Ethel Benson Nalle Wetherill, a golf champion and real estate broker, dies at 95
Mrs. Wetherill's first husband, Horace Nalle, had Alzheimer's disease for 17 years. When the Veterans Administration decided to send sick veterans like Nalle home, Mrs. Wetherill testified before a Senate committee. He died in a VA facility in Coatesville.
Ethel Benson Nalle Wetherill, 95, formerly of Chestnut Hill, a golf champion and real estate broker, died Tuesday, April 14, of complications from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease at the Hill at Whitemarsh in Lafayette Hill.
Born in Chestnut Hill to Edwin N. Benson Jr. and Ethel Weightman Benson, Mrs. Wetherill was descended from a historic Philadelphia family. Her paternal grandfather, Maj. Edwin North Benson, presided over the Electoral College that elected James Garfield to the presidency in 1880.
Her maternal great-grandfather, William Weightman, was among the city’s wealthiest industrialists. He founded Powers & Weightman, a company that held the patent on a quinine medication used to treat malaria.
Through a series of mergers, Powers & Weightman became Merck & Co., now called Merck.
Mrs. Wetherill, who was known as “Babbie Benson,” graduated from Springside School, and marked the occasion by entertaining her school chums at a swimming party in Chestnut Hill, according to the June 3, 1942, Inquirer. She made her debut at a dinner dance on June 18, 1942, at the Sunnybrook Golf Club.
She enrolled in Vermont’s Bennington College, where her dance teacher was the choreographer and modern dancer Martha Graham, and her faculty adviser the poet Theodore Roethke.
“I couldn’t dance well enough for Martha. I didn’t understand Mr. Roethke, and he couldn’t understand me,” she would later tell family.
Her sense of humor was often self-deprecating, especially when it came to her beauty. As a young woman, she was courted by patricians, politicians, and a film producer.
A sportswoman, she rode horses as a child. But her greatest sports achievements were in golf. She won the Sunnybrook Golf Championship 13 times.
In a grueling 36-hole battle against Annette Coar Gessler in 1953 that was broadcast over local radio, she won the 54th Annual Women’s Philadelphia Golf Championship at age 26.
After her win, Wilson Sporting Goods offered to sponsor her as a professional. She covered tournaments as a reporter for Golf World but did not become a pro golfer.
She set aside competitive golf in October 1953 to marry Philadelphia advertising executive Horace Nalle. The two became engaged in a boat adrift off Northeast Harbor, Maine. Over the next two decades, they raised five children on the three-acre property where she was born.
“She kept her house and swimming pool as a laughter-filled haven for friends, and particularly those of her children,” the family said in a statement. Summers were spent in Maine, winters in Stowe, Vt., or Boca Grande, Fla.
While raising her children, she taught underprivileged children to read and served on the board of a community center in North Philadelphia. She was active in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania and the American Cancer Society.
When her children left for college in the early 1970s, Mrs. Wetherill earned a real estate degree and sold homes for Eichler & Moffly Realtors, now Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Fox & Roach.
Her husband, Horace, an Army veteran, fought a 17-year battle with Alzheimer’s disease. On Nov. 24, 1998, she told a meeting of the Senate Committee on Veterans Affairs convened by Sen. Arlen Specter that Alzheimer’s was “a devastating disease that lasts a long, long time.”
Earlier that month, the VA had adopted a policy of sending late-stage patients home. She pressed lawmakers to let Alzheimer’s patients spend their final days in local VA hospitals. “There was no question he would serve the country he loved,” she testified. “Now he should be allowed to stay till death.” He died at a VA facility in Coatesville in 1999.
That year, she married former Philadelphia Stock Exchange president and WHYY chairman Elkins Wetherill. They traveled the world and rode horses on his Plymouth Meeting farm. When he died in 2011, she moved to the Hill at Whitemarsh.
She is survived by children Ned Nalle, Horace D. Nalle Jr., Ellen Nalle Hass, Alexander B. Nalle, and Lucinda Nalle; stepchildren Elkins Wetherill Jr., Alexandra W. Gerry, and Stephen H. Wetherill; 14 grandchildren; seven step-grandchildren; and eight step-great-grandchildren; two nieces; and a nephew.
A celebration of life will be held once the pandemic ebbs.
Donations may be made to Springside Chestnut Hill Academy, the Neighborhood Scholars’ Fund, 500 W. Willow Grove Ave., Philadelphia, Pa. 19118.