Polly Ann Gordon

Polly Ann Gordon, beloved mother, daughter, wife, aunt, sister, friend. Gone from us October 29, 2018 after a long illness. Born May 25, 1935 in Bay Village, Ohio to her parents, Paul and Idella Gordon, she grew up in a big loving house on Wolf Road with her brother Paul, who everyone called Sandy.

    Her childhood was a picturebook of leafy sidewalks and the yacht club and summers boating on the lake. Black-haired and blue-eyed, at 8 or 18 she was the smartest and the prettiest girl in every room she entered. She did the Grand Tour of Europe and its museums in the last great age of graciousness, when gentlemen still dressed for dinner and young ladies wore taffeta underskirts and formal gloves. She attended Northwestern University, married there, received her degree and gave birth to her only child, a son.

    Divorced not long after, then remarried, she and her new husband and the boy moved to New York City, then out to the Connecticut suburbs. She was a decorator and a talented painter in the Early American style and did a great deal of volunteer work. She wifed and she mothered her son; she loved the opera and cocktails and cross-country driving. She smoked elegantly and emphatically and drove fast with one hand on the wheel. She could throw a baseball or a football or a dinner party for twelve. She read everything. Took the son everywhere. She could clean a fish or play the piano or recite "The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock." She was dark and funny and a wicked conversationalist. She divorced again in 1975 and got back in the car.

    After New York and Chicago, she lived in California and Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Ohio and Florida, and traveled everywhere in between and beyond. She had as many adventures as she had admirers. Restless in the restless world, she eventually returned to Cleveland.  

    Preceded in death by her brother and her parents, she is survived by her loving sister-in-law Janice Gordon; by her devoted second ex-husband Edward F. Meyer; by her best friend Kathleen Keefe, and by a small family of nieces, all of whom loved her very much; by her beautiful daughter-in-law Olya and by that one son, Jeff, who thinks of Polly Ann Gordon every day - picturing her happy, smiling, standing in the lobby of the Metropolitan Opera House on opening night in a little black dress, a bolero jacket and matching gloves, all eyes on her, still the smartest and the prettiest - and who will miss the very best of her forever and ever.

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