Elisabeth Petry of Middletown, former CT reporter, daughter of best-selling Black author, dies at 74

MIDDLETOWN — Twenty-four-year city resident, attorney and author Elisabeth “Liz” Petry, a longtime newspaper reporter and daughter of a best-selling Black author, died Feb. 22 after a brief battle with cancer, her family said.

She was 74.

Longtime Middletown schools track and field coach Deborah Petruzzello, Petry’s sister-in-law, said she was a “brainiac on so many levels.”

Petry, a former journalist who worked for the Middletown Press, Meriden Record-Journal and Hartford Courant, “spoke fondly of those days,” Petruzzello said.

Petry was born in Old Saybrook and also lived in Cromwell. She graduated as valedictorian of her 1966 Old Saybrook High School class, earned a degree at Vassar College in New York and later worked as an attorney in Pennsylvania, Petruzzello said.

She met her husband of 18 years, Vietnam veteran Larry Riley, through her uncle Willard McRae. They married in 2009, Petruzzello said. 

For 18 years, Riley was part of Secret Service detail for presidents Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. “She was so proud of him, and the things that he had accomplished and the awards he had earned,” Petruzzello said.

Petry’s mother Ann Petry is author of “The Street,” written in 1946. It is still in publication today. She was the first Black author to sell one million copies of a book. In fact, Ann Petry was a prominent writer during a period when few Black women were published with regularity in America.

There is a documentary film in the works based on Elisabeth Petry’s family research, “For Dear Mother’s Sake: The James Family Letters That Shaped Ann Petry.”

Along with her cousin Ashley James and his wife, Kathryn Golden, Elisabeth Petry was in the process of making the movie using the letters. “Ashley is determined to finish it,” Petruzzello said.

“Her mother wanted her to let people know,” Petruzzello said. “The things that happened to her family were things that happened to many people through the years, prior to the Civil War and all the way up.”

Petry’s mother was the most successful Black woman writer of her day, fellow OSHS Gerry Rowland, Marcia Ketchum Baird and Christy Billings said in an email to OSHS alumni.

“She was described as an individualist, and intellectual, and a civil rights advocate who had a maroon Mustang and planned to attend Vassar,” they wrote of Petry.

After her mother died in 1997, Elisabeth Petry found letters from their ancestors that her mother had saved, most of whom she never knew existed. Through their writings and her own research, she developed an intimate sense of ancestry.

Elisabeth Petry found them in a tin cracker can where her mother had saved the letters, Petruzzello said. “It was about all their trials and tribulations as they traveled the country and what had happened to them. It was all part of the Black culture and history” going back more than 150 years, she said.

It contained ice cream cones, Elisabeth Petry told The Press in 2005, because her family owned James Drugstore in Old Saybrook.

It wasn’t easy to get the top off her grandmother Bertha James Lane’s container, Elisabeth Petry said at the time. “I pulled and pulled and it finally opened. I even broke a fingernail opening it. It was full of letters and it smelled like (the essential oil) sandalwood … a hundred years later.”

Elisabeth Petry is also the author of “At Home Inside: A Daughter’s Tribute to Ann Petry,” and edited “Can Anything Beat White?: A Black Family’s Letters.”

Elisabeth Petry was involved in many organizations, including the Old Saybrook Historical Society, the Middletown Historical Society and the Middlesex Community Foundation.

Despite being a renowned figure in Connecticut and beyond, Petruzzello said, her sister-in-law was a humble, “regular person.”

Petruzzello knew Elisabeth Petry was famous in the writing world and other realms, “but you don’t realize you’re in the presence of somebody who is famous. You know they have a heart of gold.

“You’re around someone and you don’t even realize all the stuff that she did, and was published in several magazines and newspapers,” Petruzzello said. 

Elisabeth Petry often traveled for work. “She would say I’m going here and I’m going there,” said Petruzzello, who would wish her good luck then promise they’d enjoy a glass of wine once she returned home. She later learned that her sister-in-law was speaking about her mother at colleges, historical societies and other locations across the country.

Elisabeth Petry and Christy Billings co-founded and led the “We Were There: Writing Your Military Experiences” group at the Russell Library in 2011. “The gentlemen in it raved about how she taught them how to write, express their feelings,” Petruzzello  said.

Elisabeth Petry will be remembered for “her persistence in researching her amazing family history, and sharing that history through being a speaker, and author. Liz’s writing was compelling and historical,” Billings said. 

“Liz was a wonderful friend,” she said. “She had a great laugh, and was a compassionate person as well as a great listener. She was a great storyteller … (and) had such a great sense of humor and fun. Liz would speak up against injustice, and would speak up in her support of veterans. When she spoke, people listened.”

These writings were in the process of being compiled into a book. “They glowed about how great this was for them,” Petruzzello said. In fact, she said, one of the veterans wrote Elisabeth Petry a “beautiful” poem that the family posted in her hospital room. 

Vietnam veteran and author Jerry Augustine is a charter member of the writing group. “Her efforts were so successful to have the veterans tell their personal accountings of what their specialty was while serving in the military, and how that duty fostered,” he said Wednesday.

Augustine said that, with Elisabeth Petry’s encouragement, he wrote and published “Vietnam Beyond,” stories and photos detailing life before, during and after his service in Vietnam.

“If it wasn’t for Liz, my book certainly wouldn’t have been written,” he said. “She will always be remembered and in my prayers.”

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct the attribution of an email to OSHS alumni from Gerry Rowland, Marcia Ketchum Baird and Christy Billings.