R.I.P. Mary Tyler Moore: “I’m Definitely From Brooklyn”

Mary Tyler Moore died yesterday. She was 80.

We lost both an amazing actress and a staunch Brooklynite, but don’t take our word for it.

When there was a suggestion that she’d not be worthy of being named Homecoming Queen by the organizers of Welcome Back To Brooklyn Day in 1996, Moore wrote to the New York Times expressing her outrage at the questioning.

She was born in 1936 in Brooklyn Heights. After a briefly living in Flushing, the family moved to Ocean Parkway in 1942. Moore attended St Rose of Lima in Parkville, which is on the border of Kensington and Ditmas Park, also known as Flatbush.

From the New York Times:

“It was in this neighborhood that I lived for the next three years, learning much about the spirit that produces laughter, fear, anger and — last and above all — tolerance.

The Moores and one other family were the only Catholics in an Orthodox Jewish community where my grandfather owned the house that we would live in. I made my first Communion at St. Rose of Lima Church and took no small amount of kidding for the bridelike veil I wore on that particular Sunday.”

She ends her letter saying that regardless of how the history may remember her, she was “definitely from Brooklyn. Let no one forget it.”

She shall be missed.