Elizabeth Emlen Roosevelt

Elizabeth Emlen Roosevelt left this life for the next on November 29, 2024 at the age of 93.

The younger daughter of John Kean Roosevelt and Elise Weinacht Roosevelt, she was born in January of 1931 and spent her childhood years in New York City and the family summer home on Cove Neck, Oyster Bay, New York. Following graduation from St. Timothy's School in Maryland, she attended the Pennsylvania School of Horticulture for Women in Ambler, Pennsylvania. Throughout her life she was interested in agriculture and spent the next four years managing her father's Florida cattle ranch and was a capable horsewoman. Unlike many women of her era, she ranged widely, both in geography and work, at one time working as the one and only stewardess for an Alaskan airline that flew to the Aleutian Islands.

In 1962 Liz graduated from the University of Denver in Colorado, with a degree in Arts and Humanities and subsequently began her teaching career in history at Syosset High School. At the end of four years there, she spent a year in Hastings, New Zealand, and then returned to Long Island to teach history and social studies for the next 27 years, 1968-1995, at Friends Academy in Locust Valley. She earned her Master's Degree in history at Long Island University in 1975. Following her retirement, she continued to teach at Friends part time, and The Elizabeth Roosevelt History Award was established there in 1999.

For several years Liz served on the Board of Trustees of the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Since retirement she has worked as a volunteer at The Oyster Bay Historical Society and the Planting Fields Arboretum in Oyster Bay. She was a longtime member and assistant treasurer of the Theodore Roosevelt Association and served on its Board of Trustees. She was the official historian of the Village of Cove Neck and recently wrote a history of Cove Neck. Her donation of family papers to the Oyster Bay Historical Society in 2010 was the basis for The Roosevelts Next Door: Portraits of Devotion, presenting the lives of another, non-political, branch of the Roosevelt family.

But above all Liz is remembered as a lifelong sailor, descended from a long line of family sailors at Seawanhaka -Corinthian Yacht Club since 1871. She remembers coiling lines on her family's Friendship sloop at the age of five, and she and her two older brothers joined the Seawanhaka Junior Yacht Club in 1946. By 1954 she became a junior club instructor and recalls that one of her duties was to drive the club launch around Oyster Bay picking up the juniors.

Since 1950 she has sailed in every Seawanhaka class of boat, was part of crews in women's championships of Long Island Sound eighteen times, and went to the Adams Cup, the women's national championship, four times. She won countless trophies for seamanship, sportsmanship, best crew, etc. including the Benzie Cup four times for excellence in sailing at Seawanhaka and was ten times winner of the Skipper series, the Squaw cup several times and a mug and cup for 25 years on the race committee, where she was one of the first women to serve. As crew, she sailed back from Bermuda, and from Labrador to Nova Scotia. She was a U.S. sailing judge for 12 years, which took her to Guadeloupe, Lake Tahoe and Ireland. There is no telling how many aspiring women sailors she has mentored.

Liz was a singularly independent woman, hardy, forging through life on her own terms, and always "calling it like she saw it".

She was preceded in death by her parents, John Kean and Elise W. Roosevelt, two brothers W. Emlen Roosevelt and J. Alfred Roosevelt, sister, Dorothea Virginia Armentrout, sisters-in-law Arlene Roosevelt, Elizabeth W. Roosevelt and Sharon Roosevelt and brother-in-law James Armentrout. She was survived only four days by her brother Peter K. Roosevelt, and is survived by sister-in-law Marjorie Roosevelt, fifteen nieces and nephews and numerous great-nieces and nephews.

The family extends grateful thanks to Susan Peterson, Victoria Armentrout, and Barbel Polansky, for their invaluable assistance to Liz during her last year.

A memorial service and Celebration of Life will be held for Liz in April.