Marian Holliday of Amityville dies at 85

Marian Holliday, one of the first generation of African-American women hired as telephone operators by Bell Telephone, died last month in the Amityville house she bought with her husband 58 years ago.

She was 85.

In 1957, when neighborhoods and workplaces across the country were commonly segregated by race and giant "Ma" Bell employed few black women, she took a union job with the company. She worked there, and later for AT&T and Verizon, for 33 years, winning recognition more than once for talking a phone customer through disaster.

"She saved lives," said her son Kene Holliday of Amityville in a recent phone interview. "If there was sickness in house, she called the ambulance and stayed on the line with the family, kept them comforted and calmed them down."

It helped, said her son, "that she loved to talk."

Raised in Greenwood, S.C., Holliday attended business college in New York City, reuniting with and later marrying her high school sweetheart Frank Holliday after his discharge from the Navy.

They moved to Long Island in 1952, taking advantage of the loan guarantees of the GI Bill to buy their first house. They moved to a $5,000 house in Ronek Park, Amityville, where a young African-American community was just putting down roots.

"There they are, her and my father, from Greenwood, South Carolina, and now they're in New York and they own property," he said.

In the beginning, "There was dirt for streets. When we got asphalt, it was a big deal. When we got asphalt with gravel, it was a really big deal. There were no lawns, no sidewalks, nothing, just a house. But they owned property up in the north."

Frank Holliday built a man-cave in the basement, where he and neighborhood dads would listen to jazz in the evenings.

Marian Holliday founded the community's first homeowners association and advocated for streetlights and surfaced, standardized roads. She joined Holy Trinity Baptist Church in Amityville, missing few Sundays in the next half-century, Years later, after retirement, she volunteered with old Verizon colleagues at a Paumanok soup kitchen.

In addition to her son, who is known for playing the private eye Tyler Hudson on the television show "Matlock," she is survived by seven grandsons and numerous great-grandchildren.

"She'd much rather I'd been a doctor or a schoolteacher or a postman," he said. "A civil service worker - now that's a career. But she never tried to dissuade me."

In fact, when his career was taking off and for as long as she was able, Kene Holliday said, his mother came to all of his stage shows, along with her sister and mother.

"When that curtain opened on the first night, they were always there," he said.

Services were Jan. 3 at the Holy Trinity Baptist Church in Amityville.