Name/Title
Newspaper June 26,1995 Amy Bull Crist rememberedEntry/Object ID
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Amy Bull CristScope and Content
Monday, June 26, 1995 The Times Herald Record Pg 4
Friends return Amy’s love
Orange Co.’s grande dame remembered
By MARIE SZANISZLO, Staff Writer
MIDDLETOWN — A month after her death at the age of 89, family members and friends gathered at Orange County Community College yesterday to remember the county’s first lady.
From farmers and former students to the politicians who sought her counsel, more than 150 of them filled the Orange Hall theater at the college Amy Bull Crist helped found and later helped oversee.
And although they differed in detail, their stories, told with humor and poignance, underscored the impact Mrs. Crist had as an educator, political activist and family historian.
A member of one of the county’s most prominent families, she was one of the last of a generation that watched Orange County grow from the farming community her family helped pioneer to one of the fastest-developing regions of New York state.
“She was as tough as oak and as gentle as a newborn lamb,” said Barbara Bedell, a longtime friend and a columnist at The Times Herald-Record. “She was Eleanor Roosevelt, Margaret Thatcher and Golda Meir, all rolled into one unwavering Republican under a trademark bun on her head.”
Although she never held public office, politicians respected and feared her, and she used her influence to bring about changes to benefit the causes she championed.
“She believed in the two-party system, as long as you were all Republicans,” her niece, Mary Ann Cohen of Goshen said.
At 18, weary of working on the family farm, she accepted a friend’s offer of a teaching position.
And for the next half-century, as a teacher, superintendent and college trustee, she looked after her students like a doting aunt, buying them glasses and uniforms and remembering their names years later when they returned to thank her.
BARBARA BEDELL/The Record
Relatives of the late Amy Bull Crist flank a photograph of the Orange County leader, who was remembered during a memorial service yesterday. Pictured, from left, are Michael K. Brown, William Bull-Brown, Mary Ann Brown Cohen and Louis E. Brown.
“She was tough and powerful … (but) it was her compassion for kids that always moved me. She made them feel like a million bucks.”
— Emanuel Axelrod, retired BOCES superintendent
“She was tough and powerful … (but) it was her compassion for kids that always moved me,” said Emanuel Axelrod, who succeeded Mrs. Crist as Orange-Ulster BOCES superintendent after her retirement in 1974. “She made them feel like a million bucks.”
Axelrod has since retired.
At a time when women were often relegated to live in the shadows of men, she was fiercely independent.
She wore high heels and pearls, had a firm handshake, spoke in an “outdoor voice,” drove like a demon, loved the New York Mets, hated hospitals, but donated her body to Albany Medical Center so that she could go on teaching even after her death.
“She was one of the few among us who actually lived up to the image that had been given her,” Rep. Benjamin A. Gilman said.Relationships
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