Esther Evelyn (Nelson) Sutcliffe (1932–1996)
Mother of Four, the Heart of the Home
Esther as a young woman, about 1950.
Esther as a little girl, about 1935.
Esther Evelyn Nelson, known to her friends as Essie, was born on December 9, 1932, in Providence, Rhode Island, to Karl (Carl) Leonard Nelson and Evelyn Clair (Dodge) Nelson. When she was about three, the family moved to Cranston and into the Big House, the communal home of the Church of Jesus, the religious community led by her mother's parents, Fred E. and Mabel C. Dodge. She grew up there among the other church families, and around 1941 her brother Fred was born.
In 1947, at fourteen, Esther took her first job, as a clerk and waitress at Spotlight Restaurant & Deli. That June, the Dodges' circle forced her family out of the Big House in the middle of the night. Her father sued to recover the savings he had given the church and won in 1948, and the Rhode Island Supreme Court upheld the award in 1949. The full story is on her parents' pages and the Big House lawsuit pages. Esther almost never spoke about those years. When pressed she offered small details, and she left the rest untold.
She kept working at Spotlight through high school and graduated with the Cranston High School class of 1950. That year she became a secretary at Files Engineering, where she stayed until 1953.
Esther and Ernie with their wedding party, June 7, 1952.
Around then she and her older sister Ruth started going out together. They met two handsome servicemen, cousins to each other who were home from Europe, and the sisters double-dated. Both fell in love. Ruth married Donald Hanna, remembered in the family as something of a "bad boy." Esther's match was Ernest Albert Sutcliffe, who had served in the U.S. Air Force from September 1947 to September 1951, including duty in Europe. After a courtship of only months, they married on June 7, 1952.
Their first child, Ernest A., was born in Providence on September 15, 1953. Esther clerked briefly at Ann & Hope and then worked as a secretary at Paramount Line from about 1953 to 1956. Since the wedding, Esther and Ernie had been living in an apartment at 14 Commercial Street in Cranston. On August 3, 1955, they bought a three-family house at 18 Villa Avenue in Cranston, taking title together. The down payment was money Esther had quietly saved out of Ernie's pay without telling him.
Edwin F. was born on November 4, 1956. That same year Esther and her sister Miriam started a laundry business, Drive-In Laundramaid, Inc. Miriam later left the partnership, and Esther ran it alone as sole proprietor while raising her boys.
In the summer of 1962 the family moved from Villa Avenue to 281 South Clarendon Street in Cranston, close to her parents and her siblings' families. Both daughters were born after the move: Evelyn, in Providence on February 13, 1963, and Ellen R., in Providence on December 27, 1965. Despite what she had lived through in the Big House as a girl, Esther held on to her own faith. She took the family to church every Sunday and taught her children to say their prayers each night. She and Ernie taught Sunday school together at Phillips Memorial Baptist Church. Family lore holds that she didn't miss a single week when Ellen was born. Ellen arrived on a Monday, and Esther was back teaching that Sunday.
In 1965 she left the laundry and went to work as a nurse's aide at the Rhode Island Medical Center, where she stayed for ten years. At the Medical Center she set up and dispensed medications, checked patients' vital signs, handled admissions, and worked with case histories, including time in a government program for adolescents with emotional and drug problems.
Esther at the kitchen table on South Clarendon Street in Cranston, late 1960s.
Esther was the planner of family time. The Sutcliffes kept a sixteen-foot outboard named Six E's, for Ernie, Esther, Ernest, Edwin, Evelyn, and Ellen. It sat on a trailer in the backyard on South Clarendon Street between regular trips out on Narragansett Bay. About 1969 they bought a new Ford Country Squire station wagon and set out on a three-week drive across the country to Disneyland in Anaheim, California. Esther was thirty-six and Ernie thirty-nine, the boys were fifteen and twelve, and the girls were six and three. There were also winter-vacation trips to Florida with the children, beginning when the boys were small.
Esther with Ernest and Edwin on the beach in Florida, about 1960.
The children began leaving home in 1974, when Ernest moved out first. One by one the others followed, and the last to go was Ellen, who left when she married on September 12, 1992. From 1975 to 1983 Esther was at home full time. Over the years she also had her share of anxious and low times, which she carried quietly. After 1983 she set out to return to medical work and took mental-health courses at the Community College of Rhode Island. Family members recall one unexpected turn after the children were grown: Esther and Ernie divorced, and then married each other again.
Esther and Ernie's shared marker at Highland Memorial Park in Johnston, Rhode Island.
Her father died in 1986. Esther died of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma in Providence, Rhode Island, on December 5, 1996, four days before her sixty-fourth birthday. She is buried at Highland Memorial Park in Johnston, Rhode Island, beside Ernie, who died in 2007, under a shared marker inscribed Together Forever.