Dorothy Sellers, former executive secretary to Seagram's president, dies at 109

Like a schoolgirl, Dorothy Sellers had giggled last Christmas over wearing pajamas hours before bedtime and sipping liqueur by the fireplace — still young at heart, before dying at age 109 this month.

Sellers passed away in her sleep Oct. 6 at her Freeport home.

She had left a Pennsylvania coal town for the Big Apple during the Great Depression, survived the "Mad Men" era as she rose to be the executive secretary to Seagram’s president, and fashioned masterful holiday miniatures that made it into the homes of two U.S. presidents.

She had blazed her own trail as an independent person, while the country experienced two pandemics, two world wars and the explosion of highways, which she considered the greatest invention because it opened up the nation for people to experience, her family said.

“She was a Renaissance woman,” said Gretchen Browne, her neighbor of about six decades. “She could do everything. She could talk about everything. She was attractive. She just had it all.”

Her wit and warmth gave her so many circles of lifelong friends, those who knew her said. There were the wives of Seagram executives in the Tired Mothers and Others Club (she was the “others”), her LIRR buddies and other friends in what she called the Peanut Butter Club, for whom she made sandwiches combining her favorite spread with cucumbers. She turned down five marriage proposals.

Even as her “original” friends died off, her calendar was full, her family said. When she stopped driving at 100 or so, a taxi company offered free rides. The manager at Trader Joe’s escorted her in the store to show her new items she might like. The children and grandchildren of long-passed friends kept in touch, remembering her handmade holiday gifts and welcoming traditions of mixed drinks, homemade peanut butter chocolate trifles and ice cream parfaits with a red ribbon tied around the glass, relatives said.

“Dorothy’s greatest gift was the gift of friendship,” said neighbor Ellen Kelly, a book reading buddy and half of what she and Sellers called Freeport’s smallest book club. “She was a person you wanted to be with because she was positive and fun and interested in what you were doing.

“She had a full circle of support that enabled her to live by herself in her home until the last six months of her life.”

People often asked for the secret of her longevity, and Sellers never had a pat answer. “God forgot about me,” she’d say. Or she would note, “I woke up this morning. I’m still here.”

“She was totally in love with life,” said her grandniece, Mary Alice Harper of Austin, Texas. “She had this amazing inner energy. It was really rare to see her exhausted.”

Sellers was born Sept. 18, 1913, and she lived a privileged beginning with her parents and older sister in a home known as the “showplace” of Connellsville, Pennsylvania. Her father had a plumbing and heating company in a town that was booming from the production of coke, a high-carbon fuel used to make steel, from coal. Childhood was filled with picnics, visits to the Carnegie Library and walks in the woods.

But two tragedies hit the family when she was a teenager, her relatives said. When Dorothy was a high school junior, the home burned down and locals looted the place, her family said. Shortly afterward, her father’s business started to fail in the Great Depression and he died of heart disease. It forced Dorothy in 1932 to drop out of Ohio Wesleyan University, where she was an English major. She told relatives that it was the saddest day of her life.

To support the family, she went by herself to live with her cousin in New York City, where it was tough finding work until she forged a reference letter, getting her first secretary job.

By 1947, she was the executive secretary at a major distillery. She eventually became the trusted right hand for the Seagram’s president, until her retirement in 1981, her family said. She went to concerts, plays and museums. Executives invited her to stay at their luxury Manhattan apartments and took her to special events, such as the Kentucky Derby.

She was able to buy a home in Freeport, living there with mother and aunt on the first floor and taking care of them until they died. 

Sellers became what some saw as a “master artist,” making and personalizing miniature ornamentals, a business she called “It’s a Dotti Sellers Original.” She specialized in turning eggs into holiday ornaments, carefully chipping away the shell to make a large opening, then painting the interior and inserting miniature figures for a scene — a father and son skating on an icy pond in one, an Easter egg with a leaping rabbit in another.

The Waldorf Astoria Hotel, which sold her miniatures, commissioned her to create a Christmas tree for former president Herbert Hoover, who lived in the penthouse, according to a newsletter from one of her employers. She made another tree personalized with golf clubs when Seagram’s president asked her what Christmas present to give his friend Ike, Kelly recalled. That’s how she got thank you letters from Hoover and first lady Mamie Eisenhower on the gift to husband Dwight in the White House.

Her family asks donations be made to the Hospice Care Network in Woodbury, the Planting Fields Foundation in Oyster Bay and the Freeport library and museum.