Grace Lesley Ebert of Wellfleet died on Dec. 31, 2025 at Liberty Commons in Chatham. She was 101.
Grace Ebert.
She had been living alone since the death of her husband, George, in 2006 in what might be described as a highly dependent independent lifestyle, said her son Ed, who was her primary caregiver. Though in remarkably good health, she had recently commented to her doctor that “everything hurts — but I’m getting older and you just have to expect these things.”
Grace Armstrong was born in Manhattan on April 15, 1924 to Mabel Weiss Armstrong. Her father, Theobold Armstrong, abandoned Mabel, Grace, and her sister, Ruth, when the children were small. Grace grew up in the Bronx on the Grand Concourse, sharing an apartment with her mother, grandmother, sister, aunt, and cousin Richard.
“You can tell I’m from the Bronx,” she told reporter Molly Reinmann for a June 2024 Independent profile, “because in the Bronx they talk with their hands.”
After graduating from the Katherine Gibbs secretarial school in New York, she went to work for an art dealer. When he insisted that she type his letters exactly as dictated without correcting the grammar, she told him that she could not send out uncorrected letters with her initials at the bottom and resigned.
She went to work for the Pennsylvania Railroad at Penn Station and often served as an onboard secretary for business passengers traveling between New York City, Washington, D.C., and Pittsburgh. Telephones in apartments were still rare, and one rainy night her regional manager made the trek from Long Island to her apartment complex to say they needed her on a train the next morning. The next day there was a new phone in the apartment, installed by the Pennsylvania Railroad.
Grace and George had met in Bronx Park when he was 17 and she was just 12, and after a long friendship that blossomed into romance they married in 1944. It was on a belated honeymoon in 1945 that they first visited Wellfleet. Grace decided right then that this was where they would retire. In 1983, they built the house where Grace lived for the rest of her days.
After the birth of her first son, Grace devoted her life to child-rearing. When all four were in school, she went back to work in jobs with flexible hours, including in the Montvale Public Schools in New Jersey where she was also a member of the board of education. After a move to Houston, Texas in 1970, she worked as the secretary at her St. Dunstan’s Episcopal Church.
Always one to help people in need, when Grace came across two brothers struggling to run a printing business out of their garage in Houston, she became their underpaid secretary, professionalizing their operation. Bayside Printing is now a multi-million-dollar business.
Grace was an avid reader of mysteries and cookbooks. An outstanding chef and baker, she catalogued thousands of recipes from magazines and books. Neighbors in Wellfleet remember her annual Christmas parties.
She began volunteering at the Wellfleet library when it was still upstairs in town hall. As treasurer of the Friends of the Wellfleet Library, she was instrumental not only in record-keeping but also in the fundraising for and development of the current facility. In her home is one of the original elevation drawings of the now building. The architect labeled it “Grace’s favorite view” and presented it to her.
Grace is survived by her sons and their spouses: George and Patsy of Kingwood, Texas; Edward and Christine of Wellfleet; John and Nancy of Salisbury, Md.; and Robert and Melissa of Bennington, Vt.; her grandchildren, Amy Temple of Boerne, Texas and Michael Ebert of Highlands Ranch, Colo.; and her great-grandchildren, Jackson, Hunter, and George Temple and Ronan, Juliet, and Gwen Ebert.
“She was always eager to share laughter with others,” said Ed, “and she was strong and resolute to the very end. She would be very pleased if in her memory you simply did something nice for someone.”