Daughter of D-Day admiral becomes centenarian

It isn’t every day that someone turns 100 years old. But for Deborah Kirk Solbert of Lloyd Harbor, it was just another in a long series of adventures and accolades.
Solbert was born on June 26, 1922 in Washington D.C., to Admiral Alan Goodrich Kirk and Lydia Chapin Kirk, four years after her parents married. Her father was a Navy officer, and as such the family moved several times, living everywhere from California to Rhode Island, although she primarily grew up in Washington D.C.
“If her father was shipped out somewhere, she and her siblings and mother often stayed with their grandmother in D.C.,” her daughter Alison Paine explained. “That was her “home-base,” and she really considered it her home.”
Her father had a distinguished military and diplomatic career, best known for his indispensible role as the senior American naval officer during the D-Day landings in World War II. Although that was the highlight of his career, he had also served as director of the Office of Naval Intelligence, and after the war was ambassador to Taiwan — then known as the Republic of China — the Soviet Union and Belgium.
Solbert’s mother, Lydia, had her own career. During World War II she worked for the now defunct Naval Office of Censorship, which helped hide and dissemble critical information that could have been of use to the Axis Powers, as well as lecture for the Red Cross. She would later write several well-received books, “Postmarked Moscow,” comprised of letters she sent during her time in Moscow, unveiling the lives of Soviet citizens to a Western audience otherwise largely unaware of life behind the Iron Curtain, as well as three suspense novels in the 1960’s.

Solbert also lived in London, England from 1939 to 1940, while her father was serving as the United States naval attaché. While there, her family and numerous diplomats and aristocratic debutantes were presented to King George VI and his wife Queen Elizabeth in Buckingham Palace, as well as their daughter, then Crown Princess Elizabeth.
When the United Kingdom entered the war, Solbert left London to attend Vassar College in New York, where she studied for a year before, inspired by her parents’ service, she left to serve in Corpus Christie, Texas in the Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service, commonly known as WAVES. She was a member of its first graduating class. She served along with roughly 100,000 other women in a wide variety of roles, in her case performing essential clerical duties that freed up male officers to serve on the front lines.
“She has led the most amazing life,” her eldest daughter Leslie Fogg said. “She traveled the world, served in the Navy, met the Queen. How many people can say the same?”
During the war, she would meet and marry the love of her life, Peter Omar Abernathy Solbert, who had been born on March 9, 1919 in Copenhagen to American parents, and had served as a Lieutenant Commander in the United States Naval Reserve during the course of the war. They married on September 8, 1945, and would go on to have five children together during what is now referred to as the “Baby Boom.”
The family made their home in Lloyd Harbor at the suggestion of their close friends the Lindsay family, who had lived on Long Island since before the war. Her husband worked as a lawyer for the New York law firm Davis Polk & Wardwell from 1948 until his death in 2001. In the 1960’s and ‘80’s the job would take the Solberts to far flung locales like Paris and Tokyo, where she and her husband soaked up the sights and sounds of their temporary but exotic homes.
Solbert herself is a beloved community member of Lloyd Harbor, well known for inviting friends over for dinner and tea parties, and for many years held a tennis tournament at her home, jokingly referred to as “the West Neck Invitational.” She also founded the Cold Spring Harbor Fourth of July Parade in 1954, which she led for decades, always wearing her distinctive “Votes for Women” sash, a replica of the one her mother wore while marching for women’s civil rights in the 1910’s and ‘20’s.
On June 26 of this year, her children, grandchildren, great-grandchild and friends gathered from around the country to ring in Solbert’s centenary celebrations, coming from as far away as Southern California and Montana and as close as the house next door. Original poems and songs were sung in her honor, celebrating a life lived to the fullest.
Her close friend Cynthia Jay of Lloyd Neck highlighted some of the remarkable successes of Solbert’s life, and how much history, tragedy and beauty she had witnessed in her 100 years on earth.
“One century now she’s made her own, with feathers in her hair to curtsy to the Crown and in uniform to prop up her daddy’s Navy,” Jay declaimed. “She’s done her job, raising her family with Peter, in this semi-rural spot, and with her friends, making this spot, our spot, a better place to live.”