Ernest Albert Sutcliffe (1930–2007)
Orphaned at Sixteen, the Last of His Family
Ernie with his mother, Maude, 1931.
Ernest Albert Sutcliffe, known in the family as Ernie, was born on February 25, 1930, in Lakewood, a village of Warwick, Rhode Island. He was the son of Fred Sutcliffe, then thirty-five, and Maude Mildred (Hanna) Sutcliffe, then thirty-four. Two brothers had died as small children before he was born. Less than two months after Ernie's birth, on April 21, 1930, his fourteen-year-old brother, Wilbur Raymond, died of pneumonia, leaving Ernie to grow up as an only child. That November, Ernie was entered on the Sunday school cradle roll of Peoples Baptist Church.
Ernie at about ten, around 1940, in a print Esther later hand-tinted.
He grew up in Warwick through the Depression years, and records place the family there in 1930, 1935, and 1940. A photograph taken of him around the age of ten survives in a version that Esther later hand-tinted in the 1950s. In 1939, when he was nine, he was struck by an automobile while playing in front of his house. He broke his collarbone and suffered a head injury, and he was hospitalized in serious condition, but he made a complete recovery. Fred was remembered as a strict father who worked the mill floor as a millwright at United Wire. When Ernie once talked about following him into the factory, Fred warned that he would "break both his legs" before he let him work there. The family understood this as Fred wanting a better life for his son.
Ernie in the Junior Science Club, 1946.
Ernie (right) with fellow serviceman Evans in Germany, probably at Garmisch-Partenkirchen, 1947–1951.
His teenage years brought hard losses. His father died on April 1, 1945, at fifty, when Ernie was fifteen. Fred had suffered a heart attack at work at United Wire and Supply Corporation in Cranston and died shortly afterward at home in Norwood. His mother died just over a year later, on May 8, 1946, in Providence, also at fifty. At sixteen, Ernie had lost both parents, and his aunt and uncle, Mildred and Ray Hanna, took him in for the next couple of years.
He finished high school, graduating from Aldrich High School in Warwick, where he was a member of the Junior Science Club. On September 25, 1947, at seventeen, he enlisted in the United States Air Force. He served four years, stationed in postwar Germany, probably at Garmisch-Partenkirchen in the Bavarian Alps, and was honorably discharged as a sergeant on September 24, 1951.
Ernie as a young man.
Ernie and Essie while dating, about 1952.
Ernie and Essie on their wedding day, June 7, 1952, with his aunt and uncle, Mildred and Ray Hanna.
Back home in Cranston, and despite his father's warning, he took an entry-level job at United Wire. Around the same time, he and a cousin who had also served in Europe began double-dating two sisters, Ruth and Esther Nelson. Both couples fell in love. Ruth married Donald Hanna, and Ernie married Esther Evelyn Nelson in Cranston on June 7, 1952, after a courtship of only months. The newlyweds set up house in an apartment at 14 Commercial Street in Cranston.
Their first son, Ernest A., was born on September 15, 1953, and Edwin F. followed on November 4, 1956. In 1955 Ernie and Esther bought a three-family house at 18 Villa Avenue in Cranston, and in the summer of 1962 the family moved to 281 South Clarendon Street. Their daughters were born after that move: Evelyn on February 13, 1963, and Ellen R. on December 27, 1965. Ernie and Esther taught Sunday school together at Phillips Memorial Baptist Church. The family's sixteen-foot outboard, Six E's, was named for all six of them, and about 1969 they drove a new Ford Country Squire across the country to Disneyland.
According to the family, Ernie took night courses and became a mechanical engineer, and he was later promoted into management at United Wire. Outside work, his great love was photography, and on many weekends he worked as a wedding photographer. United Wire closed its plants in 1982 after a strike, but Ernie stayed on for about five more years, until roughly 1987, while the company wound down. Family history holds that he designed many of the machines that were later sold to his son Edwin's company, Universal Shaped Wire, which Edwin founded in Providence around 1989 and incorporated in 1992. Ernie then worked there with Edwin for several years.
Family members recall that after the children were grown, Ernie and Esther divorced and then married each other again. Esther died on December 5, 1996. Some time after her death, Ernie met Eileen Mariorenzi of Johnston, and the two shared a long relationship that lasted for the rest of his life.
In his later years Ernie lived in Johnston, Rhode Island, and he spent time in Pompano Beach, Florida, from about 2005. He died at the VA hospital in Providence on August 15, 2007, at seventy-seven, of spindle cell sarcoma complicated by C. diff sepsis. He left four children, ten grandchildren, and four great-grandchildren. His funeral was held at Phillips Memorial Baptist Church in Cranston, where he and Esther had taught Sunday school, and he is buried beside her at Highland Memorial Park in Johnston, under a shared marker inscribed Together Forever.
Ernie in later years.
His obituary remembered a veteran who lived in Cranston for more than fifty years, enjoyed teaching Sunday school, and was an avid photographer. In the online guestbook, a friend called him "a very thoughtful and funny person," and his nephew Raymond Lancia, Ruth's son and a longtime lay preacher, remembered "Uncle Ernie" as "a wonderful, spirit led Christian" who had "touched a lot of lives in his time."