Alice Joyce Styner

Lebanon Springs – Joyce Styner, born October 17, 1914, widow of Tony Styner, died peacefully at her home in  Lebanon Springs, NY, in the small hours of Thursday, February 23, 2012. She was 97. Joyce’s familial reach went far and wide. She was the beloved aunt of Shirley Breazeale of Benson, AZ, aunt-in-law to Lydia S. Wilson and her children George and Mary Carmin, also of Benson, cousin to Lucille Gamble of Dyersburg, TN, stepmother to Maria Steiner Scott of London, England, and step-grandmother to Maria’s children, David Scott and Peter O’Connor, “Joyce oba-chan” to Peter and his wife Hideko’s Japanese children, Nao and Emi Hasegawa O’Connor, and, above all, a deeply valued friend to a great many people in the community of New Lebanon, NY.
Born Joyce Breazeale, Joyce and her sister Maxine were raised in a farming family in Dyersburg. Her father’s family was Native American Chickasaw; her mother came from a long line of Tennessee farmers. From an early age Joyce showed an astonishing aptitude for dance. By her mid-teens she was making her own living, performing at local venues. By her late teens, she was set on making her career in show business with her own niche in acrobatic dancing. Thus Joyce danced her way out of Dyersburg, taking a hard road through depression America.
Joyce was appearing in shows in New York and making her way in Hollywood when war intervened and brought her into the all-girl USO Camp Show company performing in the Philippines, Shanghai and elsewhere for US Forces taking back the Pacific from the Japanese. November 5, 1945, saw Joyce Breazeale reviewed in Fighter Post, thrilling war weary audiences with her “sophisticated supple-limbed swirling” as the highlight of the dance-comedy Pardon Me at the ISCOM theater on Iwo Jima. Later that year the USO Camp Show took Pardon Me and Hellzapopping to the Ginza in Occupied Japan.
The immediate post-war years took Joyce to Paris and London where she met her future husband, Tony, whom she married in December, 1949, first settling in Dorset, England, and then moving to New York where Tony set up in business on Wall Street, with Joyce working first as his secretary and later enjoying a distinguished career at the American Cancer Society. In the early 1960s, the couple bought a retirement home in Rockland, NY, which they later sold to an up and coming comedian called Woody Allen. Then they came to New Lebanon, where they moved into and refurbished their home in Lebanon Springs.
Once settled into the New Lebanon community, Joyce became an active member of the Women’s Club and President of the Historical Society. She volunteered at the New Lebanon Library and in recording books for the blind in Lenox, MA. While Tony Styner became something of a local sage in New Lebanon, Joyce became an active member of the community and a supportive wife to Tony, enjoying the Berkshires in this long, rewarding autumn of their life together.
Tony Styner died in 1990, aged 96. Now he has been joined by his partner of so many years. This part of New Lebanon has seen its share of sadness over the last year and during this strange, snowless winter. The passing of this lovely, loving, very wise and modest woman is a loss that will not be easily forgotten.
A private graveside service was held at the Cemetery of the Evergreens in Lebanon Springs, and was followed by a celebration of Joyce’s life at the Triple Nickel in New Lebanon on Sunday, February 26, at 2.30 pm.
Donations may be made to The Hospice of Columbia/Green, 47 Liberty Street, Catskill, NY, 12414. Arrangements under the guidance of the Hall & Higgins Funeral Home of Stephentown, NY.