Dan's Papers - August 24, 2007 - Jeanette Brody Rattiner, 94

Jeanette Brody Rattiner is best remembered in this community as the co-owner, along with her late husband Al, of White's Drug and Department Store in Montauk during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. She was active in the Jewish Center of the Hamptons, and was among the original families who formed that organization. And she was an active golfer, playing whenever the opportunity came up. Upon the sale of the store, she and Alan became snowbirds and began a long retirement, spending summers in Montauk and playing golf at Montauk and at Noyac, where they had been charter members from the 1950s, and in Florida at Palm Aire in Pompano Beach, where she and Al lived in a condominium on the eighth hole of one of the five golf courses that were built for that community.

If these were the things that Mrs. Rattiner was known for here on the East End, she was known nationally for something very much else. Growing up in Brooklyn as an opinionated and precocious girl with an intellectual bent, she went off to college at the age of sixteen, just two months before black Monday brought the country to a halt in the Wall Street crash of 1929. With her immigrant parents unable to afford to continue with her schooling, she obtained a scholastic scholarship and was accepted at Brooklyn Law School, where she graduated in June of 1935 as one of just thirteen women and with the highest grades in the history of the school. Her accomplishment was noted in the New York Times, as were some parts of her Valedictory speech. Nevertheless, because she was a woman, and because there had never been a female valedictorian before, she was denied what was normally given to the Valedictorian of the School, which was a clerkship with a State Supreme Court Justice. Some of her professors scrambled around, and ultimately she was offered a job, a rare job during the Depression, as a lawyer working to revise the charter for the City of New York under Mayor LaGuardia. To the end of her days, although not generally known in the struggle of the women's movement, she was often sought out by younger women lawyers as a source of inspiration in that cause, who viewed her with a sense of awe.

After two years working on the charter, Mrs. Rattiner had a blind date with a man who had been voted the handsomest man in the graduating class of the Brooklyn College of Pharmacy. Coming downstairs to the living room of her parent's home to meet him, she tripped on the steps and tumbled down the stairs and into his arms. She often told this story. Soon after, she married him. When asked why by her son, who is here writing of her passing, she once replied, "because he was a hunk."

The Rattiners soon settled in Millburn, New Jersey, living there for the next eighteen years, raising their son Daniel, and their daughter Nancy, who was raised there until the age of 10 and then moved in 1956, with her parents, to finish her upbringing, in the motel and fishing town of Montauk, N.Y.

Mrs. Rattiner was often described as a life force. Although friendly enough with strangers, she held her guard up until she was sure of them. She had lived through a triple threat - the Depression, the Second World War and the Holocaust where many of her friends had perished. But once inside her circle, she was both generous and loyal. She was funny, curious, liberal, a founder of book clubs, and it was not unusual for her, with her husband, when living in Montauk, to get in the car, drive to New York City to have dinner and see a Broadway show, and then drive back later that night. She also continued dozens of friendships with some of the couples that she raised her children with and who made the rest of their lives in New Jersey, often visiting them or entertaining them in her home in Montauk on long weekends. She was also fiercely supportive of almost everything that her children, and later her grandchildren, did. And if she was not supportive, she would tell them so. She marked the birthdays of every one among her friends and in her family with presents, cards, parties, and if they were less than 18, money. And when her husband, in his 70s, became ill with Parkinsons, she personally nursed him and encouraged him for nearly fifteen years until his final passing. People observing this, inside the family and out, often commented that she kept him going, going places and doing things, in a way that seemed to defy fate. If there was anyone who could get him to live almost forever, it would be her. It was unbelievable.

Mrs. Rattiner sold the Montauk home when her husband died, and continued with her cultural life and her many friends at Pompano Beach in Florida until her passing on August 15, 2007. She continued playing golf almost to the end. On the afternoon of August 14, she had gone to a lecture, then gone on to dinner with a friend. There she suffered a massive stroke, an ambulance took her to the hospital where she was declared non-responsive. She had a living will, and as a result of its wishes, died the next day. She is survived by her two children, six grandchildren and four great grandchildren, and she is buried next to the man she loved in the Wellwood Cemetery in Farmingdale, Long Island.