Joyce Ellingwood

Born at home on 21 June 1925, with her father pressed into service as midwife; a colicky, curly-haired baby, nicknamed Corky. As a little girl at the Wingra Park zoo in Madison she made friends with an ostrich and would race it along its fence. In the polio epidemic in Madison she fell ill the day after her sister Janet; it turned one eye aside, but the eye recovered once the other was patched. She later chose the middle name Louise (Cudge’s memoir, scans 108-109, 116).

In wartime Spokane she loved to dance and spent much of her time at the USO. In high school she volunteered on her own to be apprenticed to a seamstress: “I tell you, she learned to do beautiful work.” After a year as a clerk at the Old National Bank and two unhappy years at the University of Washington, she worked at Haddad’s dress shop to save the money for modelling school in New York, where her uncle Wink and aunt Katherine took her under their wing. Modelling for a dress manufacturer at Filene’s in Boston, she met Bill Lee at the employees’ dance: “Well, Daddy, I’ve met the man I’m going to marry” (scans 154, 158-160).

They married in the Presbyterian church in Spokane on 26 August 1948, and on his first evening with the family she served Bill strawberry shortcake made with a sponge (scan 160). Bill had a daughter, Virginia, six years old, by his first marriage. They lived at Hingham, Massachusetts, where her parents and her sister Ruth surprised her in 1950; at Pelham, New York, when Bill was with J. C. Penney; and at Rochester, when he was president of Sibley’s (scans 168-170, 187-188). One Christmas she picked out a Scotty puppy for her mother and smuggled it home with her father (scan 182). She and Bill retired to Vero Beach, Florida, and were married fifty-eight years, until his death in 2006 (his obituary). Their summers were at the family’s house on Squam Lake, New Hampshire.

She was a Christian Scientist, like her mother, and outlived all her brother and sisters. She died on 13 August 2023, aged 98, survived by “six loving children”: Bill’s daughter Virginia “Ginny” Doyle, and Janet Lee Beach, Margaret Lee Braun, Charlotte Lee, Alyson Lee and William “Richard” Lee; twelve grandchildren and five great-grandchildren. Her funeral was at the Christian Science Church at Vero Beach (obituary). Her niece Gail Dorman remembered a summer with her in the Pelham house when she was thirteen.