(Hope Pomerance) actress, wife of legendary police chief
wazzzy
Hope N. Pomerance, the redheaded actress and widow of the late,
legendary Miami Beach police chief Rocky Pomerance, died Wednesday of a
brain hemorrhage, following several small strokes. She was 77.
A familiar face in ads and commercials for the Florida Lottery, local
banks and department stores, she had small parts in many films shot in
South Florida.
The most recent: The Crew, a 2000 film with Burt Reynolds, Richard
Dreyfuss, and Lainie Kazan.
''She was in all the Jackie Gleason and Jackie Mason movies,'' said son
Ken Pomerance, 53, of Cooper City. ``She's one of the few [local]
people who made the [Screen Actors Guild] minimums year after year, and
had insurance from them.''
But she was best known as the wife of Rocky Pomerance, Miami Beach's
Ciceroquoting, pipe-smoking police chief from 1963 to 1977.
A huge man, he headed the department during the tumultuous national
political conventions of 1972, when both the Democrats and Republicans
met in Miami Beach.
Mindful of the bloodshed in Chicago in 1968, Pomerance stressed police
communication with protesters over confrontation, which prevented
violence and earned him a national reputation.
A jovial intellectual, he died at 66 in 1994, five years after a
medical mistake that deprived his brain of oxygen for 20 minutes,
leaving him with serious cognitive and physical impairments.
''A part of him knew how damaged he was,'' Hope Pomerance told The
Miami Herald for his obituary. ``He didn't have one moment's peace.''
Neither did his wife, until the family settled a $3.3 million
malpractice suit in 1993.
In the interim, they ran short of money and had to accept donations
from friends.
''My mom always said it's a loan, not a gift,'' said Ken Pomerance, a
sales-and-marketing executive. ``When the funds came in, she repaid
every single cent. She insisted on it.''
Through Rocky's illness, ''she was a hero,'' said her friend Ruth
Shack, president of the Dade Community Foundation. ``Her imperative was
to make others feel comfortable.''
Pomerance was by her husband's side daily for the eight months he spent
in a Sunrise rehab center, then a week after he came home, she found a
lump in her breast and went through chemotherapy.
She coped with humor, said her sister, Mickey Berman, 66, of Palm Beach
Gardens.
``We have laughed at things; people would think we were sick. She was
hilarious.''
Daughter Vicky Neer, a North Carolina television producer, said her
mother was with her through much of her own recent struggle with
cancer.
''She taught me to be proud and to do things with dignity,'' she said.
Born in Brooklyn and raised in Forest Hills, N.Y., Pomerance moved to
Miami Beach in 1947 with her parents, furniture-store owners Laura and
Alexander Nason.
Hope Nason met her future husband on the sands of Miami Beach, Berman
recalled. At the time, he was a postman with aspirations to police
work.
According to Berman, ''every doctor and lawyer was trying to win her,''
so it was a shock when she said she was marrying a cop.
As a mother of three, said Berman, Pomerance chose to pursue her career
``in a minimal way, but she was a star anyway. She walked into the room
and people were attracted to her.''
Said son Jim, an Atlanta-area motivational speaker: ``She [died] the
right way; my father did not. Someone said today that she would have
been the most miserable invalid in history. She was peaceful and went
the way she wanted to go.''
Services are at 10 a.m. Sunday, Riverside-Gordon Memorial Chapel, 1920
Alton Rd. Donations should be sent to The Hope and Rocky Pomerance
Fundat Dade Community Foundation, 200 S. Biscayne Blvd., Suite 505,
Miami, FL 33131.
Hope Pomerance @ IMDb: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0690055/