Dorothy Sellers passes at 109

Longtime Freeport resident Dorothy Sellers died peacefully in her sleep at her home on Ocean Avenue on Oct. 6. She was 109. Sellers, a Freeporter since the 1940s, was well-known in the village, something of a centenarian celebrity.

She was born on September 18, 1913, to Mary Pearl and William George Sellers in Connellsville, Pennsylvania, a prosperous coal and coke town in the hills southeast of Pittsburgh. According to her grandniece Mary Alice Harper, who supplied all of the information for this obituary, the Sellers family was well-known in town, and Dorothy and her older sister, Virginia, had a childhood filled with social events, regular trips to the Carnegie Library, picnics along the Youghiogheny River and treks in the woods, which sparked her lifelong love of nature.

Dorothy took part in school plays, wrote poetry, and designed her own greeting cards while in high school, heralding her artistic aspirations. She manifested an early dedication to civic responsibility as a member of the Girl Reserves, and to academics as a member of the National Honor Society.

She graduated from Connellsville High School in 1931, and enrolled at Ohio Wesleyan University that fall as an English major.

The Great Depression and family tragedies had a major impact on Sellers’s life, Harper told the Herald. Her family’s home, known as the “show-place of Connellsville,” was devastated by a fire while she was a junior in high school, and the contents were pilfered by local residents. Sellers subsequently recounted going to school after the incident and seeing other students wearing her clothing.

With her father’s coal business faltering, Dorothy was forced to drop out of college after only one year, and William Sellers died of heart disease the following year. Dorothy, who was known for her perpetually optimistic perspective on life, moved to New York City to look for work to support herself and her mother.

After an initially fruitless job search, she got her first major break, landing a job at the L. K. Liggett Drug Company, where she advanced to become an executive secretary. Over the years she had similar positions, assisting vice presidents and presidents, at the Calvert Distillers Corporation, the Frankfort Distilling Company and, eventually, Seagram Company Ltd. She retired in 1981.

Sellers spent her leisure time at Jones Beach, Harper said, organizing cocktail parties at her house, going to concerts and visiting museums, but she spent the most of her time working in her basement workshop. By the 1940s, she had a flourishing side business making Easter and Christmas ornamental miniatures that she sold under the label It’s a Dotti Sellers Original.

None other than the Waldorf Astoria gift shop featured her crafted Easter egg dioramas, papier-mâché angels and tiny illuminated Christmas trees. One of her trees was sent to President Herbert Hoover’s post-presidency residence at the Waldorf Astoria residence, and another was given to President Dwight D. Eisenhower at the White House.

Sellers, who lived in Freeport for nearly eight decades, cherished the area, the people and the village’s proximity to New York City, and led a full social life, according to Harper.

She had been born before women were granted the right to vote, but she never failed to exercise that privilege long after the 19th Amendment was ratified. She even switched political parties in order to support presidential candidate Hilary Clinton in the 2016, and Clinton sent her a handwritten message thanking her.

For decades, Sellers supported the Freeport Historical Society, the Planting Fields Arboretum of Oyster Bay, and Friends of Freeport. She often used the Freeport Memorial Library. She continued to exercise at the Freeport Recreation Center well into her early 100s.

She had the distinction of having withstood two pandemics, the Spanish flu and Covid-19, and she told numerous guests tales of the adventures she had over the years, which included visits to the 1939 World’s Fair, dancing at one of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s inaugural balls, attending the Kentucky Derby in 1948, attending a fashion show in Paris in the 1960s, and many others.

Last year, the Freeport community honored Sellers when she turned 108, with a raucous parade of fire trucks and police cars that made their way past her home with sirens blared in a birthday salute. She watched Mayor Robert Kennedy light candles in the shapes of a 1, a 0 and an 8 while the parade passed by in celebration.

Sellers was predeceased by her sister, Virginia Hornberger, and is survived by a niece, Patricia L. Harper; a nephew, Stephan H. Hornberger, and his wife, Nancy; two grandnephews, Ian L. Harper; and Kusisami S. Hornberger, his wife, Laura, and their daughter; and two grandnieces, Harper; and Ch’uyasonqo H. Lane, her husband, David, and their two daughters and son.

Sellers, Harper added, will be remembered by a large number of friends, both inside and outside the Freeport village limits.