JANE GUNTHER

GUNTHER--Jane Perry, died on May 22 at the age of 103. She was the wife of the author John Gunther, whom she married in 1948, and is survived by her son Nicholas, her daughter-in-law Susanna and her three grandchildren, John, Adam and David, who live in California. Mrs. Gunther was born in New York City on August 17, 1916 to Reginald and Hilda Hedley Perry. She graduated from Vassar College in 1938. After her divorce from her first husband, John Vandercook, she became an editor at Duell, Sloan & Pearce, publishers, retiring on her marriage to her second husband. She traveled with him extensively and contributed to and helped edit his many books, including Inside Asia, Inside Africa and Inside Russia Today. A lifelong student of music, literature and the arts, she was on the board of the Mannes School of Music and the Asia Society, among others. She was also a lifelong Democrat and a particular supporter of Franklin D. Roosevelt's policies. She spent every summer in the rural village of Greensboro, Vermont in the same house in which she had grown up on Lake Caspian. On that lake, she lived happily with her husband and raised her son. After her husband's death, she retreated to a simpler life, reading a great deal and frequenting musical and other performances, until in later life her progressive deafness denied her the latter pleasures, a loss she felt keenly. In her final years, her only pleasures were visits by friends and family and reading and re-reading the books she loved. On her bed table the night she died was found Walter Pater's "Selected Essays", with a bookmark on page 149, discussing Coleridge.