Elsie Alexandra Carol Grosvenor Myers, Story Teller, 93
DGH
The enthusiastic, irrepressible, energetic Elsie Myers, whoat age 93,
lived her life with zest and sparked similar engagement of those she
met and who, in return, she offered a fierce loyalty, unselfish
assistance and a large share of her joie de vivre, died December 30,
2004, at the age of 93.
Elsie Alexandra Carol Grosvenor Myers, better known as Carol, was
"very, very outgoing," said her youngest son. "Definitely an
extrovert," said her only daughter. "My father said she couldn't go to
the corner to mail a letter without having an adventure," said her
99-year-old sister.
Carol, sitting with knitting needles, is shown with her grandparents
Alexander and Mabel Bell, right, about 1922.
"She'd walk into a room and just command attention from people," said
her daughter, Elsie Myers Martin. "She was really very vivacious, and
she'd smile and draw people out. Sometimes that would embarrass me, but
it was so much a part of her. She enjoyed life and she challenged other
people to do the same."
A native Washingtonian, Myers was born into a large family on what her
six siblings called the "night of the cats." Behind the family home, on
18th Street NW near Dupont Circle, there were "whole families of what
we called alley cats," said Myers's sister, Mabel Grosvenor. "That
night, we thought they were making an awful row. We ran [downstairs] to
Father, and said please throw something at the cats. He told us to be
quiet and go back upstairs. The next morning, we found out we had a new
sister."
>From that point on, Myers was rarely silent. But she also had a way of
paying attention to acquaintances that made them feel as if they were
the most important people in the world, her children said.
She grew up in privileged circumstances. One of her grandfathers, with
whom she shared a March 3 birthday, was Alexander Graham Bell, the
inventor of the telephone. She spent summers and one winter at his home
in Baddeck, Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, and he was the one who
would comfort her when she awoke in the night. Her grandmother, Mabel
Hubbard Bell, was deaf but so adept at lip reading that Myers didn't
realize until she was almost an adolescent that her grandmother
couldn't hear. Myers's father was Gilbert H. Grosvenor, the longtime
president of the National Geographic Society and editor of its
magazine, who was sometimes known as the father of photojournalism.
Although she was proud of her ancestors, she took greatest delight in
her own five offspring, who all developed careers in science. Even when
she lost the ability to speak a year or so before her death, she lit up
when her son Gardiner mentioned that one of his children was about to
get married. "A wedding? When? She was a party girl. She loved stimulus
of any sort," he said. Her favorite restaurant in old age was
McDonald's, where she could sit and watch children at play.
As a young woman, Myers attended two years of college but wasn't much
of a student. Her sister now suspects that she had dyslexia. Her
children say it was attention deficit disorder, but discovery of those
conditions was decades away. She had a boyfriend of whom her parents
did not approve, so they sent her to Japan to visit a sister, who was
married to a man in the Foreign Service. After spending some time in
Tokyo, she then took a train through China to Harbin.
She caught dysentery and returned home, where her sister Mabel, a
medical student at Johns Hopkins, told her to go see a physician she
knew. Walter K. Myers successfully treated her and formally discharged
her as a patient. Thirty seconds after that conversation, he rang back
to invite her on a date. They married in 1936.
She did serious volunteer work, teaching in the District's settlement
houses, leading the Girl Scouts at an orphanage, supporting Planned
Parenthood and the Volta Bureau, which aids the deaf and hard of
hearing, and serving on many charity boards. She was one of the
founders of the National Presbyterian School and an elder at National
Presbyterian Church, as was her husband, from the time before it moved
to its current Nebraska Avenue NW location.
Myers also would be the person in the extended family who found "the
rebel or the people in trouble," said her son Kendall. "Those nephews,
those cousins always had an ally in her. After my father died [in
1964], she was really hurting and vulnerable and developed an almost
intuitive sense for someone in that condition. She really provided a
level of protection for them."
In fact, she suffered what was then called a nervous breakdown,
Gardiner said. What pulled her out of it was sailing.
She inherited the Elsie, a small, two-masted yacht built in 1916 for
her parents and named after her mother. It was on the decks of the
yawl, with its red sails, slim white hull and low varnished deckhouses,
where the Cruising Club of America was founded in 1921. Wearing a
jacket with her self-imposed nickname "Wily Old Woman," she sailed the
Bras d'Or Lakes in Nova Scotia and taught all her children how to
skipper the wooden craft.
She believed in a right way and a wrong way to do things, and the
choices she offered her children were sometimes tests.
"In Nova Scotia, the young men had too much to drink one night," Elsie
Martin said. "The next morning there was a race, and one of the guys
was supposed to be crewing. He came to breakfast and said he couldn't
go. She lit into him: 'If you're going to act like a man at night, you
act like a man in the day. You go sail.' And he did."
Many families have a storyteller, and Myers filled that role in her
home. "She could tell a tale," said her youngest son, Aleck. "We have a
family term, 'Carol-izing,' which meant you make a story a little bit
better each time you tell it."
"She could take a routine event and it would be a wonderful tale,"
agreed her son Martin. "Sometimes they weren't completely accurate, but
they were always entertaining. She just found everything fascinating."
Washington Post
G C