Bible Institute as a theology and hermeneutics professor for 32 years. So he took the train in from Winfield.

BP:  Speaking of your father, what are some significant memories from your childhood that have stayed with you?

JNA: Wow. Where to begin? Do they have to relate to something specific because I got a lot.

BP:  No no no no no. Just anything.

JNA:  My dad was a wonderful guy. He moved here to take the job teaching at Moody Bible Institute around 1962. He moved from Southern California. So the first year he lived in the Chicago area, he was freezing. His students all thought that he would either die or return to California, neither of which he did. Perhaps despite them, he stayed, and he lived there the rest of his life until he passed in 2012 at Brandel Care Center in Northbrook.

But my dad was really good at Bible trivia, and we were all nerds. We loved playing Bible trivia, and when I was dating Knute, I was really impressed because he beat my dad at Bible trivia. That’s one of the ways I knew that he was meant for me.

BP: How does your dad impact your values and your beliefs?

JNA: How didn’t he is the shorter question? My dad loved God, and he loved sending missionaries and pastors around the world. Moody Bible Institute in Chicago is the only undergraduate program that I know of that is tuition free. Did you know that?

BP: No. I did not

JNA: It’s a charity. People donate to it because the graduates go into full time Christian service. My dad had a little den in the basement of our house in West Chicago, and he had plastered all of the missionary prayer cards all along the wall. He would get up at 4:30 a.m. because he said that if you wake up after 7 a.m., you’ve wasted your entire day.

JNA: And he would pray for all of those people.

When he retired in 1995. He had taught at least 10,000 people, and so I always wanted to be a missionary. When I was a sophomore in high school. I decided I wanted to be a missionary in France, so I majored in French at University of Illinois. I spent my junior year in France, and then I switched to going to Intervarsity my senior year at University of Illinois.

And that’s where I met Knute, my husband. So my dad’s values are very strong, and he loved writing. I’ve been writing poetry since fourth grade, and he was the only one who would read it. But he wrote a 600 page hermeneutics textbook. I call it the alleged book because he was always editing it and it never got finished.

It finally got finished, and it was about to be published when the publisher was purchased by someone else, and they declined to publish it. So on his deathbed in 2012, I told him, and maybe this was a stupid promise. I’m going to get some of our stuff published. So I got some stuff published, in December 16th, 2025.

I got my 52 Life Lessons book published, and chapter three is on hermeneutics, explaining how to read and interpret the Bible. And a lot of that stuff is my dad’s writing.

BP: How would you describe your educational background and its influence on your personal growth?

JNA: Dad was big on education. I don’t know if you know this, but most teachers don’t get much money, so we didn’t have a lot growing up. However, dad was always willing to pay for books and education. He in fact had five degrees. He had two bachelor’s degrees. Two master’s degrees. One was from Wheaton College and a doctorate in theology from Dallas Theological Seminary.

He loved education so much. He also paid for my mom to finish her bachelor’s degree and get her master’s degree in counseling from Wheaton College. He was always encouraging us to, continue studying. So I got a bachelor’s in French in 1995 from University of Illinois and a master’s in French in 2001 from the University of Santa of California, Santa Barbara.

Dad was very happy to come to California for my graduation because he was cold. Probably.

BP: Looking at your career, are there specific achievements or projects that stand out to you?

JNA:  I would say getting my master’s degree was important, and dad was there and he was very proud. In 2020, I began working as a part time missionary for the Evangelical Free Church of America. They have a child sponsorship program that’s kind of like Compassion International or World Vision. And my friend Greg Norwin, who was the president, made a job for me.

It’s translation coordinator. We have almost 7000 children sponsored around the world in 12 countries, and I get to ensure that all the care worker training materials end up in 12 different languages. Do I speak 12 languages? No, I speak three and a half, and I’ll tell you about that later. But I love this job and it uses my gifting and I get to travel all over the world teaching ESL training care workers so they can basically rescue children out of poverty.

It’s so exciting. Last year in 2025, I went to Brazil, Albania and the Philippines for my job. So dad inspired us with a good work ethic, and he also let us know how important education was. And passing on your legacy through writing.

BP: How is your approach to leadership and decision making evolved over the years?

JNA: Well, it hasn’t changed much. I recently, as part of my job with the EFCA, took a class called Steward Leadership, and next week I’m giving a Bible study to our group at Global Fingerprints about leadership. So, as you may suspect, Christian leadership looks a lot different than your average secular corporate leadership. It involves, serving people and caring for them.

and like secular leadership, it involves bringing out the best in people. As the managing broker of Axelson reality and as a teacher, I’ve been a teacher since 1998. I enjoy teaching people, helping them to fulfill their potential and kind of calling out their gifting. If I see a young person and they’re really good at something and they’re passionate about something, I want to encourage them to follow that lead.

I was very thankful that in 2023, at age 50, I was able to take a class online called Write Your Life Lessons as part of my job because we have to send out weekly or monthly prayer letters telling people about our ministry, and it’s all about telling a story to get people to support your ministry. So I took this class, write your life lessons and the lady and I worked on a book I was writing that wasn’t about life lessons. After the class was over, I realized I hadn’t written down a single life lesson. So at age 50, I wrote down a list of 100 life lessons I had learned. Usually the stupid or hard way over my life, which later became my book.

BP: Can you talk a little bit about your book.

JNA: Sure. So the the book of Proverbs says that a wise person will learn from others and a lot of times in life we just end up learning by shooting ourselves in the foot, making stupid mistakes. And the classic lesson that kind of was a catalyst for this book was in December 2016. I was doing really well in the real estate business, and I was kind of thinking, what do I really need my husband for?  Now, this is a very stupid thought to think, so please don’t ever do this. But I thought, yeah, what is he really doing? It doesn’t even do the dishes when I want him to. And so God had to smack me down. And he taught me a lesson. Exactly four days later, after I said this to myself, I was going downstairs at our house on Western Avenue to charge my phone, and I fell down the last four stairs. I landed on the slate tile and I totally severed my patellar tendon, which connects your leg to your thigh kneecap. So that tendon was completely severed. It hurt worse than childbirth without medication. I can tell you that much. So I was screaming at the top of my lungs at 11 p.m. and my husband, being Swedish, comes to the top of the stairs and says, stop screaming. So I do. And the Northbrook cops show up five minutes later. They’re very fast. And then the ambulance took me to Glenbrook Hospital. They had to drill three holes in my patella to reattach my tendon. And for the next six months, I couldn’t do anything without my unnecessary husband. I’m doing air quotes there because he’s very necessary. I couldn’t go to the bathroom or shower or go to physical therapy at Athletico, which is right by Little Louis.

By the way, I couldn’t do anything without him for six months, so this book is my effort. If people are wise enough to read it, to be like, why don’t you just learn this the easy way instead of having to learn it the stupid way like I did?

BP: What has motivated you to stay in Northbrook over the years?

JNA: I really love the community that we’ve built here. I especially love the people over at the North Shore Barrington Association of Realtors, which is off of Skokie Road there.  Debra DeBoer, the head of education, also led our toastmasters group for a while there. And that was a really great opportunity to get to know other realtors and people. I also love our church is, The Orchard North Shore, which is currently renting a place in Glenview, and hopefully we’ll get a place maybe in Northbrook in the near future.

BP: Can you highlight a pivotal moment or experience that has shaped the course of your life?

JNA: (laughs)I can highlight many, I would say. Obviously, when I became a Christian at age five, that was very important. I knew you couldn’t earn your way to heaven, and I asked God to forgive me. So that kind of set the course for my life. When I decided I wanted to be a missionary in France was also important. And at age 16, I got baptized at the West Chicago Bible Church.

But when I met my husband senior year at University of Illinois, he was a great guy. He was great Christian. He did not want to be a missionary in France. So first of all, I made him go on a mission trip without me to France because I was like, if he hates it, all bets are off. I also made sure he actually took French at Glenbrook North High School.

His teacher was Mr. Jim Meadows. Mr. Meadows, who actually attended our church for a long time, who currently lives in Arlington Heights at Luther Village and great person. So I had Knute go on this mission trip and he didn’t hate it. And then I went on a mission trip. And the pivotal moment was I was kind of wrestling with God, like, hey, you told me to be a missionary, but then you also totally brought this person into my life.

Which do you want? And he was like, marry the guy. So I was like, fine, I’ll marry the guy. So we got married. And as it turns out, I think I’ve been able to do more ministry because I married Knute. And if I didn’t, because Knute is very shy, as most Swedes are. He doesn’t like, especially like traveling or teaching.

But he’s very generous. He likes giving. He’ll pray for my trip and he’ll watch the kids. So I’ve been on about 25 mission trips internationally in the last 30 years because I’m married to Knute. So it turned out to be very impactful. And Knute is also obviously deciding to marry him is very important. He’s been very supportive of me wanting to be an author and speaker and, he believes in me, which I appreciate.

BP: Could you provide insights into your family structure and the role that it has played in your life?

JNA: My family of origin. So I’m the third child of three. My brother Tim was born in 1967. My sister Ruth in ‘69, and I was born in 1973. As I said, we grew up in West Chicago, Illinois. The family structure. My parents married at Moody Church July 31st, 1965. It’s a giant church, and they didn’t have enough people to fill it.

But, they met there at Moody Bible Institute, and my mom married her favorite teacher, which is now not allowed. They weren’t dating when they were in class together. And in fact, he gave her a C, which I thought was pretty bad. But they got married at that point, so my parents were married until the day he passed away, March 15th, 2012.

And that example of them being committed and working things out, never thinking that they could get divorced, really impacted me and my sister, not especially my brother. Because he’s been divorced, but, yeah, that’s the main thing. I was six years younger than my brother, so I didn’t really grow up with him. He left the house when he was 18 and he decided to become a punk anarchist atheist.

So he was raised in the church like my sister and I were. But he was actually, trying to share the gospel with people at West Chicago High School, and they didn’t like that. So they started throwing shoes at his head. And he was a little guy back then, and he hadn’t hit his growth spurt yet. So he decided that he didn’t want to be a Christian if it meant getting beat up on.

And he couldn’t defend himself. He wrongly thought that, you know, Christians can’t defend themselves. So it was the 80s, he decided to get a mohawk and some piercings, and I think the tattoos might have come later. But, he also lived in an anarchist collective and squatted in downtown Chicago. So one time this was in the 80s in West Chicago.  He had a red mohawk like bright red, and he was working at Wendy’s, the fast food place. And they’re like, you can’t have a red mohawk. And he’s like, But Wendy has red hair. And he got fired anyway because I don’t think they could do that nowadays. But he did get fired. He had another ill fated job at the West Chicago Public Library, and they told him to clean out this closet full of periodicals.

And he just, like, threw them all away. And he wasn’t supposed to throw any of them away. So he got fired for two. Eventually, though, my brother ended up getting a doctorate in African history, not African American history, African history. Many years after he graduated from college, he went to Liberia for five years, and he lived in Ghana for two years and Senegal for one year.

He’s currently married to a Liberian lady and has a 12 year old. So yeah, my brother didn’t impact me a lot. My sister did. She’s four years older than me and she became a missionary in Spain. She married this guy, George, also known as Jordi, who she met in Spain when they were on a mission trip. And I learned Spanish like I was in French five at West Chicago High School when I was a senior, and I thought I would take Spanish one. And after learning French, Spanish is kind of a cakewalk because it’s easy to pronounce and spell. So I was learning Spanish and my sister came kind of comes back from this missionary trip in Spain. She’s like, I really like this guy, Jordi, but I don’t know if he likes me or not.

I think he might, but I’m not sure. So I was like, okay, we’re calling the camp. We’re going to call this place. She’s like, what? I’m like, yeah, we’re calling. What’s the worst that could happen? So with my, you know, one year of Spanish, we called up and I asked to speak with Jordi, and they spoke and they got married in 1994.  So they’re still married. So learn Spanish kids also learn French because it’s awesome.

BP:Yeah. You said you had three, three other languages. Would you like to?

JNA: Yeah. So I speak a little English, as you may have guessed, and I speak French fluently. I have a master’s in it. God help me if I don’t speak it fluently by now. I also speak Spanish. God gave me this weird ability to perfectly pronounce foreign languages, not just ones that I’ve learned, like Mandarin, Hindi, whatever.

It’s so fun. But then when you start talking and you have a good accent, they assume that you speak fluently, which I don’t usually speak it fluently, so I can speak Spanish wonderfully in the present and future tense. In the past tense, I never buckled down and learned the imperfecto and the preterito very well, so it’s kind of choppy. I’m still working on that. The third language that I learned was German. I took a semester of German in college, and then I lived in Strasbourg, France, which is on the border of Germany and France. I use my Deutsche marks because I’m that old. It was 1993 and 94, and I practiced German, so that’s really fun. I love speaking German.

My nephew got married in Germany in 2024, and that was very useful. Since then, though, I’ve taken Italian at Niles North High School through Oakton, I’ve learned some Haitian Creole. I’ve learned Portuguese because I go to Brazil, but I’ve been to Brazil two times. I learned of some Romanian. I went to Romania in 1993. Any Latin based languages are really easy for me, but I can pronounce the other ones.

My dad, since he was a theology professor, he had to know ancient Hebrew and ancient Greek. So he taught all of us the Greek alphabet and all these things. I didn’t know I would have a Greek father in law one day, which I have to get back to because my husband met his father. Well, when my husband was 30 years old, that’s when he met his father for the first time, because he didn’t remember from when he was two and a half.

So it was after Nils Axelsson had passed away and Matisse’s parents were in town from Thessalonica, Salonika in Greece, and they had been denied the opportunity to see their grandson for decades. And they wanted to see him again. And so they pushed him. And we were at Illinois Road, and I answered the phone, I think it was a landline(laughs).

And he’s like, yeah, I’m Stamatis. And I’m like, who are you? And he’s like, yeah, I’m Yorgos, dad. And I forgot that my husband’s name was Yorgos because this guy didn’t know he had changed his name. So I’m like, Knute, I think it’s your dad on the phone. So we go and we meet with this guy.

He didn’t know we had a son, his first grandchild, and he didn’t know that Knute had changed his name. So he kept calling him Yorgo. And Soren, our son was like one and a half. And so he called him Zoran. But yeah, that was really weird. Meeting my father in law for the first time when we were both 30 years old.

BP: You’ve mentioned, well, your name is Axelson, obviously. And your husband. Would you like to talk a little bit about the family history here in Northbrook of the Axelsons?

JNA: Yes, I would love to. So in 1973, Knute’s biological parents got married. His mom, Corolla Axelson, was eventually single again and lived with her parents, Nils and Lois Axelson, on Plum Island Court in Northbrook. Eventually, she remarried and moved to the North Side of Chicago. When Knute was about five years old. He got to choose whether he wanted to live in Chicago with his mother or in Northbrook with his grandparents.

After visiting Chicago and getting stones thrown out his head, he felt it was safer and more pleasant to live in Northbrook, so that’s what he chose. The year was 1978, and Lois Axelson decided to sign her grandson up for kindergarten. Back in the day, there was Grove School that led into Shabonee that led into Wood Oaks, that led into GBN.  So she went up to Grove. She rolled up there and she signed him up as Knute Axesson. His first name was Jorgo, his last name was Christos Stamatis and nobody cared. They just signed him up as Knute Axelson. And then when he was at Glenbrook North High School and it came time to take the S.A.T., they have to use your legal name. So they they said, who’s Yorgo? And he’s like, that’s me. So Knute Gustaf Axelsson was known as Yorgos Christos Stamatis until his 18th birthday, when his grandfather and their favorite attorney, the Erickson’s, who used to have a place on Shermer, Grant Erickson. They petitioned Cook County to get his name changed. So he changed it to Knute Gustaf Axelson and the reason he chose that was his great grandfather, Carl Gustaf Axelson, came over from Sweden when he was 17 to New York, and then his grandfather, Nils Gustaf Axelson, came to the Chicago area in 1950 after serving in the Navy in World War Two to go to Northwestern University, so his middle name was Gustaf as well, so Knute decided to choose Gustaf as his middle name. He didn’t know anything about his Greek ancestry. And then when our son Soren was born in 2003, we chose Gustaf for his middle name as well.

BP: I asked you a question about  the role family plays in your life. And you, you used the word origin family. Would you like to speak more about your current family? What’s the proper term for that family?(laughs).

JNA: (laughs)It’s a great question. Yeah. So. Well, Nils and Lois, I considered them my in-laws because they’re the people that raised my husband, so unfortunately, they’ve passed on. I think Nils passed away in 1999, and Lois passed away around 2012. They were wonderful people. They met at the Ebenezer Lutheran Church in Chicago, and they kept a lot of Swedish traditions alive at the Northbrook Covenant Church, where they attended for many years and where Knute was secretly baptized. Lois used to head up the Santa Lucia Committee. So in the beginning of December, the Swedes have a holiday called Santa Lucia. And they have all these traditions that are really cool. So we used to enjoy going there for that Santa Lucia tradition. But, let’s see. Nils Axelson, as I mentioned, came to the Chicago area to get his degree at Northwestern University. He actually did his undergrad in three years and his master’s in one year, so that the military would pay for the entire thing. So he condensed it. I guess he was really, really smart. And then he was one of the youngest administrators of the Swedish Covenant Hospital in Chicago. And he and his wife, Lois, live next door to the hospital and raised their daughter, my technically, my mother in law, Carola.

JNA: He was also Nils Axelson was also in charge of all of the Covenant Benevolent Ministries, which included all of the covenant villages. So that’s why. And Northbrook, you know, we have Covenant Living there on Pfingston and Techny, there are three stages. If you don’t need any care, you can just be in a duplex or you can be in your own condo if you need some care.

It used to be called Axelson Manor. I forget what they’re calling it now you go there and then if you need a 24 hour nursing care, you go to Brandel Care Center. And Paul Brandel was Nils Axelson best friend. Paul happened to be a millionaire, at least, and he used to invite Nils to come to his place in Florida.  And they would go to all these conferences together and every other year Paul Brandel would give Nils his car, so he would buy himself a new car every other year, and he would give the quote unquote old one to Nils. One of them was this Crown Victoria like, you know, the old cop car we call the Queenie the boat because the suspension was so smooth.It was like, you’re on water. The thing was a boat that was huge. But yeah.

BP: What did Nils do before he came to Northwestern University?

JNA: Nils got his bachelor’s degree in three years at a place in New York called Upsala College. Upsala is also an area in Sweden named after that. Before that, he was in the U.S. Navy during World War Two. At one point, I believe if I remember correctly, that they staged a fake invasion of Italy to throw people off of D-Day in France.  In addition, Nils always told stories about being stationed with the Navy on Guam and how the flour was moldy and they didn’t really have much food, and they were really hungry and malnourished, and they were going to have to invade Japan. So if the U.S. hadn’t dropped the bomb in World War Two, I might not even, well, my husband wouldn’t be here.  Maybe because maybe my grandfather wouldn’t be here. So it’s very interesting. The connection there. But Nils loved the Navy and he was very proud to serve. And they paid for his four years where he got his bachelor’s and master’s, and he loved the Swedish Covenant Hospital and serving as the administrator there.

BP:

What are you looking forward to in the future?

JNA:

Oh, that’s a great question. I’m currently halfway through my second book. I’m looking forward to a couple writers conferences. I’m going to this year because I hope to get a traditional publisher. The first book I published was through a hybrid publisher, and I appreciated all their editing and typesetting. But it’s always nice to have a traditional publisher, so I’m looking forward to that. I’m also looking forward to going to Ghana in August. I just signed up for a mission trip to Ghana in the end of August. At first, when my mentor, who used to be my youth pastor, asked me to go to Ghana. He goes about four times a year to the northwest of Ghana. I thought, well, they don’t speak French, they don’t need me to speak French and I usually teach ESL. 

You don’t need me to teach ESL either so I don’t really need to go to Ghana. That’s nice. But yeah, and we don’t have any children sponsored in Ghana with the program. I work for. But a couple Fridays ago in Warrenville, I was listening to him talk and he was showing slides or whatever you call them nowadays, and he said that there was a women’s conference in Ghana, and they had some teaching and they had invited 100 women, but then the women had invited their friends, and there are 200 women who showed up to this thing, and I just felt like I should be teaching there.  So I’m working on my notes. It’s the unshakable life, that’s the theme that I was given for my teaching in Ghana in the fall, so I’m super excited about that. I’m not super excited about the long flight and the fact that you have to fly from middle of nowhere Ghana to somewhere else and then drive for like six hours and whatever, but I’m sure it’ll be worth it.

BP:  Joy, thank you so much for participating in Northbrook Voices.  Your memories of your life in Northbrook are going to add a unique and personal perspective about the history of our town.  Thank you!