Emma Laverne Mades of Hampton Bays died at home on August 2, 2018. She was 104 and had been in declining health.
Born in Southampton Hospital on May 11, 1914, to Donald R. and Ethel (Raynor) Penny, Mrs. Mades was a lifelong Hampton Bays resident. Despite coming of age during the Great Depression, her memories of growing up on her parents’ farm on Shinnecock Road were happy ones, full of strawberry-picking in summer, sleigh rides in winter, and, as a teenager, dancing all night to the orchestra at the Canoe Place Inn. She graduated from Hampton Bays High School, and at one of those dances met and later married Charles G. Mades, a Coast Guardsman from Beaufort, North Carolina. They had two sons, Charles K. “Kenny” and Donald J. who survive. Her husband, a World War II veteran of the Pacific Campaign, died relatively young in 1960.
Mrs. Mades was a homemaker and devoted to her family. A true farm girl, she loved to garden, growing her own flowers, fruits and vegetables. She cooked everything from scratch, and baked, canned, pickled and made homemade jams, jellies and ice cream, well into her 90s. Her homemade cranberry nectar, chocolate layer cake, scalloped potatoes and from-scratch baked beans are the stuff of legend in her family.
With a life span of more than a century, she witnessed a lot of history. She recalled, as a very small child, being taken to watch the U.S. Cavalry marching by on Montauk Highway during World War I. As a young wife, she rode out the 1938 hurricane while her husband was on duty at the Coast Guard Station at what is now Shinnecock Inlet. When the storm surge came through, destroying the station, the men there had to form a human chain to avoid getting swept away, and ended up on the Southampton side of the brand-new inlet. With the phone lines down, and roads impassable, it was more than 24 hours before she found out how her husband had fared. In the meantime, the storm brought down the chimney in the house, narrowly missing her father and her infant son, Kenny, asleep in his crib.
In addition to her sons, she is survived by her grandson, William K. “Kenny” and wife Patricia and son Brendan; and her granddaughter, Virginia. She was predeceased by her parents; her brother, William; her sister, Isabelle “Babe” Creef; and a grandson, Robert.
No funeral service will be held. A memorial gathering is being planned for the fall.
Memorial donations may be made to East End Hospice, eeh.org, or to a veterans organization.
on Aug 6, 2018