The mother of Mayor Bloomberg, Charlotte Bloomberg died Sunday. She was 102. Hit the jump to read the rest of the story.
Charlotte Bloomberg, the mom with moxie who watched her son rise from restless schoolboy to become New York’s three-term mayor, died Sunday. She was 102.
“As the center of our family, our mother’s unimpeachable integrity, fierce independence, and constant love were gifts that profoundly shaped our lives and the lives of so many who knew her,” Mayor Bloomberg said Sunday night in a statement issued after the Daily News broke the story online.
“Our family recognizes how truly blessed we have been to have her live such a long and full life, and to be able to carry her spirit with us forever.”
Several neighbors on her tree-lined street in the Boston suburb of Medford reported seeing cars at her neatly-kept gray house early Sunday, and then got word that their beloved neighbor had died.
“She was always uplifting, always wanting to help people. She was proud of her children and her grandchildren,” her next-door neighbor said.
“She was the most wonderful neighbor I ever knew. She was so alert and so bright. She was a charming lady.”
The mayor routinely repeated his mother’s pearls of wisdom, including an important warning to never let success go to your head.
She was a petite woman, who often offered pithy comments on her son’s wealth and fame – qualities that never seemed to impress her although she was enormously proud of him.
She was born and reared in New Jersey, where her parents owned a wholesale grocery company. In the 1920s, she graduated from college and got a job working in a dairy. That’s where she crossed paths with the mayor’s father, William.
They had two children, Michael Bloomberg and Marjorie Tiven, who leads the city’s Commission for the United Nations.
In the last few years, the Bloomberg matriarch was rarely seen in public. The mayor would tell friends, “She has her good days and her bad days.”
Another neighbor said she spoke Saturday with a family friend who checked in on Charlotte Bloomberg daily and was told: “She seems to be fading and I don’t think she has very long.”
She was not at the mayor’s inauguration for a third term in January but stood by his side during the first two.
For her 100th birthday, Bloomberg bragged that she used e-mail, carries a cell phone and recalled when electricity first came into her neighborhood.
At the time, he credited her optimism for her long life.
“She always has a bright side of things to look at. She doesn’t stop whenever there is a problem. She says, ‘Okay. Here is the problem. Let’s just do it.'”
Her faith was her bedrock, a feeling she wished her son shared.
She helped transform her local synagogue, Medford Temple Shalom, after she found her son racing in its hallways as a boy.
“I grabbed Michael, and I said, ‘What are you doing? Would you do this at [his local school]?’ And he said, ‘No, but here they don’t care,'” she recalled for The Boston Globe.
She remained an active member of the synagogue for more than 60 years. One wing even bears her name, The William and Charlotte Bloomberg Community Center.
