Sag Harbor Author Gen LeRoy Remembered for Kindness, Creativity
By Bridget LeRoy
Editor’s note: Genevieve LeRoy Walton, an award-winning playwright, author, and model known professionally as Gen LeRoy, and former Sag Harbor resident, died on March 17. She was 87. Below is an excerpt from Notes from the Divine, a forthcoming book by her daughter Bridget LeRoy.
My mom, Gen LeRoy-Walton, was a cover model for magazines and Norman Rockwell, among others — which is kind of like saying you modeled for Jesus and also some regular humans. I remember being very young and watching TV at a friend’s house, which felt like a taboo treat, and there she was, in a commercial for a new board game. Mom. Holding the product and cocking a leg, smiling at the camera, at me. I couldn’t have been more astonished.
She was also an award-winning children’s book author. Her first book, called Bridget, went into something like a zillion printings in a gabillion languages. I may be exaggerating here, but honestly, not by much.
I was 10 when it was released. I’m in the photo on the back cover, looking exactly like what I was: A little chubby and desperately trying to hide behind my mom, my beautiful and talented mom.
She was creative and kind in that particular way that makes you realize, as an adult, that you won the mother lottery and didn’t even know it at the time.
One day, when it was too rainy to go outside, we drew pictures of flowers and plants for hours — which is fun enough when you have a fresh box of crayons and colored pencils that haven’t been broken or peeled yet. But then she promptly tacked them all up along the hallway walls outside my bedroom, creating an indoor garden so we could have the picnic in the park that had been rained out.
Because of course she did.
There were homemade gingerbread houses every Christmas, which morphed over the years into gingerbread castles. One year there was a gingerbread ark, complete with tiny frosted animals, which Mom spent actual hours meticulously designing and constructing. When (my sister Emma Watson) and I were teenagers — during the era of sexual liberation and “Our Bodies, Ourselves” — Mom made gingerbread people for us to decorate. We promptly adorned them with boobs and balls rendered in careful frosting detail, and she hung them proudly around the house.
So. That kind of mom.
Here’s my favorite Mom story, which she repeated to me the day it happened — cackling with glee — when I was already a mother myself.
She’d read an article in the local paper about turtle crossings (written by yours truly), those places where turtles cross the road, and how if you come upon one, it’s important to stop your car and assist, always bringing the turtle across to whichever side they were heading toward. If you place them back on the side they started from, they’ll just try to cross again and end up as road pizza.
It was July Fourth weekend in Sag Harbor — which used to be known as the “UnHampton” — where my mom and stepfather had by then purchased a house. The traffic was terrible. But as she navigated through town and onto the two-lane highway, my mother spotted a turtle in the middle of the road.
Putting on her hazards and swiftly exiting the car, she stopped the voluminous traffic in both directions, held up one hand like a crossing guard, and bent down to do her turtle duty.
It was a rock.
A large, extremely turtle-shaped rock.
Not missing a beat — because Gen LeRoy did not miss beats — she picked it up, patted its “back,” murmured sweet encouragements to it as she walked carefully across the road, and gently placed the “turtle” in the green grass on the other side.
The onlookers applauded her good deed.
She bowed.
United again with the love of her life, Tony Walton
October 18, 1938 – March 17, 2026.
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