Ilse McDivitt

    On Sunday morning November 4, Ilse McDivitt, with her loving family by her side, passed away after several months of illness.  She was born July 17, 1921, in Rostock, Germany, a city on the Baltic Sea.      She lived with her parents and two sisters on a small farm where she began her lifelong love affair with flowers, gardens and animals.  All was peace and harmony until World War II, during which she married twice. Both husbands died during the war.
    After her first husband was killed, she left her son Gerde with her parents in Rostock and went to Wiesbaden in southwestern Germany, where she met her second husband, and had her second son Bernd (Bandy) as the war was drawing to a close. During the Occupation, she met and married Robert McDivitt, a soldier in the US military, and had a third son Ronald. With sons Bernd and Ronald, Ilse and Robert came to America in 1948. In 1953 Ilse settled in Presque Isle which she decided would be her home in America.
    She was a lady with a great sense of humor who loved practical jokes, funny stories, and good times with friends and family. People around town knew her as the counter waitress at the Northeastland Hotel coffee shop, where she worked for more than thirty years. She was the red-haired one with the thick German accent, and she listened to people’s stories with the sympathy and wisdom of a bartender. One could read about the news, watch it on television, but the truth was told at Ilse’s counter.  
    In addition to sons Gerde Sofka of Rostock Germany, Bernd McDivitt of Glen Burnie, Maryland,  she is survived by Ronald, Roy and Bill McDivitt of Presque Isle, daughters Lorelie Orr of Mapleton and Deborah Wentworth of Bogotá, Colombia, their spouses, sixteen grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren.  
    There will be no services.  In lieu of flowers, the family requests that donations be made in her name to the Presque Isle Rehab and Nursing Center at 162 Academy Street in Presque Isle Maine, 04769.