Rita Palmer Samuels

Rita Palmer Samuels, 95, an educator and community leader, died quietly in her own bed at home in Deep River CT on Wednesday March 23 — the day before her 96th birthday.
Ms Samuels was born as Rita Arlene Palmer in 1915. She grew up in a large Middletown family where the five Palmer brothers (her uncles and father) were first generation immigrants who were prominent in business, banking, healthcare and law. After losing both her parents within a few months of each other when she was 21, Rita became the caretaker for her three younger siblings who ranged in age from 13 to 19. She married secretly—so that she could keep her job as a teacher in the days when teaching jobs were reserved for the head of a household—and subsequently brought her two younger siblings into her home in Deep River where they lived intermittently for many years. In June of 1939 she married Harold Samuels, a dentist and a clinical professor of dental surgery at Yale School of Medicine. Despite medical advice not to have children (she had mild polio and scoliosis, spending nearly a year in an upper-body cast as a young adult) Rita had four children over the course of ten years, and went on to be deeply involved in town politics and community affairs. She received her bachelors’ degree in Education (from Central CT State College in 1937) and earned her MA in Education and Child Development from Yale University and Southern Connecticut State College (in 1956); her studies punctuated her lifelong interest in expanding options for childhood education in Connecticut and the Deep River area. As part of that work she co-founded the Deep River Cooperative Nursery (later renamed the Chester Essex and Deep River Cooperative Nursery), and helped establish the Church Street Child Care program at the Deep River Congregational Church; both programs are still in operation today, decades after their founding. In 1962, she was appointed state president for the Connecticut Chapter of the Parent Teacher’s Association (PTA). She also served as a member of the President’s Council on Physical Fitness during the Kennedy administration.
Rita Samuels was active in the religious community as well. She founded the Middlesex chapter of Hadassah, and served as chaplain for Jewish patients at the Lawrence & Memorial Hospital in New London. She and her husband were one of three families who organized and founded the first synagogue in Deep River (The Deep River Jewish Community Center in the late 30’s), and she went on to serve as the synagogue’s first female president in 1941—a role that, with very little fanfare, made her what appears to be the first female president of a synagogue in the U.S. The synagogue still serves the town of Deep River and is now called Congregation Beth Shalom Rodfe Zedek. The religious school that Rita founded at JCC is still functioning, and a scholarship fund to honor her and Harold’s role in that program currently assists students who need financial support to pursue their studies. Rita had an abiding interest in town politics, and served for many years as a member of the Deep River town council, where she was elected to (and subsequently led) both the finance committee and the sewer commission. She edited the annual town report and selected unique features of the town to be highlighted in a descriptive dedication that developed a loyal readership over many years. Rita served on the Republican ticket, and was the highest vote-getter in many elections, although she had a robust reputation for voting against her party on a number of important initiatives. After the Republicans dropped her from the party’s roster without warning, she was invited by the Democrats to join them, and—in an ironic twist—switched affiliation and again became the highest vote-getter of either party.
Her wit was often leavened by brevity: When asked to speak after a rancorous and emotional debate on the vote to approve or reject her commission’s plans for building a sewer in Deep River—something that the town’s citizens had vehemently resisted for nearly 80 years—she stood, waited for the hall to quiet down and said “If we don’t build it now, the state will make us build it in a few years, and it will cost us more money.” She then paused, and sat back down. The vote passed with a solid majority. Rita’s unique wit often conveyed a modicum of modesty while (somehow) simultaneously claiming the high ground in the verbal banter that she so loved: An effusive journalist once asked her for an interview about the sewer system, exclaiming that “Everyone says I should interview you because you’re the smartest woman in Deep River.” “Well” she replied, pausing to shrug, tip her head, and lift her eyebrows as she characteristically did before saying something unpredictable “…It’s a very small town.”
She is survived by her children, Jane Samuels of Deep River, CT, Caroline Samuels of Bethesda, MD, and Palmer Morrel-Samuels of Chelsea, MI, her grandchildren Alex and Dan Markoff and Ana Morrel-Samuels Austin, Elias Samuels, and Eva Morrel-Samuels, and her great-grand-children Sam and Leo Austin and Amelia Samuels.