Olga Delves, former Massapequa School District teacher

A memorial Mass will be held at Saint Mary’s Church in Amityville on Saturday, September 6, at 10:30 a.m. for Olga Delves who taught in the Massapequa school system in the 1940s. She died August 22, 2003 at Presbyterian Village nursing home in Marietta, Georgia, after a long illness. Memorial visitation will be at Powell Funeral Home, Broadway, Amityville, Friday, evening, September 5. Mrs. Delves was 92. A nearly lifelong resident of the village, she moved with her parents from New York City to Amityville in 1917, after summering here for several years, so she could enter first grade in the same school system she would attend through high school. And it was in the first grade that she would attract the notice of John A. Delves, Jr., whose family had also just come to Amityville, and would immediately become "the only girl he ever wanted." That "courtship" lasted 19 years. The couple were married in 1936, and soon after, Mr. Delves opened a law practice in the village which he carried on for 40 years, including nine as an Amityville Village Court Justice.

Mrs. Delves was a born teacher, graduating summa cum laude from Wellesley College, Wellesley, Massachusetts, in 1933, and accepting a job teaching fourth grade in the Massapequa school system. When she attempted to give her notice shortly before the birth of her first child, Joan, in 1941, the school board declined to accept it, declaring her too valuable to lose. But lose her they did, and her next job didn’t come until some 30 years later when she stepped in to her husband’s practice, becoming an "overnight legal secretary" to help him gradually retire and close his office which was located where the Amityville Record is, at 85 Broadway, Amityville.

"She probably hadn’t sat at a typewriter much since her last Wellesley term paper," her son John says, "and suddenly there she was, speeding through documents on one of the then-radically-new IBM Selectrics, efficiently dispatching all the affairs of a small legal office, and astounding everyone who had known her simply as an intelligent, stay-at-home wife. After that awakening, she often looked back and wondered aloud if a woman’s place really is in the home. That was pretty radical thinking for someone of her generation." She and her husband moved to Marietta, Georgia in 1996, where her husband predeceased her.

Mrs. Delves was active for years in the Unqua Corinthian Yacht Club - her parents having been instrumental in the founding of the club - assisting her husband who served both on the Club’s Board of Governors and as chairman of its Water Sports Committee. She was a member of the Amityville Woman’s Club and the Mary P. Myton Literary Society, and a member of Saint Mary’s Episcopal Church.

She is survived by a daughter, Joan Greene, of Marietta, Georgia, and a son, John, of Amityville as well as by four grandchildren: Delves Foery of Charlotte, North Carolina; Adrienne Greene of Denver, Colorado, Lori Greene of Atlanta, Georgia and Bruce Greene of Beaufort, South Carolina.