A Life Well-Lived: Isabelle Hickingbotham Monteleone died peacefully in her sleep October 11 at her home in East Harwich, Massachusetts, almost exactly a year after family and friends held an early 100th birthday celebration for her. Born in Peru, Massachusetts, December 15, 1918, to Harry and Gladys Sherman Hickingbotham, she started life where a brook fed water to a hand pump in the house and the family raised its own vegetables, chickens and pigs.
If childhood can be held responsible for much of an adult’s take on life, Isabelle’s lifelong sense of reality and clear-eyed approach to the world was born on that small working farm. Through two marriages, work with paratroopers in World War II, three children and a series of careers, Isabelle was known to all around her as a steadfast, loyal employee, mother and friend, a woman who cared and was able to find many moments of humor in life’s twists and turns.
Early on, her parents moved to Hinsdale where her father became caretaker for the local cemetery. Like many of her contemporaries, she went to General Electric after graduating from Pittsfield High School and became the first woman working as a steel buyer. She never forgot that she had taken a man’s place in that first job and was paid less money. In her quiet but not silent way, she was always an advocate for what women could do and should be allowed to do.
When she married Ben Messenger of Dalton, an Air Force pilot who served with the Royal Canadian Air Force, she lived first in a summer cabin on Lake Niagara, then in Toronto, until her husband was called back to the United States. When Ben was killed in a training flight accident in 1942, Isabelle was 25 and grief-stricken. She returned to Hinsdale where friends suggested she join the Red Cross. After passing interviews in New York and Washington D.C., she was accepted, and the Red Cross sent her to Europe, attached to the 502nd Parachute Infantry, 101st Airborne Division, known as the Screaming Eagles. It was her job to start clubs where soldiers could get away from the war to play cards, write home, dance and relax. That was the minimum requirement. But Isabelle apparently wasn’t content with her job description, and one of her assignments found her with a Jeep and a driver, filling requests for mail, etc., with gravely injured D-Day soldiers as well as soldiers from the Battle of Bastogne.
As she traveled with the paratroopers through France to Germany and Austria, she established friendships that lasted for years. Planning her birthday party last year, family members found an address book listing many of the paratroopers she helped. They signed their names, and in her tiny handwriting, she added notes about what happened to them, including KIA (killed in action). Looking back, she remembered how “awful” it was when a serviceman she knew died, “just barely old enough to be in the Army.” When the Red Cross wanted to transfer her to another unit, the paratroopers objected so strenuously that she kept her place with them till the end of the war.
She was in Great Britain on the eve of D-Day and last year talked about “the fear and anticipation,” and how “to have been part of such an historic experience changed my life forever.” For her service she was awarded the Medal of Freedom, the top U. S. civilian medal for meritorious service. Last year, the Red Cross on Cape Cod added its Hero Award for her wartime work with the paratroopers.
Home in the Berkshires after the war, she married Vincent Monteleone, and they lived in South Boston until the day when a rock came through their window and scattered broken glass in their baby’s crib. They moved back to Hinsdale with their first-born, Deborah, and lived with Isabelle’s mother. The next and last home for the couple was Partridge Road in Pittsfield, where Isabelle’s mother, known to the world as “Grammy,” joined them. Vinnie, meanwhile, moved up the ranks of advertising at the Berkshire Eagle and became the department manager.
In addition to raising three children, now including William and Andrea, Isabelle worked for the U.S. Census Bureau, the Eagle’s Santa Toy Fund and the Red Cross Donor Center, where she kept track of the county’s blood supply. Along the way, she played golf, cross-country skied, gardened, followed the Red Sox, Tiger Woods and the Patriots, helped create Pittsfield’s Hospice Garden and swam frequently, first for recreation and then for the osteoporosis that plagued her later years, a disease that broke some of her bones, but not her spirit.
In 2004, nine years after Vinnie died, Isabelle moved to the Cape to be near two of her offspring and some of her five grandchildren, whose pictures were all around her house and constantly in her conversation. She continued to live by herself, her door unlocked for easy access of neighbors and their children. She fed and watched birds on the deck she loved, did crossword puzzles daily, read newspapers online and trusted the old-fashioned weather stick outside her window instead of TV meteorologists. She always kept a bowl of Dark Chocolate Hersey Kisses to welcome anyone who came to visit – and there were many – a constant stream of neighbors, friends and family. It was an amazing accomplishment and testament to her strength and resilience that she embraced her move to the Cape when she was 86 years old and went on to make a whole new group of loyal and loving friends, young and old.
Right up until the final days of her life, without glasses or hearing aids and in possession of a sharp mind, Isabelle went right on commenting on people, sports and politics in her forthright way, usually with grace but with a touch of vinegar when she thought it was warranted. She was apparently in charge of her death as well. Three days before she passed, she commented that she had another three days, although the doctors had foreseen weeks of life. But Isabelle had decided to go home, “like a shooting star,” as one of her daughters said, to the cemetery in Hinsdale, where her parents, husband, and sister are buried.
She is survived by her daughter Deborah Fish, her husband Robert and their daughter Annie Cameron Fish of Chatham, MA; her son William and his wife Carol (Baker) Monteleone of Chatham, MA and their children Timothy Monteleone and his wife, Emily Tettelbaum of Ellicott City, MD, and Sarah Monteleone and her husband, Brandon Mones of Orange, CT.; her daughter, Andrea(Monteleone) and husband, David Matthiesen of Houston, TX, their children Christopher Matthiesen and wife Schuyler of Bethesda, MD and Kate Matthiesen of Houston, TX as well as five great grandchildren.
At Isabelle’s request, there will be no service and burial will be private. Memorial donations may be made in her name to the Red Cross, Town of Harwich Fire and Rescue, Harwich Conservation Trust, Berkshire Humane Society or to the charity of the donor’s choice.