White House stint followed jobs in state government

8/17/2004

BOWLING GREEN Genevieve York, a former investigator in the Ohio attorney general s office who also worked in the Carter White House, died Friday in Medical College of Ohio Hospitals. She was 75.

She had been hospitalized since having surgery for intestinal trouble in March, her husband, William, said.

Mrs. York began working for the attorney general s office in the mid 1980s. She was a complaint specialist in the consumer protection division and, later, a special investigator, which involved some undercover work.

She investigated pyramid schemes and scams that targeted the elderly. She also investigated the workings of the state lemon law, which led her to become a mediator for the National Center for Dispute Settlement.

She liked the challenge of trying to achieve a meeting of minds, Mr. York said.

Mrs. York worked in the Carter White House for more than three years. She moved to Washington a few years after she and her first husband divorced because she wanted to live somewhere other than Bowling Green, her son, David Moore, said.

She was never quite satisfied with where she was at in life and always was shooting for something new, he said.

During her time there, she took her sons to see the Oval Office, had her picture taken with President Carter, and watched her grandchildren join in the Easter Egg hunt on the White House lawn.

After the end of the Carter administration, she worked for Directed Democrats for the Eighties, a Democratic fund-raising group, organizing banquets and parties. She moved to Columbus after about four years.

Mrs. York was born Genevieve Roberts near Cincinnati and spent much of her childhood in Weston, where her father was a Methodist minister. Her parents divorced when she was a teenager, and she moved with her mother to Bowling Green.

She began working part time as a records clerk in the Bowling Green State University student health service after her children started school in the 1950s. She held many different jobs at the university in the ensuing years, ending as the administrative assistant to the dean of the College of Business Administration.

Mrs. York was an avid traveler, beginning with a 1971 trip to Hong Kong to visit her son David while he was in the military.

That s been her lifelong desire: to see the world, he said.

She later traveled with Mr. York. They took an African safari for their honeymoon when they married six years ago, he said.

Surviving are her husband of six years, William York; sons, David and Thomas Moore; stepson, William York; sister, Marlene Dunmire; four grandchildren; and two step-grandsons.

A memorial service will be held at 10:30 a.m. tomorrow in First United Methodist Church.

The family suggests tributes to a charity of the donor s choice.