Helen 'Sally' Waters Ellsworth

SALISBURY — Helen Waters Ellsworth, known as Sally, 92, died peacefully on Aug. 9, 2007, after a long illness at her home in Salisbury. For 52 years she lived in the town and was very active in community affairs.

Sally Ellsworth was born in Brookline, Mass., on Nov. 16, 1914, where she attended Miss Windsor’s School. Her parents were Bertram G. Waters and Helen Kent Shaw.

In 1955 she moved to Salisbury with her husband, Duncan S. Ellsworth, and two daughters and lived in the Bushnell Tavern house. Six years after her husband’s death in 1967, she built a modern house designed by John Johanson on her property up Selleck Hill Road.

Her first marriage, to William E. Richardson, a stage manager and designer, ended in divorce; her second, to John Elting, ended with his death in an accident in Bombay in 1941.

On her homeward voyage from India, Sally left Singapore on the last plane before its fall to the Japanese, and, after anxious waiting in Australia, took a perilous journey on a navy transport across the Pacific, in seas largely controlled by Japanese submarines. After her return to the United States she joined the Office of Strategic Services in Washington but left when she was able to join the American Red Cross in London.

With American troops flooding into England, she helped run Rainbow Corner, the social club near Piccadilly maintained by the Red Cross for enlisted men. A few days after the Normandy invasion on June 6, 1944, she was with a Red Cross unit which landed on the beaches to provide coffee and doughnuts to the troops.

She followed them into Paris and helped set up the Rainbow Corner in Paris at the Café de la Paix. She was there the night that Glenn Miller’s band played after waiting for him in vain to arrive by plane over the Channel.

In 1950 she was working in New York City as secretary general of the English-Speaking Union when she met her future husband, Duncan Ellsworth.

After moving to Salisbury, Sally was active in the Northwest Center for Family Service and Mental Health, the launch of Sarum Village and Faith House housing, the Democratic Party town committee, and was appointed a justice of the peace for some years.

She is survived by her daughters, Helen Scoville and Anne Ellsworth, and three grandchildren; as well as her stepchildren, Duncan Ellsworth, Jane Ellsworth Hotchkiss and A. Whitney Ellsworth; nine step-grandchildren; and 18 step-great-grandchildren. She also leaves many devoted nephews and nieces.

A memorial service will be held on Oct. 20, 2007, at 11 a.m. at the Congregational Church in Salisbury. There will be a private burial in Grafton, Vt. In lieu of flowers, donations may be sent to the Salisbury Housing Committee, PO Box 10, Salisbury CT 06068.