Jackwyn Colleen Durrschmidt

1/25/1930 - 5/4/2025

Mystic - Jackwyn Colleen Durrschmidt, 95, of Mystic, passed away peacefully at Masonicare, Mystic Sunday, May 4, 2025.

She was born Jan. 25, 1930, in Valentine, Neb., the fifth child of Joseph and Lyda Peterson Thompson. She always remembered an idyllic childhood on the dairy farm her mother ran. After they delivered milk in town early in the morning, her mother dropped her off at school. She adored her horse Chipper who got her through some scrapes while bringing the cows home. She also enjoyed singing in the high school choir.

Jackie attended the University of Colorado at Boulder and then moved with her mother and brother to Glendale, Calif. where she met her husband, Frank, after a courtship which included many rides up the coast and through the mountains on his Indian motorcycle. They were married in 1951.

She worked twenty hours a week while earning a degree from Woodbury College in Los Angeles. In 1952, she and Frank moved to Berkeley where Frank studied at the University of California. Jackie became an executive secretary to a manager at Bakelite Corporation in San Francisco, traveling across the Bay each day, which she loved.

In 1954, she and Frank moved to Groton where she joined the League of Women Voters and eventually became President. She served on the Republican Town Committee while raising four children. She enjoyed taking trips with Frank in their Tri Pacer plane on Sunday afternoons. In the 1960s, she spearheaded cross-country camping trips from east coast to west coast, up to Nova Scotia and down to the Florida Keys.

In 1970, she supervised the family's move to the north of England where Frank's work had taken him. They also resided in Reading, England, and in Belfast, Northern Ireland where they lived through some eventful times, and she found time to run a small shop selling crafts made by local artisans.

After the family returned to Mystic in 1975, she became a member of the Groton Town Council and a developmental force in the Gorton Sheltered Workshop which later became Seabird Enterprises. She also served as an Interim Town Clerk in the Town of Groton.

She sailed the coastal waters as far as Maine. Frank and Jackie sailed on their friends's sailboat across the Baltic Sea from Helsinki to Gothenburg, Sweden, and the Mediterranean Sea from Gibraltar to Viareggio, Italy, and then onto Antalya, Turkey.

In the late 1980s Jackie became a yacht broker at Sailing Specialties in Noank. A decade later she became a docent at the Lyman Allyn Museum, and wrote and published a history of the museum, "The Finest Small Museum in the Country," still on sale at the museum.

Jackie and Frank enjoyed cruising the world. Their travels took them from the North Cape of Norway to the tip of South America, and through the Caribbean Sea. Other trips took them to Moscow and Chongquing China, 1,300 miles up the Yangtze River.

Jackie is survived by her husband of 74 years; her sons, Michael, Eric and Robin; her daughter Virginia "Ginny"; three grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren.

Services at the convenience of the family. Donations in her memory may be made to the Mystic Congregational Church.