By Norma Higgs
Every once in a while you meet someone who makes an impact on your life. It is usually someone who has little in common with you and goes in a different direction than you, but maybe that is what we are really looking for.
I formally met Elsie Paradise in 1985 when I began working at City Hall. I had the title of Assistant to the City Manager and Risk Manager and Elsie was the City Clerk and had been since 1982. In fact, she won a landmark decision when U.S. District Judge John T. Curtin ruled in 1984 that since she “performed nonpolicymaking tasks as a city clerk, she should be protected from politically motivated firings”. At the time, I was very involved in local Democratic Party politics helping to elect democrats mostly on the County level. Even though Elsie was a strong Republican and had worked tirelessly for Republican candidates for many years, I was secretly overjoyed that she had the courage to take the City Council to Court and fight for her job, and that she won the case and set a precedent for all future city clerks. I recall attending the City Council meeting when Elsie returned to her duties in the Council Chambers. I was so proud of her. She held her head high and took her rightful spot at the table in front of her adversaries, called the roll as if she had never left and there she stayed until 1999.
Nicholas Marchelos was City Manager when I began my short-lived career at City Hall and he assigned Elsie and I to handle the local redistricting of the City of Niagara Falls. I do not know how he came to have this task to perform but Elsie and I began the job by agreeing it would not be political. We would write the boundary lines based on population only, without regard to party affiliation. And that is what we did. A few hours each day we would meet in the Committee of the Whole Room and lay out the maps and the voter registration list and start counting people. That is probably the only time it was ever done that way.
During these hours, we learned a lot about each other and became quite close. We would often stop for a drink or two at Rufran’s on 11th and Lockport Street after work just to gossip and kick back. It was really a work relationship and being the organizer that I am, she became part of the “ladies lunch bunch” from City Hall. A group of us, consisting of Lynne MacDougall, Personnel Director, Patricia Lenhart, City Controller, Margaret MacDonald, Secretary to the City Manager and Elsie and I would meet for lunch at different spots on a regular basis. Sometimes others would join us but we were the core group.
Both Elsie and I dreamed of travel in Europe and I recall the adventure she had with her daughters “traveling on the cheap” as she called it. They found out of the way spots in Italy and stayed in convents and she complained about her stay in Poland as her room was next to a couple who “were drinking and arguing all night” . When my sister and I finally made it to Warsaw in 2006, we stayed in a neighborhood hotel with a small beer hall in the back. When the bar closed, and we had to listen to the revelry outside our window, I told her about Elsie and her trip many years ago with a similar experience. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Elsie told me she wanted to live in Europe for at least six months when she retired and I wished we could have done that together. Our paths changed a little as I went on to work at Supreme Court with Judge Jackie in 1987, but we still saw each other occasionally after work.
After I retired, our personal contact dwindled even more as we both traveled a lot and I became involved in community volunteering and block club activity and she had a large extended family living nearby. I knew of her illness and we did exchange emails when that became the thing to do. The jokes went back and forth on a regular basis and I kept track of her that way.
She called one day in early 2008 and wanted me to pick up a “map” that her son Joel had found on eBay. She thought I could use it and write stories about the “old days on Main and Falls Streets during the industrial heyday. Elsie helped me a lot with her remembrances of Main Street and when I finished there, I went on to Falls Street and went block by block using that “map”. She loved the nostalgia and the stories and I think I wrote them just for her.
Elsie was a good natured, always smiling person, who loved being City Clerk where she could help people. That much we had in common.
Her son Joel sent me an email on Sunday, October 25th and said “The great lady is gone. My mother died this afternoon at about 4:30 p.m.. She went very, very peacefully, 43 days after my father.” Yes, Joel, she was a “great lady” and I was lucky to have known her.
