Helen Marvelle Rose

Born February 10, 1930 in Manhattan, New York. She worked as nursing department secretary. She died March 24, 2011 in Forest Hills Hospital, Queens, New York.

• A stenographer for Robert Hall Clothes, Inc. on Broadway, 1948–1949.
• At her own request, removed from the membership roll of the First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Forest Hills in 2010.

A Bronx and Brooklyn Childhood

Helen Marvelle Rose was born on February 10, 1930, in Manhattan, the daughter of Jacob “Jack” Rose and Esther “Stella” Kutner, and grew up with her brother Ted in the Bronx and later Brooklyn. She kept a pet monkey and a white Persian cat as a girl, visited the 1939–40 New York World's Fair with Ted, and spent wartime summers at Jewish summer camps in the Catskills — Bruce Lynn Camp and Camp TA-RI-GO among them.

Four Decades of Secretarial Work

Helen built a long career as a stenographer and secretary in Manhattan, moving through a series of firms over more than three decades: Robert Hall Clothes (1948–49), the cutlery and scale manufacturer John Chatillon & Sons (1949–51), Surface Combustion Corporation (1951–55, until her marriage), a Midtown law office, and, from 1956, Memorial Sloan-Kettering's personnel department, which she left to help her husband Barney with his restaurant business in the 1970s. After Barney's death in 1980 she reopened and sold his restaurant, then worked as a hospital patient-library assistant, a part-time church secretary, and finally, from 1981 to 1989, as the nursing department secretary at High Ridge House in Riverdale, a job that came with a three-and-a-half-hour daily commute by her final years there.

Loss and a New Faith

Widowed at fifty, Helen pursued a wrongful-death claim against the driver responsible for Barney's accident. Around 1979 she discovered Christian Science, working her way from a borrowed copy of Mary Baker Eddy's “Science and Health” to church membership within about a year; she went on to serve as church secretary, as Clerk of the Board of Trustees, and eventually as a reader for her congregation, the First Church of Christ, Scientist in Forest Hills, where she remained a member for over two decades.

Later Years

In her later years — evidently coping with declining eyesight — Helen took computer classes at Baruch College's center for the visually impaired, earning top marks in courses on Windows, Word, and internet use in her seventies. She served repeatedly on Queens County juries into her seventies, kept up regular visits to family in Vermont, and was remembered by her workplace newsletter as especially fond of baroque music and watercolor and oil painting. She left her Christian Science church roll by her own request in 2010 and died at Forest Hills Hospital on March 24, 2011, at eighty-one.