Dionyse Angele Price
Dinny Price, who helped to raise several generations of Palisades children, died on November 29th, 2010, at the age of 75. She had lived in Palisades for forty-eight years. Her grandfather Joseph Lieval came from France in the late 19th century and became a partner in an artificial flower business located on Oak Tree Road. He married Angeline Hennequin and had three children, Constance (Dinny's mother), John and Joseph. Constance Lieval married Harrison Price, an engineer with International General Electric. They moved to Grandview where their first four children were born.
When Constance's father died, her mother asked her and her family to move in with her in Palisades. Thus, three year old Dinny arrived here in Palisades in 1938. Dinny was born with a physiological problem, which was not diagnosed until some years later, of a blockage of the pulmonary artery. (She had one of the first operations to correct this at age 16.) As a result Dinny did not grow as fast as other children. She entered the first grade weighing all of 28 pounds and standing 28 1/2 inches tall. She still walked up the hill to the Palisades school with her brother and sisters. Her brother, John, would be behind her, carrying a stick. Whenever she started to slow down, he'd flick the stick. “Faster, Dinny, faster.” There was a state law saying that the children's feet had to reach the floor. Well, Dinny's didn't so the janitor fashioned a box for her feet to rest on. That box stayed with her through the third grade.
Dinny attended Nyack High School which meant catching the public bus on Route 340 going through Sparkill to pick up more kids. “High school was not a highlight of my life,” said Dinny. “We were always late and had to run up from the bottom of 5th Avenue, the steepest hill in Nyack, where the bus let us off.” Dinny by now had reached her full height of 4' 7", but “I still couldn't run up that hill fast enough.”
After high school, Dinny moved to Cortland, New York to look after her sister Janet’s children. When her sister and brother-in-law moved to Hawaii in 1958, Dinny went with them. She loved the big island of Hawaii which was still unspoiled at the time. Dinny returned to Palisades in 1959 to join her mother and grandmother, who were living in the family home. Dinny and Connie immediately began caring for the neighborhood children; Connie did the cooking and dispensed grandmotherly love, and Dinny carefully watched over “her children.” After her grandmother's death in 1965, Dinny and her mother moved next door to her present home, which her mother had bought several years before.
By this time Connie had become “Minama,” little mama, to everybody. Mildred Rippey wrote about them, “Once settled in, Minama and Dinny became an institution in Palisades — unique and precious.” Elaine Imady, Mildred Rippey's daughter, wrote; “When my daughter Susu was only a year and a half old, Connie Price boarded her for five days a week for several months while my husband was studying for his doctorate and I was working in New York City. No words can convey what an enormous help this was to us. We have never forgotten the loving care Susu got at that time from Connie and Dinny. They nursed her through a bad case of the measles, potty trained her and she thrived. Weekends we would come up from the city to Palisades and Susu would happily tell us of the good times she had at the Prices. She loved the stories Dinny read her and the games they played and had fun with the other children and the numerous cats.”
Jane Lattes remembers, “Dinny was a very important figure in my children's lives. When Connie Lattes and I moved to Snedens Landing Lisa was almost four, Abby was two and I was pregnant with Conrad. Prior to moving I had been told about the child care arrangements possible at Dinny and Minima Price's home on Oak Tree Road so I immediately made arrangements to take Lisa and Abby there when I went to work in the city. I knew very little about the Prices except that they looked after many of the neighborhood children and that the kids were required to eat whatever was served as lunch.
“As I drove out from the city, I was frankly scared about what I would find. Did the kids have a good time or did they feel like outsiders? Did they follow Dinny's rules? And did they eat all of the required lunch which I thought would surely be something on the order of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches?
“Yes, they were obedient, yes they had a good time, and yes they ate lunch. ‘And what did you have for lunch?’ I innocently inquired. Imagine my surprise when I learned that their first lunch consisted of home cooked rabbit stew made from the rabbits one of Dinny's brothers had shot and brought to Minima that morning. Not only were we not in Kansas anymore. We definitely weren't in Manhattan either!”
Albon Man, whose two children, Angela and Tony, spent time at Dinny’s, also recalls that Connie set a high standard for meals. It was hard to compete when the children came home and told their mother they had had asparagus from Connie's garden, with Hollandaise sauce, for lunch. Minama made beautiful soup and all sorts of healthful and delicious foods for her brood which they ate with gusto.
In 1999 over 200 people came to Dinny’s to honor her in a most spectacular way. The day marked 50 years of her service to this community. Jocelyn DeCrescenzo described the event: “This was a celebration of epic proportions, a multi-generational, multi-cultural extravaganza. Family, friends and now fully grown children came from far and wide — literally from all over the United States. Children came who hadn't seen each other for twenty years or more. “The event marked fifty years of breakfasts, lunches and dinners. Fifty years of runny noses wiped and dirty diapers changed. Of cuts and bruises lovingly kissed and made better. Of sleep-overs and stay-awakes. Of getting on and off the school bus right there. Of homework done on the dining room table and of dining on some of the best gourmet dinners concocted by the hands of her mother Constance, Minima to all of us. Of riding bicycles in the driveway, shinnying up the shinny pole and ringing the bell. Of playing house with the most extensive array of fabulous plastic food ever seen in the little red play house. Of rainy days, gleefully splashing in puddles on the way up the stone path to the house. And, the children of the children came, some of whom have had the good luck to have been nurtured and nourished by Dionyse Angele Price.
“In some cultures it is said that it takes a whole village to raise a single child. I think, however, that in Palisades, all it really takes is a single Dinny to raise a whole village.”
Much of the information in this article comes from a 1988 10964 article written by Karen Jefferies.