Heckscher Drive Neighborhood

Would that we could live as she did...

Jan 04, 2000

from NY Times on the web...January 3, 2000

A New Yorker Born in 1898 Dies at the Dawn of 2000

By ROBERT D. McFADDEN
Her name was Charlotte Green, and she was 101 years old when she died of kidney failure at a hospital in Manhattan on Saturday afternoon, a few hours after the new century began. By the ordinary measures of a life in this city of power and riches that had been her lifelong home, she was an unknown woman.

She had never married, and for 60 years had worked for a Wall Street law firm as a secretary, librarian and chief clerk, retiring 22 years ago. And if it had not been for the span of her life, which gave her a foothold in three centuries, perhaps no one would have cared enough to write about her.

But there is a history in every life, as Shakespeare noted, and a few people who loved Miss Green -- relatives, friends and colleagues -- took a few hours on the telephone yesterday to remember a tall, intelligent and graceful woman who was a perceptive witness to the 20th century of her city, from horse-and-buggy days to the building of its skyline and the rise of its great institutions.

She wanted to do everything in her beloved city, they said, and came close. She saw Babe Ruth at Yankee Stadium and Enrico Caruso at the old Metropolitan Opera and had subscriptions to the New York City Ballet, the New York Philharmonic and Carnegie Hall. She rode on trolley cars, worked for $6 a week, wore ribbed stockings and recalled winters in the days before the city plowed snow from the streets.

At Lord, Day & Lord, the now-defunct, once-prestigious law firm where she worked from 1918 to 1978, she became the most indispensable nonlawyer in the house, supervising the nonlegal staff and library and keeping track of court dates and case obligations for 125 lawyers who represented such clients as the Cunard ship line, The New York Times and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Miss Green, as everyone at the firm called her, was an original tenant of Stuyvesant Town on the Lower East Side, moving into a $65-a-month, one-bedroom apartment in 1947 and staying on until the end of her life. On her vacations, she traveled the world -- to Europe, India, South America, Africa and Asia, to China for six weeks at the age of 85 -- savoring restaurants, theaters, museums, galleries and exotic street life, just as she did in New York.

She seemed to be good at everything -- playing the piano, photography, golf, foreign languages, cooking. But yesterday, as those closest to her recalled, it was her quiet kindnesses, her generosity and her way with people that seemed to place her in the obituary pantheon of corporate giants and political sachems.

"She touched everybody's life," Miss Green's niece, Joan M. Appleby, of Wayside, N.J., said. "It was how she made you feel when you spoke to her. She was very interested in you, the other person. She was probably the most remarkable woman I ever knew."

Lea Layng, 90, who worked with Miss Green at Lord, Day & Lord for 30 years, said it was her friend who persuaded her to marry at the age of 50. "I met him on a blind date, and she met him," Ms. Layng recalled. "Later, he asked me to marry him and she said, 'Do it.' I always attributed my marriage to her."

Leonard Leaman, 84, who worked for Lord, Day & Lord for 50 years and, because of a boyhood encounter, knew Miss Green for 76 years, remembered her as a clerical keystone at the firm, keeping track of business and appointments for everyone. "She was the grande dame all right," he said. "Everyone liked her. She had a hell of a good mind. She didn't equivocate, but had a subdued manner. Not the bossy type. This is before the girls got emancipated."

Sandra Davis, a relative who published a family genealogy in 1997, put it this way: "Be all you can be and see all you can see aptly describes Charlotte's life."

Charlotte Green was born in Manhattan on Aug. 25, 1898, the year that 40 local governments were consolidated into New York City. She was the oldest of three children of William Green, a printer, and his wife, Rose, who cleaned houses to add income to the impoverished family. Charlotte was always close to her siblings, Jerome, who was born in 1903 and died 15 years ago, and Harriet Green Masury, who was born in 1900 and died in November 1998.

The family moved to the Bronx early in the century. Ms. Davis, who interviewed Miss Green for her genealogy, said Ms. Green described her childhood as happy, though she did not receive her first doll until she was 8, and her first new dress was a gift from a cousin.

Miss Green remembered winters adrift in snow, playing jacks on the sidewalk, trolley cars and annual Fourth of July outings to Coney Island. Her father took her to see Babe Ruth and talked about the day's news over the dinner table; her mother did the family laundry weekly with a hand wringer and two washtubs.

At 10, the girl began taking piano lessons from a cousin; her mother cleaned the cousin's house in exchange, but the value was incalculable: it began a lifelong love of music that made the work of Beethoven and Mozart and others so indelible that she could hear it with crystalline clarity in her head in the last years of her life, though she had lost her hearing.



She was a good student at Morris High School, taking commercial courses and graduating, after three years, in 1916. Her first clerical job paid $6 a week, but that did not last long. Her second, as a stenographer for a lawyer, paid more and the wage quickly rose to $15 and then $18 a week.

In 1918, at the age of 20, she got a job with Lord, Day & Lord, which had been founded in 1848 and was already one of the most prestigious firms in the city, specializing in civil practice, including maritime law, real estate and estates and trusts. Its offices at 49 Wall Street, and later in the Cunard Building at 25 Broadway, near the Custom House on Bowling Green, were thickly carpeted, with oil paintings on the walls and many offices paneled with lustrous woods.

A picture from 1918 shows her as a thin young woman with a longish nose, a prominent chin, carefully waved hair parted on the left, and a serious, almost solemn face above the prim collar of a dress with a row of pearl buttons down the front. She is not wearing glasses, though she seems to need them.

As a teenager, the cornea of her right eye was scratched, and despite -- or perhaps because of -- repeated operations, she had vision problems all her life, compounding the hardship of the heavy reading she was obliged to do in her work and in her legion of outside interests.

Miss Green took dictation longhand and transcribed it on a typewriter. But she later took evening courses at Columbia University and New York University to improve her English and writing skills, and she promoted in the 1930's to librarian and then to manager of law clerks.

Mr. Leaman, whose father had been head of the law firm's real estate department, recalled meeting Miss Green on a trip to the office as a boy in the 1920's. She gave him paper clips to play with, and he remembered her when he became a lawyer at the firm in 1940. Even then, he said, she was "the nerve center of the office."

As managing clerk, Miss Green kept track of all litigation and the calendars for executing it, informed lawyers when they had to file briefs and appeals and meet other court dates, and read all briefs, not for legal reasons, but for grammar, punctuation and what Mr. Leaman called "persuasiveness."

While her education was limited, she was extremely intelligent, he said, and was entrusted with a job that another law firm would ordinarily have assigned to a lawyer -- the negotiation of workmen's compensation injury claims. Since Lord, Day & Lord represented Cunard, which had hundreds of ships and thousands of seamen, there were hundreds of such claims to be negotiated, and Miss Green handled them -- in addition to all her other duties -- with dispatch, he said.

"She was extremely effective in representing Cunard," Mr. Leaman said.

Ms. Layng, who joined Lord, Day & Lord in 1942 and worked there for 30 years, was one of a coterie of lifetime friends Miss Green made on the job, people who joined her in her expeditions around the city and sometimes on her travels abroad.

"She did everything, she knew everything that was going on," said Ms. Layng, who for her last 15 years at the firm was the secretary to one of its top partners, Herbert Brownell, who had been the United States Attorney General in the administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

"She was also the librarian," Mr. Layng said of Miss Green. "She had to keep track of all the books, all the new laws that came out. She had to know authors, tax laws and so on. She cataloged everything. We adored her. She was a very kind person. We had a lot of office boys and girls and she taught them a great deal -- about the firm and about life. Courtesy. Manners. That's the way Charlotte was."

Ms. Layng said that in the 30 years that she knew about, Miss Green had never missed a day to illness. She was always on the go, with season tickets or subscriptions to symphonies, operas, the dance and other performing arts. Besides Caruso, she adored Beverly Sills, Luciano Pavarotti and her favorite, Pl?¡cido Domingo.


But what she remembered most about Miss Green was her sensitivity to others, the qualities that do not fit in the headlines. "She took an interest in people," Ms. Layng said. "She could bring out the good points in a person. She had a way of doing that. And she was a very modest person."

While Miss Green never married, she had an active social life, Ms. Layng recalled. "She had a gentleman friend for long time," she said, "but I can't think of his name."

Ms. Layng and Mrs. Appleby remembered that Miss Green took great care in her appearance, usually wearing conservative suits or dresses, never slacks. She and her circle of friends celebrated birthdays and other occasions with dinners that dotted the calendar.

Her vacations became a doorway to the world. Beginning in 1930, she flew to Europe, a trek that took 16 hours, and subsequently traveled all over Europe, and to Japan, India, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Iran, Iraq, New Zealand and a number of countries in Africa. She usually took hundreds of photographs and brought back artifacts that decorated her apartment.

When she retired in 1978, the law firm held a dinner at a Midtown hotel and gave her a silver tray and what she really wanted most -- a trip to Australia. Ten years later, the firm was merged with another and became Lord, Day & Lord, Barrett Smith, and in 1994 the firm was dissolved.

Miss Green's eyesight and hearing began to fail in recent years. She could no longer read or watch television, but did listen to recordings of classical music. "She couldn't hear it, but she knew it so well she could hear it in her mind," Mrs. Appleby said.

She recalled a trip with her aunt to Cape May some years ago. They checked into a Victorian bed and breakfast, strolled on the beaches and breathed in the salt air of the ocean, using the last of her senses to take in the fading world. "I loved to do things with her," Mrs. Appleby said. "I always learned things. She loved everything about New York. She was the most vital person I ever knew."

As the millennium approached, Mrs. Appleby said, her aunt said little about it, Last Thursday, with two days to go in 1999, Mrs. Appleby took Miss Green to New York University Hospital. She was suffering from pneumonia, and the end was near.

On her last day, Miss Green could not see or hear the celebrations that roared across the city and blared over the television. "But she knew she was going to be alive in three different centuries, and that meant a lot to her," Mrs. Appleby said. At 2:45 p.m., with the year 2000 less than 15 hours old and her family at her side, Miss Green died peacefully.