Elizabeth Miner Fosdick

Elizabeth Miner Fosdick, known as Betty to her many Newtown friends, died May 25 at the Caleb Hitchcock Health Center at Duncaster in Bloomfield.

She was 109 years old, and her long life touched three centuries. Longevity did appear to run in the family. Her great-grandmother, who lived to be 101, was also alive in three centuries. She was born in 1799 (the same year George Washington died) and died in 1900.

Born in Fredonia, N.Y., in 1894, Elizabeth Miner later moved with her family to New York City where she attended public high school.

Admitted to Smith College in Northampton, Mass., she graduated Phi Beta Kappa with the Class of 1918. At the time of her death, she was considered the oldest living Smith graduate.

She then served as a secretary in business establishments and social agencies in New York and on the staff of the Children’s Bureau in Washington, D.C. Following a year of travel in Europe she took a position as executive secretary to Raymond B. Fosdick, then president of the Rockefeller Foundation and a former undersecretary of the League of Nations.

In 1936, she and Mr Fosdick were married, when she was 42 and he was 53. They traveled widely in the United States and abroad, meeting and getting to know many of the intellectual and political leaders of the day.

After coming many years to their Newtown farm on Boggs Hill Road for weekends, they retired here in 1948 and Mrs Fosdick continued as helpmate to her husband. In his autobiobraphy, Mr Fosdick described her as his “comrade and collaborator who was to buttress the most satisfactory period in my life.”

In those early days, Boggs Hill Road was all dirt and the cars that passed were few and far between, Mrs Fosdick recalled during an interview with The Bee in 2002.

“Back then it was really, really country. There were about 3,000 residents in town. We always spoke of living on a farm. Of course, it wasn’t a farm, but there were lots of wooded areas and I enjoyed gardening.”

Raymond and Betty Fosdick were among the Newtown Forest Association’s earliest and most generous supporters. In the 1960s they donated approximately 66 acres of their Boggs Hill Road property to the private land trust.

The Fosdicks’ home was next door to that of longtime resident Al Goodrich. For many years after Raymond Fosdick died in 1972, the Goodrich family would faithfully bring dog-toothed violets to Betty Fosdick when they bloomed in April in the nearby woods.

She explained that until he died, her husband would pick them for her. Then Al Goodrich was kind enough to continue the tradition. He even brought them after she left Newtown in 1985 to live in the Duncaster retirement community in Bloomfield. For 19 years, she was a beloved resident of that community, and she never returned to Newtown.

“When you love a place like that and you have to leave because of age, you never want to go back,” she commented.

She was a lifelong adventurer, traveling solo around the world in 1931 and taking up classical Greek in her 70s so she could read inscriptions on the monuments in Greece.

Betty Fosdick had many close friends and family members. She was a nonsmoker and never drank, which may help explain her long life. She said at one point that her fondest memory was the day she got to look thought the eyepiece of the Mount Palomar Telescope in California, which, at the time, was the largest in the world.

She is survived by four generations of adoring and admiring nieces and nephews.

Services will be private. Arrangements by Honan Funeral Home, 58 Main Street, Newtown.

The Newtown Bee        May 28, 2004