Paid Notice: Elizabeth Bond (Stoner) Welsh, 98, a longtime resident of Swarthmore, Media, and for the past 23 years, White Horse Village, Newtown Square, Pa., passed away peacefully surrounded by family on July 2, 2025.
She was born on September 28, 1926, in Jamaica Estates, NY, to Raymond Tostevin (R.T.) Bond, President of Dodd, Mead & Company Publishing, NYC, and Elizabeth Ann Mullen Bond.
Liz graduated from Jamaica High School in 1944 and Wellesley College in 1948, where she majored in English
Literature. After graduation, she worked in the Circulation Department at Life Magazine until March 1949, when she married Bartine Albert Stoner, Jr., on the 19th of that month at The Little Church Around the Corner in Manhattan. They had met on a blind date at the Princeton-Harvard Football game played in Boston on November 8, 1947, where Bart’s Tigers routed Harvard, 33-7, setting the tone for a successful first date.
She was an immensely creative and talented artist who loved to read, write, and create. At the age of 12, she published her first book, “Crunch the Squirrel,” with her 13-year-old best friend, Joan Rabin, in 1938, through her father’s firm. As a girl, she learned to play the piano, figure skate, play tennis, and sew, which became one of her early passions. She sewed many of her own clothes, which helped inform and engage her lifelong interest in the world of fashion. She even dabbled in modeling clothes for women’s retailers in Philadelphia, appearing in ads in the Philadelphia Inquirer and local papers. Liz had a great eye for style and has been described by those who knew her as “glamorous” and “elegant.” She maintained a ‘virtual lifelong’ subscription to Vogue magazine well into her 90s.
One of her hallmark, favorite literature genres was anything whimsical that delighted children and inspired their imaginations, with nature playing a significant role. She loved reading to her children, grandchildren, or anyone who might sit still, and counted as favorites The Wind in the Willows, anything by A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh-based especially, and Beatrix Potter.
She cited Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets often and offhandedly, and enjoyed tutoring Latin to any number of Swarthmore High School students. She also knew and loved classical music and opera, reserving Sundays to play the latter loudly on the house stereo. Her love of the company of animals was always evident, with an array of Collies, Siamese cats, and an occasional Maine Coon, stray or rescue, and at one point, a blonde Afghan named Taj.
Liz was a member of the Swarthmore Presbyterian Church for many years, returning to active membership after she moved to White Horse Village (WHV) in 2001. She always enjoyed the community and assisting with the annual Christmas pageant, while also engaging in more spiritual aspects, including occasional Bible Study at the church and at WHV.
At 42, she became an accomplished sculptor, after 7 years of lessons at the Philadelphia Art Museum, under acclaimed sculptor Gerd Utescher. She met German theologian Paul Tillich in the summer of 1959, through close friend Maria Pelikan, a German to English translator. He agreed to sit for her sculpting his head, and in 1968, 2 bronze casts of the finished work were delivered to Jerald Brauer, the Dean of the University of Chicago’s Divinity School, who had requested them. Tillich had been established as the Divinity School’s first John Nuveen Professor of Theology, 1962-1965, which was also the same year in which he passed. One copy went to the Nuveen family whose investment banking concern established the Chair, and the other still resides in the Divinity School’s Nakagawa Library.
Liz and Bart divorced in 1970. She married D. Patrick Welsh in 1972, who had a real estate office in town, and they lived on a bucolic property in Media for 12 years until their divorce in 1984.
Her talents were actively sought and reflected in her diverse volunteer activities. Liz worked with Designing Women, LTD, a venture capital group for women to invest in Philadelphia. She also served on the 1976 Philadelphia BiCentennial Commission, as a volunteer docent and animal administrator at the Philadelphia Zoo, and as a volunteer administrator at Chester Crozer Hospital. She was also a frequent volunteer for the Delaware County Literacy Council, where she spent many hours teaching adults to read.
Liz was an intelligent, inquisitive, and independent woman, who lived an active, varied, and well-traveled life, but she was never too busy to recognize the value and beauty of quietude and reflection.
Her favorite place in the entire world — and as shared with her family — was at the end of Long Island, where her father built a small summer cottage in 1956, in the fishing and farming hamlet of Wainscott, NY, located on the Atlantic, and the first and most agrarian of the 5 hamlets that comprise East Hampton Township, ending with Montauk. And while it is just outside the village boundaries, it is the epicenter of the 6.7 square miles of what NY State documents as “the best soil in the whole of New York.” It was there that the family spent their summers regularly and without fail, and whenever possible otherwise throughout the year, and for the rest of their lives. And it’s where Liz has requested her ashes to be spread in the ocean.
She was a hardy Yankee, and loved nature in all its forms and climates, and spent most of her free time outdoors. An avid and accomplished gardener and birder, just like her father, she spent much time on the eastern end of Long Island both birding and fishing, mostly surfcasting with her sons and friends. She traveled the east coast extensively in search of yet more bird sightings and freshly caught fish.
She self-published her (2nd and) last book (there were two unpublished manuscripts in between, one on clouds, and the other on insects) “Around the World in 21 Years,” about the 18 separate Earthwatch trips on which she embarked, between 1984 and 2005, from age 58 to 79, across the globe. She traveled to Kenya, Gibraltar, Madagascar, Bali, Guernsey, the Canary Islands, all over Europe, Russia, South Africa, and the Outer Hebrides among her many destinations. Her work ranged from banding baby egrets in Southern France’s Camargue, to counting and cataloguing animals visiting a dying lake in Kenya, and excavating Moscow’s Red Square. She signed up to travel and work around the world, with interesting groups of other dedicated people, and to help collect and catalogue scientific data around a variety of different environmental challenges. It was another passion from which she derived great satisfaction, and from which she always returned with more great stories.
She continued sculpting for many years, branching out to human figures and wild animals, usually large and lean, like giraffes and deer, stylized and real-life versions. After sculpting, she moved on, to learn welding, creating more creatures and shapes of varying sizes and dispositions. She next took up wood carving, and specifically birds, beginning with primitives on stick legs, and then onto incredibly detailed real-life carved and painted feathers, of every variety. Her final medium came well into her 90s at White Horse, as beach glass and small stones glued and painted on tiny canvases created bird, animal, and ocean beach scenes.
Liz liked children, especially as they got older, and is survived by son Jon, wife Julie, and 5 grandchildren, Sam and Will, Erin, Ben, and Adam; and two great grandchildren, Max Theodore and Lyla. She was predeceased in death by both husbands in 2006 and 2007, Pat and Bart respectively. Her younger sister Susan Jane, died in January of this year, and son Tad, in June of 2022.
In lieu of flowers, the family asks that contributions be made in her memory to the National Audubon Society or the World Wildlife Foundation.
