Yole Sills

Sills, Yole L.
Yole Laura Granata Sills, a sociologist, died on Monday, December 7, 2015 in North Branford. She was a resident of Evergreen Woods, a retirement community in North Branford, Connecticut.
Yole Sills was born on November 22, 1917 in New York City, New York; she was the only child of Alfedo Granata and Eda Luzzatti Granata, (migrated from Italy in the early 20th century). She is survived by her son and daughter-in-law Gregory Lawrence and Kitty Sills, of Bowling Green, Kentucky, her three granddaughters, Melissa Farlow of Carterville, Illinois, Monica Sills of Bowling Green, Kentucky, Autumn Sills of Ashton, North Carolina, one grandson Stephen Sills of Union, Missouri, four step-granddaughters, Jennifer Noble, Amanda Noble and Erica Hager of Bowling Green, Kentucky, Pamela Noble of Louisville, Kentucky and eight great grandchildren. Her youngest brother, Norman D. Sills of Salisbury, Connecticut, three nieces-- Margaret Huckel, Virginia Filkins, and Eugenie Sills-- and two nephews—Jeffrey Sills and Mark Sills-- also survive her. Preceding her in death her husband David L Sills, her parents, oldest brother-in-law, Richard M. Sills of Niskayuna, New York, two sister-in-laws, Janet Sharts Sills and Nancy Grupe Sills-- and granddaughter, Jennifer Sills.
Yole received a B.A. in languages and literature from Brooklyn College in 1939 and a M.A. from Columbia University in 1940.
During World War II she served on the Italian desk of the Voice of America in New York, writing scripts in Italian for short-wave broadcast to partisans in Italy.
From 1946 to 1950, Yole worked in Tokyo as an information specialist in the postwar American occupation of Japan, headed by General Douglas MacArthur. She was one of five or so people in a Tokyo office that fed information about the occupation to the press, both in and outside Japan. Yole dealt with the Allied Press, publicizing efforts at land reform and expanding women's rights in a society that remained extremely traditional. She amplified the efforts of Lieutenant Ethel Weed, an energetic Women's Army Corps (WAC) officer who met with kimono-wearing Japanese women daily in her office, and helped re-establish a native women's movement that would eventually push through important reforms.
Yole would go to work for the Bureau as well, as a researcher and interviewer on different sorts of funded projects. By the mid-1950s, the Bureau was beginning to move away from mass communications research into other areas. Yole Sills took part in several of an important series of studies done of medical education, which helped change how medical students were trained. She also interviewed and prepared reports on immigration, black migrant workers from the South, and the current state of the pajama industry among other topics, and taught new graduate students how to interview as well. The couple spent a year in India in 1961-62, where she wrote a report based on interviews with Indians about their reading of U.S. and Russian literature. Yole channeled her interest in medical sociology into adjunct teaching opportunities.
In the 1980s and '90s, she conducted research on the AIDS pandemic and the sociology of retirement communities, publishing on the former in 1994.
In the 1970s, Yole was appointed director of Interdisciplinary Studies at Ramapo College of New Jersey, and continued to write about medicine. Conducting a research on "The AIDS Pandemic: Social Perspectives", publishing a well-received book in1994, by Westview Press.
Yole Granata was married to Dr. David Sills– a fellow civilian employee of the Japan Occupation – in Yokohama, Japan in February 1948 Dr. Sills and Yole both served under General Douglas MacArthur. The Sills moved to Evergreen Woods – a retirement community in North Branford, Connecticut – from their home in Rowayton, Connecticut in May 2004.
Services will be held privately at the convenience of the family. Arrangements in care of the Guilford Funeral Home, 115 Church St, Guilford. To share a memory or leave a message of condolence, please visit www.GuilfordFuneralHome.com