Eleanor Murray Antan

Eleanor Murray Antan passed away on Monday evening, November 11, 2013 in Mansfield, at the age of one hundred. She led a long, and beautiful life and was lucid to the very end. She began helping others at an early age; her father passed away when she was 19 years old and she had six younger siblings to help care for. She attended New Britain Normal School, earned a Master’s degree from UConn and became an innovative teacher advocating Dr. Seuss at a time when Dick and Jane were standard fare in school. She moved to San Antonio Texas to teach, but had to give that career up when she married Joseph Antan because females could be teachers only when they were single. She moved back to West Hartford to be with her family and became the head of the Curriculum Lab at the University of Connecticut where she worked for 25 years. She instilled in many a love of books and life. She travelled widely including a trip with her husband Joe, now deceased, from Alaska to South America in a Studebaker, with her sisters to France, Ireland, Scotland, China, and Italy. Although she lived in West Hartford for most of her life, she also lived in San Antonio, Texas; Jackson, Tennessee, and Oceanside, California where she moved at the age of 93 to help out a favorite nephew Michael Murray. At the age of 91, she travelled to Gatlinburg Tennessee to play in the National Bridge Tournament where 10,000 hands of bridge are played in four days. She and her younger partner-Mini Bess Williams of Tennessee, only 90, her nephew Joseph E. Murray, still a kid at 52 and his wife Phyllis Murray won every event they entered. She attained the ranking of Silver Master at Bridge. She loved family and went out annually to spend a month with her brother George in L.A. When she lived in California would return to spend a month here with her sisters. An active, cheerful, generous, perceptive woman who loved art, literature, opera, sailing, fishing, New York, music, and “All Things Considered”, the matriarch of the Murray family leaves a wonderful legacy behind. She is survived by her sister Mary Murray of Newington, fifteen nieces and nephews and myriad great and great-great nieces and nephews. Her brothers Joseph and George and her sisters Laura, Florence and Esther predeceased her. The family wishes to thank the staff at Mansfield Center for Nursing and Rehabilitation for their many kindnesses in treating Eleanor. A Mass of Christian Burial will be held Saturday, November 16, 2013 at the Church of St. Brigid, 1088 New Britain Avenue in the Elmwood section of West Hartford, at 11:00 a.m. Burial will follow in Mt. St. Benedict Cemetery, Bloomfield. There are no calling hours. Molloy Funeral Home, West Hartford has care of arrangements.