Betsy De Filippis, reporter, avid gardener, longtime resident

Betsy De Filippis, a longtime Ridgefield resident, died at Danbury Hospital on Friday, June 25, from lingering complications of a stroke she suffered following surgery in October 2002. The wife of Nicholas A. (Nick) De Filippis, she was born to Bernard Theodore and Elisabeth Prince Ehrhardt on June 17, 1933 in Charleston, S.C., where she grew up, and where her ancestors settled in the 1600s. She is a graduate of Bishop England High School in Charleston, and the University of South Carolina, from which she received a bachelor of arts degree, cum laude, in English and journalism. While at Carolina, Betsy was president of the Alpha Delta Phi sorority.

Following college, Betsy was a reporter for the News and Courier in Charleston. After she married Nick in 1955, she became the first of her family to “defect” to “Yankee territory,” where she initially concentrated on raising her five daughters and becoming an avid and accomplished gardener. During those years she was active in both the Newcomers and Oldcomers Bridge clubs, as well as the Ridgefield school system, where she served as PTA president for what is now the East Ridge Middle School.

In the early 1970s she returned to work as a reporter for The Ridgefield Press, and, later, The News-Times, where some of her stories were run on the Associated Press (AP) and United Press International (UPI) wires. The early years of her career were spent mining the subject she knew best, family life, in the manner of Erma Bombeck. As these stories were frequently populated with fascinating tidbits about her family, such as her teenaged daughter’s obsession with the color “hot” pink — years before The Preppy Handbook came out — she frequently humiliated the very subjects she wrote about.

Her articles were not limited to her family. Her editor at The News-Times, Jean Buoy, reminisced recently about what her colleagues teasingly referred to as Betsy’s “Death and Destruction” or “Disease of the Week” beat. Lyn Hottes, another former colleague and a current editor at the paper, spoke of Betsy’s reams of notes, and steadfast commitment to her sources and topics. One friend said that years before she met Betsy through bridge connections, she had wanted to meet the woman behind the News-Times stories. On a lighter note, there exists a much loved (by her family) photo where Betsy appears to be interviewing a horse. She retired from writing in 1990.

Although gardening was her passion — her daughter Marybeth likes to say she was fanatical about flowers long before Martha Stewart made it trendy — she was also an accomplished pianist and bridge player, a voracious reader with a special interest in politics, and a lover of theater and The New York Times crossword puzzle.

So great was Betsy’s commitment to her garden, that she and her friend Pat Liptrot were known to dig up (some would say “steal”) day lilies they had spotted on the side of the road. The very same day lilies remain in her garden today. Yet those who only knew Betsy in her later years, and who were most apt to find her at home in her muddy gardening clothes, would be surprised to learn that their friend once counseled her daughter Marybeth that “a lady never leaves the house without lipstick on,” a statement that would have made her own proper, southern mother proud and her current friends howl.

In addition to her husband of 49 years, Betsy is survived by five daughters: Laura Kaiser and husband John of New Milford, Marybeth De Filippis of New York City, Suzanne Anderson and husband Arthur of Ridgefield, Caroline Burns and husband John of Ridgefield, and Jeanne Bartlett and husband Charles of Sinking Springs, Pa.; two sisters: Caroline Condon of Charleston and Mary Stoll Ferrara and husband William of Mt. Pleasant, S.C.; and her brother Ted Ehrhardt and wife Nina Robinson of Brooklyn, N.Y.; eight grandchildren: Sean, Gregory and Ryan Kaiser, Elizabeth Chen, Rebecca and Carly Anderson, Alden Burns, and Samuel Bartlett. 

Memorial services took place earlier this week.

07/01/2004