Frances Edith Disner Biddle

Frances Edith Disner Biddle, who taught elementary school, helped her husband earn a Ph.D, raised two sons, doted on her grandchildren, and helped elect Democrats from Franklin Roosevelt to Joe Biden, died Jan. 9. at her retirement community in Bryn Mawr, PA, two weeks after her 101st birthday. Her beloved husband, Edmund R. Biddle, predeceased her by 21 years. Her survivors include sisters Marion Zieman and Marjorie Newman; sons Stephen and Daniel, grandchildren Jonathan, Ellery and Elizabeth, and a great-granddaughter, Cleo. Ms. Biddle’s health declined sharply after a bad fall more than a year ago, but thanks to her heroic friend and helper Barbara Davis, she was able to vote in the 2020 presidential election. She complained of memory loss by then, and lamented a thousand times that unlike her wealthy mother-in-law she hadn’t kept a diary. But she still told the story of a certain professor who, at the University of Pennsylvania 70 or so years earlier, had stopped his lecture on British writers to admonish one student, a tall, dark-haired World War II veteran: “Mr. Biddle, if you insist on disrupting the class by whispering to Miss Disner, why don’t you just go sit next to her?” Their classmates applauded as Randy Biddle collected his books and moved back to sit by Miss Disner. Her marriage to Randy lasted from a summer day in 1951 until his death in 2000. Frances Edith Disner was one of five children of Israel and Sarah (nee Kahn) Disner, Jewish immigrants from Lithuania and Ukraine who spoke Yiddish and met on a Philadelphia streetcar. She grew up in Philadelphia, Detroit and Merchantville, N.J., where she and her siblings worked in their father’s drycleaning and tailoring shop to help the family get through the Depression. She never knew her grandfather, a rabbi who had defiantly practiced his faith in the time of pogroms, and who was said to have been taken by Cossacks on horseback never to return. She lost an aunt and cousins in the Holocaust. Ms. Biddle’s interest in politics surfaced early. In seventh grade she wrote a song cheering on President Roosevelt and the New Deal (“...For in the time of the so-called depression/ You have changed ... the country to a better condition...”), mailed it to the White House --and got a thank-you note signed by FDR’s aide Louis Howe. The local newspaper published the lyrics in a news story headlined, “Musical Ode To President Composed By Borough Girl.” She attended Western College in Ohio before enrolling in night classes at Penn after the war, earning a B.A. in English. The Army Air Corps veteran she met in those classes was from an old, well-off Philadelphia family. When they began dating, friends called them Romeo and Juliet. But they had much in common. Both were crazy about the New Deal, Democratic politics, Penn football games at Franklin Field, postwar writers like J.D. Salinger and Saul Bellow, and teaching. She taught at a boys’ school in Philadelphia before becoming a mom; he went on to become a college English professor who taught at Drexel, Rutgers and Widener universities. They spent many a vacation on Cape Cod at his parents’ Wellfleet summer home. Ms. Biddle’s marriage merged a family persecuted by the Nazis with one that helped bring them to justice. Randy’s father, Francis Biddle, was Roosevelt’s last attorney general -- and chief U.S. judge at the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal in 1945-1946. She loved recalling how her future husband had said nothing about his father’s prominence till she demanded to know why, during a meet-the-parents outing in Atlantic City, passersby walked up to shake his hand and say, “Hello, Mr. Attorney General.” She was also fond of quoting the friend who spied her and Randy at a movie theater and teased, “There go the poor but intellectual Biddles.” In the 1960s, 70s and 80s, when they lived in Bala Cynwyd, PA, Ms. Biddle threw kaffeeklatsches for candidates such as Pennsylvania’s first Jewish governor, Milton Shapp, and Rita Banning, Montgomery County’s first female commissioner. Her son Steve, a retired legal draftsman of multistate employee benefit plans who is active in politics and regional planning, remembers her countless phone calls rallying voters for a Democratic congressional candidate who narrowly won the swing district where Steve and his wife Lynn live. In 2008 Ms. Biddle organized Democratic women in her retirement community, Beaumont at Bryn Mawr, to get out the vote for Barack Obama. Always interested in drama and playwriting, she pitched in for a time with Plays For Living, a national group that used theater to confront family and societal issues. Her summers in Wellfleet caused so many Cape Codders -- neighbors, contractors, mom-and-pop restaurant owners -- to become her devoted friends that her family called them her Mafia. When her son Dan, a longtime Philadelphia Inquirer reporter and editor, lost his wife of 35 years, Cynthia Roberts, to pancreatic cancer in 2016, Ms. Biddle became one of the largest donors to a fund that honors Roberts’ memory. The Cindy Fund helps disadvantaged families enroll children in the West Philadelphia preschool Roberts once led, the Parent Infant Center. Ms. Biddle lived to see her son remarry last October. Dan and former New York Times reporter Sara Rimer staged their tiny, masks-on ceremony in the courtyard of Ms. Biddle’s retirement community so that she could attend. Her friend Barbara Davis helped her gently into a wheelchair. Her son Steve was best man. Her granddaughter Ellery was emcee. Her great-granddaughter Cleo, 20 months old, was the flower girl. Ms. Biddle waved her bouquet for a photo and remarked of the unusual wedding, “Leave it to the Biddles.” She died three months later. A delayed Zoom Shiva is planned for Feb. 27, her late husband’s birthday. The family suggests donations in her memory to the Cindy Fund, the ACLU, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Widener University’s English Department, and the Wellfleet Historical Society.