GEORGIE GATCH

GATCH--Georgie.

Ione Georganna White Gatch died in New York on New Year's Eve. She was born in New York on October 19, 1935, the daughter of Ione Waite and George Crosby White, and had an older half-brother Lawrence Wheeler White. After her father's death, she moved to Cincinnati, where her mother married James McB. Garvey and she gained older siblings, James, Jr., and Jane F. Garvey (now Adriance). She attended the Ethel Walker School, Brownmoor School and Finch College before entering Sarah Lawrence College in the class of 1957. In 1956 she married Milton McCormick Gatch, Jr. (Mac), and they lived in Kaiserslautern, Germany; Cambridge, MA; New Haven, Guilford and Danbury, CT; Mount Carroll and DeKalb, IL; Cambridge, England; and Columbia, MO before moving to New York in 1978. The family had vacationed in Wellfleet on Cape Cod since the 1960s and in 1975 converted a barn as a summer house. Given their many moves, Wellfleet became the family's base; and Georgie, when she was not on the tennis court, loved the sand and the sea. Rearing her three children and managing a lively household gave her great joy, as did entertaining friends at beautifully prepared, festive meals. But she was never restricted by domesticity: she was active in anti-Vietnam-War activities, the struggle for women's reproductive rights, abortion counselling, and ministry in higher education. In New York she became director of housing at Barnard College and retired after two decades as Dean of College Life. At Barnard she was respected as a mentor, model and friend to staff and students. She was on the boards of NARAL, Pro-Choice New York and the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine. A former trustee of Sarah Lawrence, she was honored by its alumni in 2017. After retirement, she worked for the senatorial campaign of Hillary Clinton and was deeply engaged in supporting the Eleanor Roosevelt Val-Kill Partnership. Her imaginative sculptural ceramic reflections on New York and Florence, created at Greenwich House in New York and Officina Laboratorio Ceramica in Florence, Italy, were exhibited in Wellfleet. Georgie is survived by Mac, her husband of 61 years; their children Ione Waite and her husband Kenneth Miller, Lucinda McCormick and her husband Daniel Poindexter, and George Crosby White Gatch; eleven grandchildren (Jeff, Michael, Marcy, and Andrew Miller; Noel, Nicholas, Georganna, and Alice Poindexter; Bryce, Logan, and Aurora Gatch), her brother and sister James Garvey and Jane Adriance; a brother-in-law Thomas Gatch; and numerous nieces and nephews in the Gatch, White, Garvey and Adriance families. Memorial gifts may be sent to The Eleanor Roosevelt Val-Kill Partnership, 4097 Albany Post Road, Hyde Park NY 12538. Her memory will be celebrated at a service at the Church of St. Luke in the Fields, 487 Hudson St., New York, NY 10014 at 3:00pm on Saturday, January 6. There will also be a memorial at the Chapel of St. James the Fisherman in Wellfleet in the summer of 2018.