Elise Boots Liddle
Dec. 10, 1931-Dec. 14, 2025
Menlo Park, California
Elise (“Boots”) Liddle passed away on December 12th, 2025, at a residence in San Jose, two days after her 94th birthday. Present at her passing were sons George Jr. and Marshall. Elise will be interred next to her husband George Sr. at Alta Mesa Memorial Park in Palo Alto. A memorial will take place at 11am on January 30th at Menlo Church.
Elise was born on December 10th, 1931, in Paris, France, to Elliott and Elizabeth Schieffelin. The parents were Americans living abroad, as father Elliott pursued graduate education in Paris. Elliott was the seventh of nine children of William Jay and Maria Louise Schieffelin, a leading New York City family at the turn of the last century. Elizabeth was the granddaughter of Lucien Brunswig, the founder and longtime president of the Brunswig Drug Company.
Elise grew up in Los Angeles, CA, along with her younger brother Richard (“Dickie”), until Richard succumbed to a sudden illness at age five. The strain of this and Elizabeth’s developing tuberculosis led to Elliott and Elizabeth’s divorce and Elliott’s subsequent lifelong estrangement from his surviving child, Elise. Elizabeth spent eighteen months in a tuberculosis sanatorium in Prescott, AZ, during which Elise was cared for by her grandmother, Anne Brunswig Wellborn, in Los Angeles.
After Elizabeth recovered, they continued to reside at the Wellborn house. Elise attended Marlborough School through her junior year of high school, but for her senior year was sent to Brillantmont, a Swiss finishing school in Lausanne. There she encountered various young royals (Princess Ragnhild of Norway, Princess Hush of India) and made lifelong friendships with several girls from England. She learned to ski, which she continued to enjoy for much of the rest of her life. More importantly, she learned French, which proved to be a future asset.
Upon her return to the States in 1948, she was enrolled in Mt. Vernon Junior College near Washington, DC, which she found intellectually unsatisfying. A teacher suggested that she go back to California and attend Stanford’s summer session, as it accepted all students, and those that passed their courses were eligible to enroll as full-time students. She passed and entered Stanford as a sophomore in 1949, majoring in French. Soon after, she met her future husband, George R. Liddle, Sr., of Pasadena, CA. They were married in 1953 and enjoyed 69 years of marriage until George, Sr.’s passing in 2022. Elise’s marriage with George provided the bedrock for her adult life.
George, Sr. and Elise lived in west Menlo Park and raised four children – she is survived by John (now 70), Susan (now 68, married to Mark Wahlgren Summers), George (now 65, married to Jane (nee Nighswonger) and Marshall (now 62). In addition to her four children, Elise was blessed with six grandchildren: Ariel, George Galen, and Wes Summers, and Caroline, William, and Alexander Liddle.
Elise had a lifelong passion for art history. She fed that passion by traveling and by serving as a docent and Head Docent at the Stanford Museum (now known as the Cantor Arts Center) for decades. She became a local expert in Rodin sculpture and gave dozens of tours through the Rodin sculpture garden, including a tour in French while hosting the French Minister of Culture in the 1970’s. Being a docent allowed her access to any course in the Stanford Art History Department, and it is believed that she audited all of them. In the course of these activities, she became friends with Lorenz Eitner (Museum Director), Don Kennedy (Stanford President), and Leo Holub (acclaimed photographer).
At the start of her marriage Elise had elevated taste in food from travel in France but no cooking skills. She practiced, took classes and became a first-rate chef.
Another lifelong passion was Elise’s participation in the Current Events Club, a small group of women in the Menlo-Atherton area originally founded by Jane Stanford as a discussion club for wives of Stanford faculty members. Elise was a club member from the ‘00’s into the ‘20’s, and she earned particular appreciation for her report on the epic path to the decipherment of Linear B in 1952. (Linear B was the mysterious script of the ancient Mycenaean civilization on Crete around 1400 BC, and deciphering it required decades of effort).
Elise lived a long, interesting, and accomplished life, and she will be profoundly missed by her surviving friends and family. Many of us take comfort in her Christian faith, knowing that her soul now resides in heaven.
