Obituaries

Sandra Jean Bennett, who was diagnosed with breast cancer when she was 39 and who survived the cancer’s spread for many years, died at her Springs home on Nov. 17. She was 78.

Warren Jordan MacIsaac, a humanities and drama professor who was an expert on Shakespeare and modern European drama, died at home in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 14.

William Riley Franklin Jr., a writer and former Bridgehampton and Sag Harbor resident who in the 1970s actively opposed both a Route 27 bypass project and aircraft traffic at East Hampton Airport, died on Nov. 6 in Great Neck.

Carol M. Mercer, an award-wining garden designer, died on Saturday at home in East Hampton. She was 92.

Confesor Samot, who moved to East Hampton from Isabella, Puerto Rico, in 1971 with his wife and six children, died at home here on Nov. 3. He was 83 and had had Alzheimer’s disease.

David Condie Lamb, a retired naval commander who grew up in East Hampton and New York City, died in Arlington, Va., on Nov. 10, following a series of strokes last summer. He was 87.

Frederick Loftus Dankmyer of Orwigsburg, Pa., and Amagansett, a physician who had been a flight surgeon and was an ophthalmologist, died on Nov. 13 at home in Amagansett.

Jack Rivkin, who has been credited with introducing investment research practices that elevated some of Wall Street’s biggest firms beginning in the 1980s, died on Nov. 8 surrounded by family at his home in Amagansett, where he lived part time since the mid-1970s. He was 76 years old and had pancreatic cancer for the last seven months.

Martin Foster Johns, an ardent surfer and fisherman in his hometown of Montauk, died of pneumonia in Sebastian, Fla., on Nov. 10, at the age of 58.

Rosa Rojas “taught about giving and led by example,” her family wrote. She was “a devoted wife, mother, grandmother, sister, and friend, who had a deep faith in God.”

Thomas Stewart Waller, a former Springs resident who ran a computer store in Bridgehampton while living here, died on Nov. 16 in Portland, Ore., of a heart attack. He was 61.

Tracy Ann Segelken, a public safety dispatcher and one of the first female firefighters in the Springs Fire Department, died of heart failure on Nov. 12 at Southampton Hospital. She was 52.

A memorial service for Elbert Edwards, a member of the East Hampton Village Board and a 12th-generation member of one of East Hampton’s founding families, will be held on Saturday at 11 a.m. at the East Hampton Presbyterian Church.

A memorial service for Jack L. Rivkin, a longtime resident of Tyson Lane in East Hampton, will be held today 4 to 7 p.m. at the Angler’s Club of New York at 101 Broad Street in Manhattan.

Thomas X. Mackey, a retired Sag Harbor Village police lieutenant, died on Nov. 4 at home in Bonita Springs, Fla. He was 55. The cause of death was an apparent heart attack, his brother, Chip Mackey of East Islip, said.

Judith Sartorius Seixas, a psychologist who wrote two well-received books on the treatment of alcoholism and was a Springs summer resident since the 1950s, died on Nov. 2 at Sunrise of Weston in Weston, Mass.

Louise Meybert, who signed up at Penn Station after World War II to buy land in Montauk with her sister Anne, died at home there on Oct. 26.

Delia Yuska, a lifelong resident of East Hampton, died on Oct. 23 at the age of 87. 

Her family said Mrs. Yuska, who was born on Nov. 13, 1928, died at home, but declined to provide further information.

Frank J. Forde, a native of Dublin who served in India, Egypt, and Palestine with the British Army before coming to the United States in 1950, died on Sept. 8 at Southampton Hospital at the age of 90. His death was attributed to dehydration and other natural causes.

Jeffrey Slonim of New York City and East Hampton, a journalist and reporter who started his prolific career at Interview magazine, died at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center in New York on Oct. 13 as the result of a fall. He was 56 years old.

Margaret Dowdney Watson, a prolific painter who lived and worked in East Hampton and Manhattan, died on Oct. 14 at Flesher’s Fairview Health and Retirement Center in Fairview, N.C.

Word has been received here of the death on Aug. 10 of Mark Jeffrey Cohan of Manhattan and East Hampton. Mr. Cohan, who was 74, had been diagnosed with prostate cancer not long ago.

Shirley Theodora Ford Garrett, who spent her childhood summers in Sag Harbor and retired there in 1996, died at home on Oct. 16. She was 81 and had had Parkinson’s disease for about three years.

Mrs. Garrett was close to her sister, Marian Ford Pryce of Sag Harbor, who affectionately called her “the volunteer of America” this week. She was a familiar face at the food pantry of St. Ann’s Episcopal Church in Bridgehampton, the Animal Rescue Fund thrift shop, and the Retired Senior Volunteer Program, whose members look out for older people living alone. 

Elizabeth Lee White, a Montauk Historical Society president for 20 years who was a charter member of the Montauk Lighthouse Committee when it took over stewardship of the Light, died on Oct. 10 at the age of 76.

Elsie Lawall Treleaven came to know Amagansett as a teenager, when her parents had a summer house on Bluff Road. She learned to sail at the Devon Yacht Club and developed a deep love of the hamlet, eventually returning to live there with her family in the early 1960s.

Florence Lillian Talmage, an East Hampton native who spent her entire life in the town, died on Oct. 10 at the Peconic Bay Skilled Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Riverhead, at the age of 86. She had been diagnosed with cancer about a year ago.

Mrs. Talmage was born at home on Feb. 19, 1930, one of three children of Sidney N. Bye and the former Christine E. Mott. She attended East Hampton High School and married William W. Talmage soon after leaving school, on Jan. 24, 1948.

William Warren Bates, who served the East Hampton and Springs Fire Departments for a combined 58 years and founded Bates Electric, a company still going strong after 50 years in business, died at Southampton Hospital on Oct. 12 of congestive heart failure.

Angelina Anna Ross of Sagaponack died on Sept. 30 at the Kanas Center for Hospice Care in Westhampton Beach. She was 73 and had had pancreatic cancer for four years. Donna Ross Levy said her mother had responded well to chemotherapy and survived longer than most who have that illness. “She was a fighter, very strong willed,” Ms. Levy said.

Charles Sheridan Preusse, a former East Hampton resident who served in the Air Force and had a career at the New York Stock Exchange, died on Oct. 3 at the home of one of his sons in Frederick, Md. He was 76 and had pancreatic cancer.

Visiting hours for Betsy White of Montauk, who died on Monday at Southampton Hospital, will be held tomorrow from 1 to 5 and from 7 to 9 p.m. at the Yardley and Pino Funeral Home in East Hampton.