Meet & Greet: Elizabeth White

The couple took to Saugerties from the start, hiking all over the area and exploring the town, she says. White remembers being particularly pleased to discover the Lighthouse. “It’s a wonderful marshy walk, and then suddenly you come upon it. We hadn’t really realized before that how connected Saugerties is to the Hudson.” When a coalition was formed to keep Winston Farm from becoming a dump, they got involved, and later, when that movement was successful but attention then turned to siting a casino there, the two became active in fighting that as well. “Knowing how destructive a casino can be to a town, we became part of that movement,” says White. “Arnie is really passionate about it.”

Twenty-five years ago Saugerties was “a lot sleepier,” she adds, “but there’s been a lot happening here the last 10–15 years. We like this town; we’re here to stay.”

Elizabeth White grew up on the North Shore of Long Island on an estate known as Box Hill. If that sounds familiar, it’s because Box Hill was the family home designed by White’s great-grandfather, Stanford White, the renowned architect who brought Beaux Arts grandeur to the Gilded Age. As one third of McKim, Mead & White, he was the premier architect of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in America, building many of the architectural treasures of that time, including the original—and very elegant—Madison Square Garden.

Stanford White built Box Hill for his wife, Bessie Smith, who loved the St. James area she came from, and whose family founded Smithtown. “Long Island was wonderful countryside in those days,” says Elizabeth, “all fields and meadows, forests, coves and harbors. The house was called Box Hill because part of the land had boxwood shrubs on it lining the property.” It has remained in the family with each subsequent generation, currently owned by Elizabeth’s brother Daniel and his wife Betsy, who open the residence to the rest of the family and are “pouring heart and soul into preserving the place,” says White.

Growing up there with nine brothers and one sister, she didn’t think much about the fame part, she says, until Life magazine came along in the ‘60s to do a feature about Stanford White’s buildings and photographed their home. She does remember her grandfather, Stanford’s son Lawrence, as a very scholarly man, “a little stern,” who was also an architect and who continued the McKim, Mead & White architectural firm after Stanford White’s tragic death. “I remember him always clipping bushes and caring for the land. It was a wonderful place to grow up, with big woods going down to the harbor,” White recalls. “It gave me a certain sensibility, and I learned to love those gifts; and it was a gift from them.”

White lived in Italy for a year before beginning college in Massachusetts, where one of her professors started a restaurant called Peasant Stock, inspired by simple European-style rustic eating. “All the favorite students ended up in the restaurant business with him because it was really fun and he was so much fun to be around,” White remembers. She worked there for a few years before she decided she was having too much fun, and designed her own liberal studies major, studying subjects she was passionate about: music, literature and Italian. She took a circuitous path through the academic upheaval that was the 1970s; one that led her finally to the Columbia School of Nursing and then to night courses at Hunter College in preparation for attending medical school.

White met her husband around that time. “He was very supportive,” she says. “And I needed taking care of because medical school is hard—you get so much information every minute that it’s like drinking from a fire hose.” After four years of medical school, three years of residency and two years of a fellowship taking care of mentally-retarded adults, White began her career as a primary care physician. She doesn’t regret going into nursing first, she says, as it was very valuable training that served her later as a doctor, and it helped her support herself in a meaningful way while getting into medical school.

At a year from retirement age, White isn’t sure how long she’ll continue to practice medicine. She says she comes home “ready to peel off the day,” but at the same time, “it’s something I worked so long to do, love doing, am pretty good at, and it defines me. I have other things I like to do, but it is who I am.”

Practicing medicine is always difficult, says White, but general care physicians face particular challenges. “We’re the gatekeepers,” she says. “We are the people to whom they come back after going to various specialists; they come back to us to sort it out and figure out what comes next.” White says she worries about the future of medicine, because there aren’t many medical students going into primary care anymore. “After building up enormous debt in medical school, most new doctors choose a more remunerative path than general medicine,” she says. “But we need primary care doctors.”

Thinking ahead to the new insurance laws soon to take effect, White adds, “It’s wonderful that more people will have insurance, but who will take care of them?”