Beatrice Gray

1923 - 2019

New London - Beatrice Castle Kirk Gray, 96, a noncombatant survivor of Pearl Harbor and Watergate, died July 10, 2019, at Fleet Landing in Atlantic Beach, Fla., where she lived for 30 years.

A third-generation kama'aina, Bea was born in Honolulu, Hawaii May 14, 1923, to Addison Erwin Kirk and Alice Moore Kirk. A Punahou School graduate, she was home on break from Pine Manor College in Massachusetts Dec. 7, 1941, when she witnessed the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Unable to return to the mainland for fear of submarine attack, she remained in Honolulu, volunteering in various wartime capacities. There she met and married her first husband, naval officer Edward Emmet DeGarmo, with whom she had two sons, Alan and Edward. Ed DeGarmo, a highly decorated naval aviator, was killed in action on Okinawa in 1945.

Ed DeGarmo's Naval Academy classmate, L. Patrick Gray III, a veteran of five submarine war patrols, stopped by at the end of the war to pay his respects to his classmate's widow. They fell in love and were married in Coronado, Calif. in 1946. Together they had two more sons, Patrick and Stephen.

For the next 14 years as a full-time navy spouse, Bea raised their four boys through multiple changes of duty station across two more wars, Korea and Cold, and on two coasts, Pacific and Atlantic, until Pat retired in 1960 to practice law in New London, where they built a house and settled down.

But not for long. In 1969, Pat was called back into service, this time as a presidential appointee in the Nixon Administration. For the next three years Bea and Pat shuttled between their home in Connecticut and an apartment in Washington, D.C., while Pat rose through the Justice Department until becoming acting director of the FBI on the death of J. Edgar Hoover in 1972. Six weeks later the Watergate break-in occurred. Though not part of the conspiracy that would eventually bring Nixon down, the fallout from it ended Pat's government career. They moved back to Connecticut while Pat finished his law career. They then moved to Kiawah Island, S.C., and finally to Fleet Landing in 1989, where they both lived out the rest of their lives, Pat until 2005 and Bea until 2019.

Bea is survived by her four sons, Alan, Ed, Patrick, and Stephen; their wives Betsy, Rebecca, Marcie, and Eliza; 14 grandchildren and 21 great-grandchildren. Her ashes will be interred next to Pat's at the Naval Academy Columbarium in Annapolis, Maryland in a private ceremony.