Gracia Gaynor Winget

Gracia Gaynor Winget passed away peacefully on January 18th at her longtime Riverside, Connecticut home surrounded by her children Bill, Joe, Sue and Chris, daughters-in-law Wendy Dye and Betty Hinsey Winget, and 3 of her 9 grandchildren, Anthony Feith, Ainsleigh Winget, and Marcella Winget. Mrs. Winget was 97 and some years ago lost the ability to walk or speak due to Alzheimer’s Disease, but she found her own ways to communicate and somehow managed to exude happiness, affection, and a strong will to live. She was good company to the end, an inspiration to her family, and will be sorely missed.

Known as “Gay” to her many friends, Mrs. Winget enjoyed a wonderfully happy marriage for 64 years to Nelson Winget, who died in 2021 at age 94. Always proud to identify herself as a stay-at-home wife and mother, starting in her 40’s Mrs. Winget nonetheless channeled lifelong passions for art, antiques and salvaging discarded furniture into an astonishingly successful estate liquidation business.

Proudly and devoutly Irish Catholic, Mrs. Winget was born in 1927, being baptized and living with her parents in Forest Hills, Queens and, as a young child, moving to Nutley, New Jersey, where she resided with family until her marriage to Mr. Winget in 1957.

Mrs. Winget’s father, William T. Gaynor, a lawyer and eventually an executive with the New York Central Railroad, hailed from an upstate-New York family that had operated the Bangs & Gaynor cement mill on the Erie Canal dating back to 1818; Mrs. Winget fondly recalled spending summers in the 1930’s at a 19th century family home in Fayetteville, New York where her father had grown up, no doubt nurturing a taste for antique furniture and American history that remained a powerful influence throughout her life. Mrs. Winget’s mother Madeleine -- whose maiden name was also Gaynor despite no known familial connection with her husband -- had been born in upstate Elmira, New York into a “railroad family,” her father working as an engineer for the Lackawanna Railroad. Madeleine Gaynor enjoyed a long career as a French Teacher at Nutley High School, from where Mrs. Winget also graduated.

Having grown up during the Depression, in later life Mrs. Winget frequently voiced gratitude for her family’s good fortune during that painful era in that both of her parents managed to keep their jobs, albeit at reduced salaries. The family home was located near a suburban train station, and Mrs. Winget recalled soberly how her Mother would leave plates of food on their back porch for the stream of unemployed men – sometimes referred to unkindly as “hobos” -- that wandered along train tracks in New Jersey (and all over the country) in a desperate search for work.

Mrs. Winget graduated from Elmira College with an Economics major in 1949. The College then admitted only women as students, being notable for, among other things, housing the landmark “Octagon Library” where Elmira summer resident Mark Twain penned his classic novels immortalizing Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. As a loyal Elmira alumnae, Mrs. Winget devoted extraordinary time and energy to supporting the College over the decades after graduation, in particular working tirelessly on a number of editions of its yearly “Octagon Fair.”

During her Elmira years, Mrs. Winget was briefly introduced to a Cornell undergraduate who had just returned from military service named Nelson Winget. While Mrs. Winget and Mr. Winget recalled only a passing acquaintance before their respective graduations in 1949, they were eventually re-introduced by mutual friends while working in the New York area in the early 1950’s with happily momentous results, marrying in 1957. Before her marriage, Mrs. Winget worked as an assistant buyer at the B. Altman department store and subsequently as a flight scheduler at American Airlines in New York City, a job she particularly enjoyed.

Mrs. Winget gladly traded-in her corporate jobs for motherhood and a lifelong partnership of equals with her husband Nelson. The couple moved to Riverside with their four children in 1966, where they resided for the rest of their lives in the same colonial-style house built in 1929. Gay and Nelson reveled in their family and life in Riverside, always being kind and attentive parents while relishing school concerts, youth sporting events, graduations, and the friendship of a much-loved group of neighbors. They were longstanding members of St. Agnes Roman Catholic Parish.

Mrs. Winget cultivated a profound passion for rehabilitating discarded wooden furniture that she acquired for a few dollars at church auctions, garage sales, and even junkyards. She would routinely amaze her family by turning what appeared to be crudely painted pieces of junk into stunningly beautiful furniture, painstakingly stripping and refinishing the underlying wood surfaces to their natural glory. The restored chests, tables and other pieces that she particularly liked found a place in the Winget Family home, along with select paintings, glassware and furnishings of great beauty that she somehow managed to salvage for minimal or no cost from obscure sources. Along the way, she became a dedicated student of art and antiques, especially knowledgeable about traditional wooden furniture, antique American glassware and American painters.

In the 1970’s Mrs. Winget helped her widowed Mother Madeleine move from the house in Nutley to an apartment in Greenwich. Grasping a demand from similarly situated individuals, Mrs. Winget founded “Your Move” as a support service to handle all phases of the relocation process. That business quickly centered around the sometimes emotionally wrenching need to dispose of treasured family property that could not be kept in a downsized home, with the humble “tag sale” proving to be a highly efficient vehicle for realizing the value of surplus items.

Mrs. Winget’s tag sales for Your Move clients attracted the attention of local attorneys, who began to seek out her services for dealing with the homes of deceased, relocating or divorcing clients. From there, the business was rebranded as “Early Bird” and came to focus largely on estate liquidations, with Mrs. Winget and her partner Jean Barker exhaustively inventorying the contents of a client family’s home, identifying particularly valuable items for auction (no small thing working in the stately homes of Fairfield County), and holding a tag sale to realize the value of everything else from furniture to toothbrush holders. The term “tag sale” hardly does justice to the scale of Mrs. Winget’s enterprise as hers evolved into almost carnival-like events with dozens of dealers from New York and more distant cities clamoring for early access and a cadre of off-duty Greenwich Police Officers needed to maintain security.

Partnering with Mrs. Barker and assisted by various friends in staffing their tag sales, Mrs. Winget worked hard and successfully at Early Bird’s business for many years, enjoying the satisfaction of assisting families and the excitement of discovering many extraordinarily valuable items overlooked in basements, garages, closets and attics.

For her leisure time, Gay enjoyed long walks, sailing and canoeing with Nelson, and swimming at Greenwich Point and various beaches where she and Nelson would take holidays with the family, notably on Martha’s Vineyard, Long Beach Island, New Jersey, and Caspian Lake, Vermont. Gay and Nelson also cherished being grandparents, doting on nine grandchildren in Vermont, Connecticut and New York City, joined later by four great grandchildren.

Even as Alzheimer’s took its harsh trajectory, Mrs. Winget always remained palpably enthralled by the continuous presence of her husband Nelson and their devotion to each other never wavered. The family takes great solace that their last years together were spent comfortably at home in Riverside, and that Mrs. Winget was able to remain there after Mr. Winget’s passing, wishing to thank a dedicated team of caregivers who will forever be considered “family,” Rose Telima, Joana Jules, Patricia Dorisca, Michelle Gale and St. Heureuse Telima. Mr. and Mrs. Winget were also fortunate to have new generations of terrific neighbors in Riverside, most born decades after Gay and Nelson moved to the area, who with their children were invariably warm and inclusive in greeting “Grandma” and “Grandpa” -- honorifics they cherished -- and keeping them engaged with neighborhood life even in their final years.

Funeral Services for Mrs. Winget will be held on February 11, 2025 at 10:00 am in the St. Agnes Chapel on the grounds of St. Catherine of Siena Church, 4 Riverside Avenue, Riverside Connecticut, followed by burial at Putnam/St. Mary’s Cemetery. A reception will follow at 1:00 pm in the dining room at Louie’s, 136 River Road Extension, Cos Cob, CT 06807.

In lieu of flowers, the Family would be grateful for contributions “In Memory of Gracia Winget” to Elmira College, 1 Park Place, Elmira, NY 14901, Attn: Advancement; https://www.elmira.edu/support-elmira/give-now; or at (607) 735-1855.