Jessica Tomlinson

Jessica Tomlinson, Italian-American, Democrat, was born and lived her first twenty-six years in Brooklyn, where children played ringolevio on the streets and mothers watched from apartment windows with their elbows on cushions. She was a child of the Depression, then WWII. She adored Frank Sinatra, and, later, Phil Ochs. At twenty-one, she married Robert W. Tomlinson, US Marine, the handsomest guy on Fresh Pond Road. They had two sons, Michael and Timothy, and moved to suburban Long Island, where, reliable sources say, she never once walked barefoot on a lawn. She embodied many conventions of her time. She was the kind of woman who entered the water up to her knees, then bent over to splash her chest. The kind of woman who wore a scarf over her hair even when the car windows remained closed. But she named the family’s first cat after Malcolm X, and she laughed out loud at the acerbic wit of Gore Vidal. Adlai Stevenson was her first political inspiration. John F. Kennedy’s campaign and presidency galvanized her activism in Suffolk County’s Democratic Party—an activism that culminated in her ceiling-cracking election to the Riverhead Town Board in 1975, the first woman to serve in this capacity. In 1976, and again in 1980, she served as a delegate to the Democratic National Convention, something about which she and her husband were extremely proud. As a committeeperson, she served on numerous local, state, and federal campaigns. She was Democratic Town Leader of Riverhead from 1988 to 1990, taking up the position following the passing of her husband, the previous Town Leader. In later years, she worked at the Suffolk County Board of Elections. In 2000, she relocated to Manhattan where she enjoyed attending movies in the daytime, and walking over to her beloved Metropolitan Museum of Art (in particular its gift shop). She loved schnauzers, Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World, and Barack Obama. In her way, she tried to make the world a better place, but the world stopped making sense to her with the election of 2016.

She is survived by her sons, Michael of Los Angeles, and Timothy, of the Seven Seas, her daughter-in-law Deedle Tomlinson, her grand-daughters Alexandra and Josie, and a great-granddaughter, Louisa.

In lieu of flowers, the family requests that donations be made to the nonprofit literary organization, New York Writers Workshop, or to Doctors Without Borders.

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