By Scott Brinton
For decades, the native Merrick resident, who came of age when the community was still in its infancy, had hoped that her sister Rita's enormous art collection depicting early 20th century Merrick would find a home.
The Merrick Library Board and Director Ellen Firer agreed to permanently display a collection of Rita's works at the new library, and the paintings are now scattered on the walls throughout the soaring structure's first and second floors. I can only say thank you to the board and Firer. You have preserved a slice of Merrick's, Bellmore-Merrick's and the South Shore's past.
Rita and Alice were well ahead of their time. Rita studied art from childhood, becoming a master painter at the Art League in New York City. Alice, who was 10 years younger than her sister, earned her doctorate in French literature from the City University of New York. In the early 20th century, however, women were expected to become homemakers and secretaries. Rita took a job as the latter. Alice did as well, though she eventually became a teacher.
Throughout her life, Rita continued to paint. She died in 1975, at age 70. For three decades thereafter, Alice kept Rita's paintings stored in an upstairs bedroom in the quaint Merrick cottage in which the sisters grew up.
In 2004, Alice wrote to this reporter, encouraging me to keep up the fight to preserve the Meadowbrook Parkway woodlands and open them up as a public hiking trail -- a fight that continues to this day. Alice wondered whether I was interested in viewing her sister's collection of paintings depicting the woodlands. Naturally, I was.
I was dumbstruck. There, on paper, were all the places that I had trotted through around town, only there were no homes, no businesses -- just open fields, marshes, trees. When Rita created these masterpieces in her early 20s, the term suburbia hadn't yet entered the lexicon, I believe. Merrick was small-town America, the Norman Rockwell version, and Rita Leadley beautifully documented it in all its bucolic glory.
An article, "Portraits of the past" (Feb. 24, 2005, issue) followed my three meetings with Alice. Shortly afterward, I ran into Merrick Library Trustee Tim Whalen at the Merrick post office. I talked up Rita's collection, wondering whether the library could help preserve her paintings. Alice told me that she worried that she would die and her sister's collection would simply be carted off to the dump.
Thankfully, it will not be. Whalen took up Alice's cause with a passion, making sure that the library saved Rita's works. And so, for generations, folks will be able to gaze into the Bellmore-Merrick community's storied past. Many of Rita's paintings are vignettes: two sisters trudging together through a blinding blizzard, New Yorkers hurrying here and there in front of the Art League. There are landscapes: boathouses set against the shoreline in Merrick Bay, Hewlett Avenue as nothing more than a dirt lane surrounded by patches of grass.
At the turn of the century, the South Shore must have been a wondrous place. Bellmore-Merrick is indeed different now -- not worse, just different. Thank goodness Rita and Alice Leadley preserved the community of yore on paper.
I plan to take my young daughter to the library and show her all of Rita's paintings. My daughter draws incessantly. She is, you might say, a budding artist. I will tell her that a great woman painted the works on these walls many years ago, and in doing so, Rita Leadley helped us understand where we came from and who we are.
Comments? SBrinton@liherald.com or (516) 569-4000 ext. 203.
