Grace Lesley Ebert

Her name was Grace. To her four sons she was “Mom,” and it was funny to hear cousins call her Aunt Grace. But as the years went by it became increasingly obvious that grace is what characterized this remarkable woman.

Grace Lesley Ebert of Wellfleet passed away on December 31, 2025, just a few months shy of her 102 birthday. Living alone since the passing of her husband, George, in 2006, she lived what might be described as a highly dependent independent lifestyle. One of her sons, also a Wellfleet resident, served as her primary caregiver. Though in remarkably good health, she recently commented to her doctor that “everything hurts, but I’m getting older and you just have to expect these things.”

Born in Manhattan, daughter to Mabel Weiss Armstrong, she grew up in the Bronx, NY along the Grand Concourse sharing an apartment with her mother, grandmother, sister, aunt, and her cousin Richard. Strong-willed and fearless from the start, she once sat quietly on her tricycle watching the construction workers blasting and excavating for the 8th Avenue subway.

As a graduate of the prestigious Katherine Gibbs Secretarial School in NYC, 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 was then placed in a position with the Pennsylvania Railroad at Penn Station. Though she worked in an office, she often travelled as an onboard secretary for business passengers between NYC and Washington, D.C. as well as to and from Pittsburgh. On one dark and rainy night her regional manager from Long Island had to trek through the mud outside of the new apartment complex where she lived with her husband to say they needed her on a train the next morning. At a time when telephones in apartments were rare, the next day there was a phone in her apartment installed by the Pennsylvania RR.

After the birth of her first son, Grace devoted her life to her children. When all four were in school full-time she went back to work in jobs where she could arrive after the children were off to school and before they returned home. These included the Montvale Public Schools in New Jersey, where she was also a member of the Board of Education, and after a move to Houston, TX in 1970, as the secretary at her church.

Always one to help people in need, when she came across two brothers struggling to run a printing business out of their garage, she stepped in and became their underpaid secretary bringing a professional business model to their operation. That business is now a multi-million- dollar printing company.

It was on a belated honeymoon in 1945 that Grace and George first visited Wellfleet. She decided right then that this is where they would retire. And in 1983 they built a house and did just that. She has lived here ever since.

Grace was an avid reader of mysteries and… cookbooks. An outstanding chef and baker, she catalogued thousands of recipes from magazines and hundreds of cookbooks. The few neighbors remaining (one of whom is also a centarian) will remember the annual Christmas party she hosted for the neighborhood.

Volunteering in many capacities in Wellfleet, she began working with the library back when it was upstairs in Town Hall. As treasurer for the Friends of the Wellfleet Library she was instrumental not only in the record-keeping but also in the fundraising and development of the facility we now enjoy. In her home is one of the original elevation drawings of the proposed building. The architect labelled it “Grace’s favorite view,” and presented it to her.

She is survived by her four sons and their spouses, George and Patsy, Edward and Christine, John and Nancy, and Robert and Melissa; her grandchildren Amy Temple and Michael Ebert; and her six great-grandchildren, Jackson, Hunter, and George Temple; and Ronan, Juliet, and Gwen Ebert.

Always anxious to share laughter with others, she was strong and resolute to the very end. She would be pleased if in her memory you simply did something nice for someone.