April 15, 1947 — April 17, 2023
As reported by Barbara Carey ’64
The Class of 1964 lost one of its most dynamic and charismatic members this year when Elizabeth Parish Eames Roebling died on April 17, 2023, after a short illness. Lizzie attended Friends from Junior Kindergarten through graduation in 1964. She then went to Middlebury College until her first marriage in 1967, after which she completed her baccalaureate work at Hunter College. Over the years, she lived in New York, Newport, Oyster Bay, Asheville (in a geodesic dome near Black Mountain College, where Buckminster Fuller had taught), the Dominican Republic, and Florida. She was an experienced sailor, able to navigate by the stars, use a sextant, and she successfully weathered heavy storms off the Australian Coast. She was also a great party-giver, as many of us could attest.
Lizzie worked for many years as a journalist for the InterPressService in the Dominican Republic, an organization that is concerned primarily with issues of development, the environment and gender. She found it extraordinarily fulfilling and exciting work, interviewing in Spanish & French and writing in English. Articles she wrote can be found at https://www.ipsnews.net/author/elizabeth-eames-roebling/. She also focused on, and had a great fondness for, Haiti and its people. Her political activities included being jailed (along with others, including Jacqueline Jackson, wife of Jesse Jackson) for protesting the Navy’s resumption of bombing practice on the Puerto Rican island of Vieques.
After years in the Dominican Republic, Lizzie moved to Florida, where a number of her friends and her adopted daughter Kimlee Revock lived. Despite her disgust with DeSantis, she liked where she lived, because the area (near Lake Worth) was full of artists, immigrants, a wide variety of like-thinking people, and “a good little Quaker Meeting.” She had become a “Convinced Friend” when in Asheville.
A vibrant and important member of our class, Lizzie was always full of surprises, good humor, and love. When, after a recent Zoom call, Susie Localio suggested that our next theme might be: "What in the past few months or year has inspired in you a sense of wonder?" Lizzie agreed, but characteristically added, “Although I cannot guarantee that I will color between the lines.”