Mary Esther Carmen Tanner-Grooms of Hampton Bays died on January 18 in Southampton. She was 84.
Ms. Tanner-Grooms was born on July 31, 1931, in Amsterdam, New York. She was the daughter of Clayton P. Carmen and Charlotte Benedict Carmen, both of whom predeceased her. She grew up in Freeport and graduated from Franklin High School in 1949; she remained active in the school’s Alumni Association.
On September 8, 1951, she married Ernest Tanner. The Tanners lived in Oakland, New Jersey, where they raised four children: Clayton, Mark, Tracy, and Todd. They separated in 1975 and divorced in 1980.
In 1998, Mary Carmen Tanner married Robert Skidmore Grooms of Hampton Bays and took the name Mary Tanner-Grooms.
As Mary Tanner, she was a semi-professional singer with the Memmott Polyphonic Chorale, which sang at Carnegie Hall and many other venues, and also a semi-professional actress. She also held jobs in government and in real estate.
Continuing into recent years, though her physical condition deteriorated, Ms. Tanner-Grooms continued to have an extraordinarily active mind. She was an avid reader of all kinds of books, and subscribed not only to Newsday, whose crossword puzzle she completed every day, but also to Opera News.
Ms. Tanner-Grooms was predeceased by two of her children, a son Clayton, and Amy Lee, who died in infancy. Her husband Robert Grooms died in May 2013. She is survived by two sons Mark Tanner of Illinois and Todd Tanner of California; a daughter, Tracy Tanner of Coram; a daughter-in-law, Christina Tanner (Clayton’s widow) of Nevada; six grandchildren; seven great-grandchildren; and four stepchildren.
A funeral service will be held at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church in Hampton Bays at a later date.
Memorial donations may be made to the Church of St. Mary, 165 Ponquogue Avenue, Hampton Bays, NY 11946.
on Jan 19, 2016