Eleanor

Waterhouse Thompson

Former Newtown Bee Assistant Editor

Eleanor Waterhouse Thompson, 92, died March 11, at her home in Sandy Hook. She was born May 3, 1919, in the farmhouse of what was then Hundred Acres Farm, daughter of Blanche and Irvin Waterhouse. The farmhouse still stands at the corner of Phyllis Lane and Hundred Acres Road.

As a girl, she was caught in the polio “storm” that swept the northeast United States in 1932, and was severely afflicted. Her treatment and rehabilitation were carried out in Connecticut and at Warm Springs, Ga., where on a number of occasions she occupied the therapy swimming pool at the same time as President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

She graduated from Hawley High School in 1935, and in the late 1930s attended the Ringling School of Art in Sarasota, Fla.

At the outbreak of World War II she graduated from Weylister Secretarial College in Milford, which later became Weylister Junior College for Girls and merged with the University of Bridgeport in 1948. She then joined the Technical Publications Branch of Chance Vought Aircraft Company in Stratford as an editor, where she worked on the F4U Corsair fighter for the US Navy. By the end of the war she had risen to the position of deputy chief of the Branch.

In 1948 she married Wilfred J. Thompson, a draftsman with the well-known architectural firm of McKim, Mead and White of New York City, whom she had met during the war, at Chance Vought. The couple settled in Old Greenwich, where she worked for a time as copy editor for the Old Greenwich News.

After her husband’s death in 1963, she returned to Newtown and settled with her mother, Blanche Waterhouse, in Sandy Hook. She was assistant editor of The Newtown Bee from February 1966 to November 1969.

She returned to school and earned her bachelor’s in psychology from the University of Bridgeport in the early 1970s. She then worked as assistant librarian at Fairfield Hills Hospital in Newtown until her retirement in 1978.

She is survived by her son Peter M. Thompson of Annandale, Va., a diplomat with the US Department of State in Washington, D.C. Two siblings predeceased Mrs Thompson.

Interment will be at 11 am, Monday, March 19, at Saint Mary’s Cemetery, 399 North Street, Greenwich. A memorial celebration of her life will be scheduled at a later date.

In lieu of flowers, the family requests donations be made to the development fund of South Kent School, 40 Bulls Bridge Road, South Kent CT 06785, or to the Sandy Hook Volunteer Fire & Rescue Company, at sandyhookfire.com.

The Newtown Bee        March 16, 2012