Blanche Winter of Provincetown died peacefully at home Friday, August 24, 2018. She was 101.
Born May 30, 1917 in Bridgeport Connecticut, as a young child, she and her family moved to Bronx, NY. She attended New York City public schools and graduated from Evander Childs High School. She attended a fashion design program, created by the Roosevelt administration for students who could not afford college, and later worked doing sketches of fashion design and clothing patterns.
She married Sidney Winter, an artist and graphic designer, in 1942 and settled in Stamford, Connecticut. She helped Sidney run the design business for 30 years.
During that time, she was also a dedicated peace activist. She was a member of the Committee for a SANE Nuclear Policy (now known as Peace Action) and Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. She joined the Women’s Strike for Peace and worked to end the Vietnam War.
After the death of her husband she became a literacy volunteer, teaching adults to read through a program with the Stamford Public Library. She taught students for the next ten years and was honored for her decade of service to this worthy effort.
Blanche was an avid traveler and was in one of the first groups of U.S. tourists to visit The Peoples Republic of China in the 1970’s. She visited England, France, Italy, the former Yugoslavia, St Petersburg and the Caribbean. She also traveled with Elder Hostel tours around the United States.
She and her husband Sidney were long-time friends of the artist and New Yorker cartoonist Mischa Richter and Helen Richter, the abstract painter. Their friendship was a catalyst for many visits to the Cape and Provincetown throughout the years before moving to Provincetown ten years ago to live with her daughter Jane Winter, a Provincetown painter and daughter-in-law Susan Wheelan, an Organizational Psychologist, researcher and writer.
In her late eighties and until she was ninety she was the main care-giver and home health aide organizer for her two older sisters, Rose and Bess, who lived to ninety-five and ninety- eight. They lived in Stamford, Connecticut until 2009.
Blanche remained an active reader, never without a book. Her favorite and most re-read book being The Hours by Michael Cunningham. She was a huge movie fan and caught up with classics on the Turner Classic Movie channel most nights.
In 2016, she was awarded the Boston Post Cane as the oldest registered voter in Provincetown.
One of the last things she did was to fill out her absentee ballot for the September 4th primary election.
Her many friends in Provincetown will gather in the fall for a Celebration of her Life.