Elaine Jones, an outspoken observer of local politics who, when neither of the town’s major parties met her expectations, founded and led her own, died at her family house in Amagansett on Sept. 18. A stroke two years ago had left her physically weak but she was mentally as sharp as ever, said her daughter Vicki Littman, but she had a second stroke shortly after Labor Day and was brought home, as she wished, to die. She was 82.
Her East Hampton Independence Party lasted for 25 years, during which, her family wrote, she supported candidates “from all sides of the aisle who shared her vision for the community.” The party was ushered into oblivion five or six years ago, when Andrew Cuomo was New York’s governor. “He thought third parties took away votes,” Ms. Littman remembered.
Ms. Jones had plenty to say on that score in her letters to the editor of this newspaper, which were frequent, rarely missing a week during election years. Among other things, she pushed for a civilian review board for the Police Department, affordable housing, an annual recognition day for firefighters, eagle-eyed surveillance of town expenditures, her chosen candidates, capping and not mining the town landfill, and much more, mostly but not always about concerns close to home. Like many others, she supported President George Bush on Iraq and “weapons of mass destruction,” until she didn’t. She was a fierce advocate for her husband, Leslie Jones, a town employee for 28 years, to be compensated after his death for many hours of unpaid overtime, and she eventually won a modest reimbursement.
Ms. Jones once wrote that “My motives include, and have from the very beginning, equal justice for all, no matter who you are, who you know, or if they just don’t like you.” And she did not mince words. About 25 years ago, when the town Democratic Committee just didn’t like then-Supervisor Jay Schneiderman, who was running for re-election on the Independence ticket, and lambasted him for driving an East Hampton Town car to an endorsement interview, she defended him like a mother bear, pointing out that the supervisor has round-the-clock access to town vehicles, in case of emergency.
“Do the rules change when candidates other than Democrats are in office?” asked Ms. Jones (a former Democrat herself until politics got in the way). “East Hampton faces far more serious issues than this garbage.”
“Elaine had a lot of weight in local politics for someone not associated with a major political party,” Mr. Schneiderman said this week. “She wanted good government, and there were times when the Independence Party could make the margin for a candidate. She carried great weight with the town board.”
She was also “fearless to speak up for people who didn’t have a voice of their own,” said her family. One year, there were whispers in Town Hall that a man running for a town office had been making racist remarks. After Elaine Jones looked into it, the Independence Party ran a candidate against him, who won.
Her Dellapolla grandparents had left Italy in around 1910 to settle in Amagansett, where they farmed large tracts of land east of the commercial district, near where their great-granddaughter’s farm stand, Vicki’s Veggies, now sits. Ms. Jones lived almost her entire life in a house next door. “The area was all DiSunnos and Dellapollas then,” said Ms. Littman, “and we all took care of each other.”
Ms. Jones was a steadfast champion for her beloved hamlet. Some 50 years ago she founded the Concerned Citizens of Amagansett, and when it morphed into the Amagansett Citizens Advisory Committee she was one of the first to join. Not long before she died, she told Ms. Littman that “I had a good life. I loved my family and my community, and I worked hard to protect 555,” a 19-acre tract of land on Montauk Highway that is now known as the Amagansett Plains Preserve.
“She tirelessly worked to maintain the hamlet’s beauty and charm long before formal committees were established by town resolution,” recalled Rona Klopman, ACAC’s chairwoman. “Elaine’s impact on Amagansett will endure.”
Ms. Jones was born Elaine Carol Semb on Oct. 15, 1942, at Southampton Hospital to Carol (Dellapolla) and Eric Andrew (Andy) Semb. Her father was a fisherman. “He came from Norway at 17 and married my Italian mother,” said Ms. Littman. “She would say we had the best of both worlds.”
Ms. Jones’s mother taught her to cook when she was 10, “and she was a wonderful Italian cook. She canned over 500 quarts of tomatoes and basil every year!”
She passed a generation of family recipes on to her daughters, they said, “and won a panoply of first-place ribbons from the Riverhead County Fair for her jams, breads, and fruit pies.” Larry Cantwell remembers her arriving at Town Hall with an apple pie on his first day as supervisor. “We didn’t always agree, but when Elaine loved you, it was forever,” he said this week.
She graduated from the Amagansett School and East Hampton High School, where she met her husband. They were both only 19 when they announced their engagement, and her parents were not happy about the situation. The young couple eloped, to Charleston, S.C., and were married on March 7, 1961.
They lived in Charleston for about two years, during which their first child, now Angela Sullivan, was born. When they came back home with the baby — “this black-haired Italian little baby” — from then on, Ms. Littman said, the grandparents were “love, love, love.”
According to the family, Mr. Jones, who died in 2004, kept his wife’s high school yearbook picture in his wallet for over 40 years.
Their empathetic mother taught them to think about the less fortunate, her daughters said. “She’d give people clothes, food, a place to stay.” Back two decades or so, for example, when many young Irishwomen came to Montauk in summer to work in restaurants or as nannies, Ms. Jones went out of her way to befriend them at the farm stand. One of them, said Ms. Littman, hearing of her second stroke, flew in from Ireland the day before she died, just in time to see her at the house. “And Mom opened her eyes and said, ‘Oh, my god, you came to see me,’ and she said, ‘Of course I did.’ And she went back to Ireland the next morning.”
Many in the community assume that Ms. Jones was the force behind Vicki’s Veggies, which in fact is likely among the few family projects that wasn’t her idea. “It was mine, from day one,” Ms. Littman said — a child’s request when she was 11, a wooden stand on Montauk Highway built for her by her father to sell the excess string beans she’d been helping sort for shipment to the city. Her mother “didn’t want to leave an 11-year-old alone on the highway,” she said, but she eventually worked there herself, baking innumerable loaves of zucchini and banana bread for sale, and “embraced and encouraged me for 44 years.”
Ms. Jones loved three things above all, Ms. Littman said. “Family, politics, and Vicki’s Veggies, depending on what order — what season — they came in.” If it was summer, she said, the farm stand stayed open no matter what. “Her rule was, ‘We don’t close in summer.’ We couldn’t get married, have babies, or die in the summer. When she had her second stroke, a week after Labor Day, she said to me, ‘I made it through the summer.’ “
In addition to her daughters and sons-in-law, Tony Littman and Tom Sullivan, Ms. Jones leaves a son, Leslie T. Jones, and seven grandchildren: Michael Jones, Ryan Sullivan, Chelsea Jones, Grady Sullivan, and Rose and Maria Littman. Her brother-in-law Gene Shaw, and his daughter, Tiffany Tuthill, “whom she regarded as a third daughter,” also survive, as do two great-grandchildren, Hayden Jones and Hadley Jones, and her niece, Regina Lynch, “along with an array of community members who considered her family.”
The family received visitors on Tuesday night at the Yardley and Pino Funeral Home in East Hampton. The Rev. Ben Shambaugh of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church officiated at funeral services yesterday, with burial following at Cedar Lawn Cemetery. The family has suggested memorial contributions to the Amagansett Fire Department, where an afternoon reception for her many friends and family members was held, or the East Hampton Food Pantry.
