Miriam Kessner October 10, 2021

Miriam Lewitz Kessner, a longtime resident of Oronoque Village, died on October 10 in Stratford after a short illness. She was 92. She was born on February 5, 1929, in Brooklyn, NY, the daughter of Samuel and Anna Sherman Lewitz. Her parents owned a corner candy store and Miriam exercised her gregarious nature working behind the soda fountain counter, which was patronized by the neighborhood’s colorful characters. She was a 1946 graduate of Manual Training High School in Brooklyn, and attended Brooklyn College and later The New School for Social Research in Manhattan.

Miriam married Paul Kessner in 1952 and several years later moved to Lancaster, PA where Paul worked in his family’s outerwear manufacturing business. They returned to New York in 1962, and together founded and ran The Ferry House, Inc., a mail-order catalog company based in Westchester County. Miriam wrote advertising copy and selected items for the catalog with flair and success. They sold the business in the mid-1980s, and moved to Oronoque in Stratford and to Vero Beach, Florida, where they spent winters until Paul’s death in 2016, after 64 years of marriage.

She is survived by three children: Ellen (Frederick Shortz), of Chester, CT; Lawrence (Helen Thackray), of Bethesda, MD; Richard (Lisa Baron), of Hastings-onHudson, NY; nine grandchildren: Stephen, Alan, and Imani Shortz; Andrew, Jane, William and Anne Kessner; Sean and Ani Kessner; and many nieces and nephews.

Miriam had been a member of the Riverdale-Yonkers Ethical Culture Society, the Oronoque Tennis Club in Stratford, and the Grand Harbor Beach Club and Timber Ridge Tennis Club, both in Vero Beach.

There will be a private family memorial service, and burial at Shaarai Shomayim Cemetery in Lancaster, PA.