Helen Grimm

Helen Jean Grimm, a Riverside resident for fifty years, where she still has family, who most recently resided at the Edgehill retirement community in Stamford, died Tuesday morning at Edgehill after several hospitalizations.

She was born Helen Jean McNaughton on January 23, 1917, during a forty-below-zero night in the Canadian prairie town of Regina, Saskatchewan, where her father worked for the Canadian National Railway. She grew up in Prince Rupert, British Columbia, a port city near Alaska. She was always proud of her Canadian origins.

Miss McNaughton’s family moved to San Francisco before the Second World War, where she walked across the Golden Gate Bridge the day it opened in 1937. She graduated from the College of San Mateo with a business degree and worked for a Scottish maritime insurance firm in San Francisco. There, during the war, she met and married Eldon A. Grimm, the securities journalist and long-time principal in the investment firm of Walston & Co. The young family moved to Riverside in 1949 when Walston moved its headquarters to Wall Street. Mr. Grimm predeceased her in 1990.

Helen Grimm was an active member of the First Congregational Church in Old Greenwich and the Garden Club of Old Greenwich, as well as the Innis Arden Golf Club. She was an accomplished and often-shown amateur artist, especially pursuing Chinese-style brush painting, which she studied with noted artist Diana Kan. Much of her work depicts the Maine coastline around Penobscot Bay.

Mrs. Grimm is survived by three children, Richard of Manhattan, Royden of Noank, Conn., and Georgia Walters of Longboat Key, Fla., as well as four grandchildren, two step-grandchildren and five great grandchildren. Arrangements for a memorial event are in progress. In lieu of flowers, the family suggests that contributions be made to the First Congregational Church of Greenwich, 108 Sound Beach Ave., Old Greenwich, CT 06870, or the Garden Club of Old Greenwich, P.O. Box 448, Old Greenwich, CT 06870