Eleanor Scheck

Eleanor Scheck died at home in Belmar on August 24, 2022 at the age of 93. She was born to Mina and Harry Jagels in Englewood NJ, and raised in the Palisades section of Fort Lee with her big sister Dorothea (who married Bill Jones) and twin sister Evelyn (who married Tulane De Angelis and later Blaine Layton). The girls enjoyed childhood and teenage summers at Point Pleasant Beach, where the twins filled each other’s shifts as needed at Martel’s and Jenk’s, management none the wiser. Eleanor met Harold Scheck while working at her father’s ice cream and candy shop, Jagel’s Confectionaries, in Union City. They were married Jan. 16, 1949. She graduated from the Berkeley School (now Berkeley College), on the top floor of the landmark Graybar Building adjacent to Grand Central Station, and worked in offices in Manhattan before motherhood intervened. Hal and Ellie raised their four children (Alan, Thomas, Neil, and Nancy) in Union City, Clifton, and then for thirty-five years in Pompton Plains. When their son Thomas suffered a broken neck in a diving accident, Eleanor got her school bus driver’s license to take Tom to high school, and then up the twists and turns of Route 202 during his first year at Ramapo College, before he learned to drive himself with hand controls. Harold and Eleanor’s devotion to Tom helped him lead a happy productive life full of music, laughs, and adventure. Meanwhile, Ellie’s garage sale hobby led to weekends selling at seasonal outdoor markets all across the state, and ultimately twenty years indoors, alongside her sister Evvie, as star vendors of the US Route 1 Flea Market in New Brunswick. It was so much fun that Hal quit his corporate computer systems career to join in and drive the van to the auctions in Pennsylvania. After the Flea Market closed, Ellie and Hal retired and moved with Tom and Neil to a house near the beach in Belmar. They enjoyed numerous long road trips as far as Alaska, Nova Scotia, and Florida, and to visit sister Dot in California, until Harold’s death in December of 2000. Their son Thomas passed away in 2019. Eleanor is survived by son Alan and his wife Kathy, son Neil, daughter Nancy and her husband James Bernarducci, as well as grandchildren Jon, Michael and his wife Angelyna, and Jennifer Boyce, and great-grandchildren Ava, Landon, and Bailey.