The well-dressed little girl above, Elizabeth Mary Jones, grew up to be a formidable woman. Not the first definitions of formidable: 1. causing fear or dread; 2. hard to handle or overcome; (well, maybe a little of those) but the 3rd one: strikingly impressive. She was born in 1897 to Charles & Helen Jones, graduated from Roscoe Central H.S. and went to school to become a registered nurse when "colored" RNs were rare.
While living in Manhattan and working as a home care nurse, she hired Benjamin C. Williams to hang her wallpaper. As the story goes, Benjamin was very impressed with Elizabeth's piano playing - I guess she played while he hung the wallpaper. He, a former Vaudeville singer, had a beautiful voice. They married in 1924; he was 40, she was 27. They had my father and bought a house in Jamaica Queens. At some point they bought a building in Mt. Vernon and opened a nursing home. I remember hearing from my parents that grandma was a very competent nurse but not a very good businesswoman and so she kept losing the businesses and having to start over in different places upstate. For years she ran a nursing home in Monticello NY, where her clientelle was primarily Jewish. Her patients often gave her expensive gifts like silk scarves and jewelry to show their appreciation.
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| Standing with my grandfather Benjamin Williams at my parents' wedding. |
Growing up in Queens, I didn't see my grandmother very often but I always knew that she was separate from my grandfather who lived near us and that she had sent her son, my father, to be raised by her parents in Roscoe. When she would occasionally visit us, she was a very striking presence - arriving unannounced, driven there by Sam from Brooklyn to whom, according to my young ear, she addressed like a chauffeur; she wore fur wraps with creepy fox heads dangling from them, talked in a fast high- class clip like people in the movies, stayed for a short time and then was off. I remember her visits made my father unusually quiet, almost resentful. But at my grandmother's funeral in 1970, I looked up at my father standing beside me and saw a single tear roll down his cheek. Sam cried openly and said She was a wonderful wonderful woman. |
| c. 1897 |
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| Sam Siegel |
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| Grandma Elizabeth, my mother Ruth, brother Barry & me. 1966 |
