Eleanor Taylor Waller 1912 - 2011

Tolstoy may have been right about happy families but when it comes to great wives and Moms, they are great each in their own, often surprising ways. Eleanor Taylor Waller was full of surprises.

• At Taylor’s Grove she rode the tippy barrel horse on Lake Moraine – fully dressed - to the amazement of those cool dudes from Colgate whom its instability had completely confounded; one of those dudes she married.
• They eloped since a senior at Syracuse U. could not be married – more than surprising, to put it mildly, my Taylor and Waller grandparents; her sisters, neighbors and class mates; and probably Dad as well.
• When we moved to Hinsdale and discovered in spring that the “side yard” was a strawberry field, she started canning and set up a fruit stand in front to the utter mortification of her socially awkward seventh-grade son.
• Out of the blue, she took my third-grade sister to buy a bowl of goldfish, “just to spend time with you” she explained years later, giving Carol the gift of a lifelong glow.
• Back in Maryland, she didn’t protest when Dad embarked on a budget backyard swimming pool per Popular Mechanics, nor did she mutter a peep when it turned into a bloomin’ disaster of rusty red water leaking away, followed by noxious algae blooms, mosquitoes and frogs.
• She was determined to hybridize a truly blue African violet. You had to watch where you sat, because there were cuttings in sulphurous eggshell-water sitting on every available horizontal surface in our house.
• We shrugged it off when she said she was saving to buy a greenhouse – until a truck pulled up and unloaded aluminum spars, crates of plate glass, a million bolts and nuts and minimal instructions. Next, the backhoe arrived to bash a hole in my bedroom wall and hollow out a below-grade foundation. Dad and I were conscripted laborers.
• She encouraged Dad to kick over the corporate traces; she becoming President of Door County Sailing; he: Exec. VP; headquarters: Fish Creek; total employment: two.
• When leasing boats and teaching sailing didn’t work so well during winters on Tampa Bay, they bought Beaver Flags. She hired retired ILGWU seamstresses, allowing Dad to hang out at yacht club bars sketching personal burgees on the back of cocktail napkins which she and staff then sewed and sold at exorbitant prices to delighted yacht owners throughout the south. Still the best burgees available.
• She ran Beaver Flags until near ninety, and couldn’t understand it when one of her seamstresses wanted to retire again at 75 or so.
• She took to making wine, this daughter of a Women’s Christian Temperance Union chapter president, terrible grapefruit wine happily bubbling away in carboys filling spare bathrooms and bedrooms until it reached alcohol levels somewhere north of 15%. I always brought a supply of Napa chardonnay when I visited. T-men never did show up.
• She spent a live-aboard year on a 32’ sloop, then was graduated by Dad into a 44’ ketch from Hong Kong; they sailed it in the Caribbean until they could no longer safely handle it alone. So then they homesteaded an abandoned dairy farm and sugar bush in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont, building a cabin and planting an orchard for “future generations.”
• She started quadrennial reunions of the Taylor and Waller clans. Seven cousins, spouses, grandkids, great-grandkids, and even a great-great.
• In spring she held Rays seats and scored games into her late eighties, then during Vermont summers watched the Red Sox Network every game. Playoffs were an agony of conflicted loyalties.
• She was constantly expanding the Vermont cabin “for the grandkids” after Dad died. She played with her bridge group and volunteered at the Barton Library until her mid-nineties. The only project she didn’t fully complete was to build a putting green in the hay field. (And no, she didn’t play golf.)
• No retirement home for her. She designed and built an apartment onto Adrien’s home and lived out her winters there on Tampa Bay, basking in Adrien’s, Edward’s and grandkid Helms’ loving attention.

She loved us all, our spouses and our kids; our misadventures; the dogs -- Cindy, T-bolt, Hubbub, Trouble and Beau; the canaries and parakeets she was always trying to breed; Frisky, the award-winning oyster; her orchids and most of all and forever, Dad. She always told it straight, kept her disapprovals private, and always found in us, herself and the rest of the clan something to laugh about.


Truly, one of the great wives and Moms….