Helen Moritz, corrected kids' LI accents, dead at 89

Helen Moritz expected a lot of things out of her children - and no excuses.

She'd supervise her three sons and three daughters as they did homework, correct their Long Island accents with gentle - or not so gentle - teasing and once criticized a guidance counselor for going too easy on her kids.

Moritz, of Sag Harbor, died Thursday morning at 89 of complications from a stroke.

"She was tiny, beautiful and tough," said Stacey Brodsky of Scarsdale, one of her daughters. "You couldn't pull anything over our mother."

As children, Helen Delehanty and her twin sister, Muriel, were tap dancers who performed at parties and on the radio. The two graduated first and second in their class from South Side High School in Rockville Centre. But their family couldn't afford college. Both sisters went to work as secretaries.

In 1943, Delehanty married Edwin Moritz, a Hofstra University graduate who was then a cadet in the U.S. Army Air Corps. Over the next 30 years, Helen Moritz raised six children while Ed ran a construction firm that built swimming pools and often worked day and night. After her husband had a heart attack in 1977, she helped him start a mail-order sporting goods business, Ed Moritz said.

She was both strict and compassionate, her children said. Once, she threw away a pair of torn blue jeans owned by her son Kirk, a student at Columbia University in the late 1960s. Kirk Moritz, who retold the story Thursday, then fished the jeans out of the trash. But they went missing again.

"She told me, 'I threw them out of the car onto the Long Island Expressway,' " said Moritz, of Manhattan.

She also never missed a birthday or anniversary and greeted each person with, "Hi, dear," Brodsky said. She proofread her husband's letters and balanced the family checkbook to the last penny every night.

The tough love worked. All six children graduated from college. Four earned graduate degrees. "She got what she wanted," said Meryl Moritz of Tuckahoe, the eldest. "Even when we talked to her this morning, we said, 'You have to keep praying for us. A few of us are squeaking by on your coattails.' "

Moritz is also survived by her children, Jeffrey Moritz of Briarcliff Manor, Kerri Moritz Topping of Manhattan, and Scott Moritz of Glen Head, and eight grandchildren.

Services have not yet been announced. The family asks donations be made to the Hertzberg Palliative Care Institute at Mount Sinai Hospital or to the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.