Wikipedia:Today's featured article/October 14, 2015

Mary Margaret O'Reilly (1865–1949) was the Assistant Director of the United States Bureau of the Mint. One of the highest-ranking female civil servants of her time, the "sweetheart of the Treasury" often served as the Mint's acting director in the absence of the director beginning in 1916, and was formally made assistant director in 1924. O'Reilly lived her early life in Massachusetts. She left school around age 14 to help support her widowed mother and her siblings, and worked in Worcester for twenty years as a clerk. In 1904, O'Reilly succeeded in gaining a position at the Mint Bureau. Her rapid rise in the hierarchy was unusual for a woman at that time, and with many of the directors under whom she served having little knowledge of or interest in the bureau's operations, the task of running the Mint often fell to her. Beginning in 1933, O'Reilly served under her first female director, Nellie Tayloe Ross, and soon forged a strong bond with her. O'Reilly was so indispensable to the bureau's operations that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt postponed her retirement, scheduled for 1935, to 1938.