Elizabeth I. Carroll

Elizabeth I. Carroll of Montauk, 92, died at the Peconic Bay Medical Center in Riverhead on July 12. She had broken her hip in a fall and was in rehabilitation there, but succumbed to complications caused by blood clotting.

The elder of two daughters, she was born on Dec. 2, 1923,  in Manhattan and grew up in Queens Village. Her parents were Russian immigrants, Paul Ilief and the former Ekaterina Begansky, who discovered Montauk when she was a young woman.

She graduated from Queens College and went on to Hunter to pursue a master’s degree, but gave up academia in favor of medicine. She had already begun working at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, where she was to spend some three decades as an assistant in various laboratories, focusing particularly on microbiology and genetic research, topics on which she published papers. 

Liebe F. Cavalieri, a pioneer in nucleic acid research, was her mentor. 

She met her husband, John Carroll, when “teaching immigrants to dance,” her son, Paul Carroll, said yesterday.

Her parents had built a house on Midland Road in Montauk in the 1960s, where the family enjoyed cookouts on the Navy Road bay beach. The house eventually became hers.

After she retired from her job in the city, she and her husband began volunteering at the Montauk Library. “They did a lot of book repairs,” their son said. They were members of the Friends of the Montauk Library. After they retired here full time, she cared for her garden, where she loved to sun herself. Mr. Carroll predeceased his wife, who, as she grew older, became a fixture at  lunches and activities in the Senior Nutrition Center at the Playhouse.

“She was seen as a human being of grace and honesty,” her son said.

Besides her son, she leaves two grandchildren. Funeral services took place on Saturday at the Yardley and Pino Funeral Home in East Hampton, with burial following in Cedar Lawn Cemetery, East Hampton.