Denyse E. Reid, 96

Denyse E. Reid, who aided the allied forces in Belgium during World War II and was a community activist after settling in Princeton, N.J., in 1955, died on Nov. 14 at the Acorn Glen Assisted Living Facility in Princeton, where she had lived for eight years.

Mrs. Reid often said her favorite memories of the war were seeing the Belgian flag flying for the first time on a British tank rolling down one of Brussels’ main boulevards after five years of German occupation, and answering the door at home after the liberation to find her father standing there.  

She was born in Brussels in 1922 to the former Germaine Gontier and Jacques Van Hove, a career soldier who eventually became a colonel in the King’s Regiment in Belgium, having survived five years in a prison camp. She studied clothes design in Brussels before and during the war.

Mrs. Reid met her American-born husband, John Reid, at an officer’s club in Brussels two months before the Battle of the Bulge. He was at the time an air aide to the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force, which Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower commanded throughout the war. He and Mrs. Reid, who spoke perfect English, talked over dinner, and the attraction was instant, her family said.

“The next day they went dancing, and my father visited her every day at their home right in the middle of Brussels after that,” said Mrs. Reid’s eldest son, Archibald Reid. “My mother always laughed and said he had two things they hadn’t seen in years: He had Life Buoy soap. They had no soap during the war, except this lye and tallow soap that was awful. And he had cans of fruit cocktail. They couldn’t believe it. They hadn’t seen any fruit in five years, either.”

Mr. and Mrs. Reid were married on July 24, 1949, and lived in Charlotte, N.C., and East Hampton, where their two children spent every summer, as Mr. Reid had as a child, then settling in Princeton. 

There, Mrs. Reid was active as the chairwoman of several international festivals, and as a forceful environmental advocate. Her family said she became known in Princeton as “The Sewer Lady” after her knowledge of the Federal Clean Water Act prompted her to serve for many years on a site plan review advisory committee, which helped establish a regional sewage plant.

In East Hampton, where she lived on Egypt Lane, Mrs. Reid was a member of the Maidstone Club and Ladies Village Improvement Society and enjoyed long days at the beach with her children, grandchildren, and friends. She was also a patron of a composer and several local artists.

She was predeceased by her husband, who died on Dec. 19, 1990, and a daughter, Anne Denyse Reid, who died in 1976. She is survived by her sons, John Reid of East Hampton and Archibald Reid of Princeton, and by two grandsons, William Howell Reid and John Reid, who spent summer breaks visiting his grandmother at Acorn Glen to read to her.

One of Mrs. Reid’s final acts of public service was donating her body to Robert Wood Johnson Hospital in Brunswick, N.J., for medical research. She will eventually be cremated, and the ashes will be returned to her family.