Helen Marvelle Rose

1930s

Born 10 February 1930 in Manhattan to Jack Rose and Stella Kutner, and grew up with her brother Ted in the Bronx and then Brooklyn.

1940s

Spent summers at camps in the Catskills and the Berkshires, lived on President Street in Brooklyn, and graduated from Samuel J. Tilden High School with a commercial diploma. Started work as a stenographer in 1948.

1950s

A secretary in downtown Manhattan. Married Barney Weber on 6 November 1954 in Brooklyn, and from 1956 worked in the personnel office of the Sloan-Kettering Institute.

1960s–1970s

Worked for a law firm until 1961, then settled in Rego Park, Queens, volunteered at local hospitals, and helped Barney run his sandwich shop.

1980s

Widowed in April 1980. Found a new faith in Christian Science and worked as a nursing department secretary in Riverdale.

1990s–2010s

Visited her son's family in Vermont, served on Queens juries, and in her seventies took computer courses for the visually impaired. Died 24 March 2011 in Forest Hills, Queens.

A Bronx and Brooklyn Childhood

Helen Marvelle Rose, called Leni by at least one admirer and known in Hebrew as Hannah, was born on February 10, 1930, in Manhattan, the daughter of Jacob "Jack" Rose and Esther "Stella" Kutner. She spent her first years on Sheridan Avenue in the Bronx with her younger brother Ted, and by the war years the family had moved to Brooklyn, first to Albany Avenue and then to 1625 President Street, which was home until 1952. As a girl she kept a pet monkey and a white Persian cat. She and Ted had their picture taken beside the Lone Ranger statue at Gimbels in 1939 and visited the 1939–40 New York World's Fair together.

Summers meant camp: Bruce Lynn Camp in 1941, Camp TA-RI-GO near Fleischmanns in the Catskills in 1942, a turn as a counselor herself in 1945, and tennis at Camp Mi-Yo-Quan in 1947. Around 1944 the family celebrated Ted's bar mitzvah at Jack Silverman's Old Roumanian on Allen Street, and for her sixteenth birthday in February 1946 her mother took her and Ted to the 400 Restaurant at Fifth Avenue and 43rd Street. Postcards from admiring young men survive from these years. At Samuel J. Tilden High School she took the commercial course, learning Pitman shorthand, and graduated with a commercial diploma.

A Secretary in Manhattan

In August 1948 Helen went to work as a stenographer for Robert Hall Clothes on Broadway. She left the next year because she refused to join the union. She then spent more than two years with John Chatillon & Sons, the cutlery and scale makers on Cliff Street, leaving for lack of any chance to advance, and from 1951 to 1955 she was a secretary at Surface Combustion Corporation at 225 Broadway, which made Janitrol heating equipment.

In July 1951 she was photographed at Sha-Wan-Ga Lodge in the Catskills with Barney Weber, and on November 6, 1954, they were married at 1661 St. John's Place in Brooklyn. She kept working: after a year with an employment agency, she spent 1956 to 1959 as secretary to the personnel director of the Sloan-Kettering Institute on East 68th Street, leaving to help Barney with his business, and in 1960–61 she was a legal secretary at a law office on William Street until she left, pregnant, in February 1961.

Queens, the Restaurant, and a Sudden Loss

From the mid-1960s the Webers lived in an apartment on 99th Street in Rego Park, Queens, which would be Helen's home for the rest of her life. In the 1960s and '70s she took summer temp jobs, and she volunteered for years at Memorial Sloan-Kettering and as a diversional therapist at LaGuardia Hospital. In the 1970s she worked beside Barney at his sandwich shop, Ben's Sandwiches on West 55th Street, whose company name, Helber Foods, combined Helen's name with Weber.

On April 13, 1980, Barney was killed in a head-on collision on the Queensboro Bridge. Helen, just fifty, reopened the shop and then sold it. She hired an attorney to seek damages from the other driver and, as administrator of Barney's estate, found herself named in a suit the following year by the other car's injured passengers.

A New Faith

Around 1979 Helen had wandered into the Christian Science Reading Room in her neighborhood and borrowed a copy of Mary Baker Eddy's Science and Health. The next weekend she went to a lecture, within weeks she was studying the Bible lessons every day, and within a year she had joined the church and taken a job as its part-time secretary. In August 1980 she spent two weeks in a Christian Science class in Greenwich Village. The faith became the center of her life. She served her Forest Hills congregation as clerk of the board of trustees, spent three years as First Reader and later served as Second Reader, and in 1989 wrote a testimony of healing for the Christian Science Sentinel.

Needing full-time work after Barney's death, she took a job in March 1981 at High Ridge House in Riverdale, in the Bronx. She started as an office secretary, trained and worked as a nurse's aide for six months, and then became secretary of the nursing department, staying until 1989. By the end her commute took three and a half hours a day. The staff newsletter described her as especially fond of baroque music and deeply interested in painting, both watercolors and oils. She left in 1989 intending to take a secretarial post in Boston but turned it down when she saw what the rents were.

Later Years

Helen stayed busy. She served on Queens County juries at least five times between 1987 and 2004, planned to attend the Sunday afternoon concert series at Carnegie Hall with a neighbor in 1990, and made regular trips to Vermont to see her son and his family, including birthday parties for her grandson Ben, among them one at a mini-golf course. Apparently coping with failing eyesight, she enrolled, in her mid-seventies, at Baruch College's computer center for the visually impaired, earning A's in courses on Windows, Word, and surfing the Internet and going on to Excel. In 2010, at her own request, she left the roll of her Christian Science church. Helen died at Forest Hills Hospital in Queens on March 24, 2011, at eighty-one.