Sandra Cantey, a master gardener who designed the gardens at Home, Sweet Home in East Hampton in the 1970s and was also involved in a number of other village activities, died at Southampton Hospital on Dec. 28 after a long illness. She was 74.

    As a member of the Ladies Village Improvement Society, Ms. Cantey had been a chairwoman of the summer fair and of the Nature Trail committee. Other members remarked on her “deep love for the trail.” She remained involved in the society until recently. She was also a lay minister at St. Luke’s Church and made numerous hospital visits to comfort the sick and dying. She served at one time on the East Hampton Village Design Review Board.

    In the 1970s, Ms. Cantey obtained a degree in horticulture from the Cornell Cooperative Extension in Riverhead. She had an expansive organic vegetable garden and also wrote a gardening column for The East Hampton Star, in addition to her work at Home, Sweet Home.

    Born in Austin, Texas on July 3, 1938, to Emory Ambler Cantey and the former Gladys Aileen Westbrook, Ms. Cantey’s family traced their roots in America to the 1600s and the earliest founders of the Carolina Colony.  Following the Civil War, they moved west to Fort Worth, Tex.

    Ms. Cantey grew up in Fort Worth, where she graduated from Arlington Heights High School. She was a “speed reader with near perfect memory,” wrote her son, Phelan Wolf of Amagansett. She enjoyed horseback riding and performed with a local theater company called the Reeders School.

    After receiving a bachelor’s degree in English literature at Vassar College and a master’s in psychology from New York University, Ms. Cantey spent a year at the Southern Methodist University Law School before traveling to Europe, principally France, with David Addickes, an American painter whom she eventually married. The couple lived in Paris and Antibes, where she learned to speak the language and prepare French cuisine.

     Following her divorce from Mr. Addickes, Ms. Cantey met Peter Wolf, a doctoral student, in Paris. The two married and moved to Manhattan, raising their children, Phelan and Alexis, there and at a summer house in Springs.

    Ms. Cantey was a guidance counselor at Brooklyn College, and became active in the Vietnam War peace movement. In the mid-1970s, she and the children moved to their Springs house full time, while Mr. Wolf continued to work in New York.

    The marriage ended in divorce, and Ms. Cantey was briefly married to a high school sweetheart, while splitting her time between East Hampton and Fort Worth. She lived mainly in East Hampton for the past 10 years.

     In addition to her son, and her daughter, Alexis Wolf of Pittsboro, N.C., Ms. Cantey is survived by four grandchildren. A funeral was held on Friday at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in East Hampton. Her ashes were buried in the St. Luke’s Memorial Garden.

    Catherine O’Neill, who helped found the Women’s Refugee Commission in 1989 and in a long career had worked for the United Nations and the International Monetary Fund among other notable organizations, died on Dec. 26 at the University of California Medical Center in Los Angeles. She was 70 and had had cancer for 12 years.

    Ms. O’Neill and her husband, Richard Reeves, lived in Sag Harbor on and off for about 30 years. Her political activism and concern about women and children in other parts of the world propelled the couple to live for a time in Pakistan, where she worked with refugees from the Soviet war in Afghanistan, and in Paris, where she worked for the International Herald Tribune.

    Her advocacy for women and children who were refugees grew from having accompanied the civil rights leader Bayard Reston to Thailand in 1979, where she saw refugees from the war in Cambodia. She helped found the Women’s Refugee Commission after traveling to other camps in Southeast Asia as a member of the board of the International Rescue Committee.

    In Sag Harbor, the couple owned a house at the corner of Main and Glover Streets, where they gathered friends to what was described as “almost a salon.” Ms. O’Neill was known to introduce a heated topic at the dinner table and ask each guest to express an opinion. “You never said no to Catherine,” Linda Bird Francke, a longtime friend and colleague, said, as she praised Ms. O’Neill’s formidable organizing skills and determination.

    The couple had two children each when they married in 1979 and went on to have a daughter. Ms. O’Neill’s peripatetic lifestyle not only prompted them to live abroad, but to take a trip through 16 countries with their extended family, whose members ranged in age from 10 to 33. It resulted in the couple’s co-authoring “Family Travels: Around the World in 30 or So Days.”

    Catherine Elizabeth Vesey was born to Patrick and Bridget Ruddy Vesey in New York City on July 17, 1942. She earned a degree in history at St. Joseph’s College in Brooklyn and taught for a year as a Catholic missionary in La Grange, Tex., which had a brothel industry that inspired the Broadway show “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.” She earned a master’s degree in social work from Howard University.

    Her political life began in Los Angeles, to which she had moved in 1965 with her first husband, Brian O’Neill. She ran for the California Senate twice and for secretary of state in the 1970s, and was finance director of Gov. Jerry Brown’s presidential campaign in 1976. According to The Los Angeles Times, she lost her hope to become the first woman in the California Senate by one percentage point after a Roman Catholic pastoral letter was read in her district’s pulpits condemning her stand on abortion.

    After their marriage, she and Mr. Reeves, an author, lived in Los Angeles until she was offered a job as RCA’s public affairs officer. She didn’t like it, he wrote, and quit to get another master’s degree, this time in international affairs, at Columbia University.

    In 1992, Ms. O’Neill was back in Los Angeles politics, losing a Democratic primary bid to run for the California Senate to Tom Hayden, who went on to win the election. Kofi Annan, secretary general of the United Nations, appointed her director of the U.N.’s information center in Washington, D.C., in 1999, a post she held until 2005.

    In addition to her husband, Ms. O’Neill is survived by their daughter, Fiona O’Neill Reeves, by two sons from her first marriage, Colin and Conor O’Neill, a stepdaughter and stepson, Cynthia Reeves Fyfe and Jeffrey Reeves, as well as one grandchild and three step-grandchildren. A sister, Mary Ann Garvey, also survives. The family plans a ceremony in the spring at Oakland Cemetery in Sag Harbor.

    Memorial contributions would be appropriate, the family said, to the Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children, which now has a staff of 25 and focuses on gender-based violence, sexual and reproductive health, and migrant rights. Its office is at 122 East 42nd Street, New York 10017.

    In an interview with The East Hampton Star in 1999, Ms. O’Neill said, “In my lifetime, I have been blessed at talking to and getting to know people all over the world. And I have never stopped being struck by the ability of women from all different parts of the world to bond, connect, understand their shared values, and click with their aspirations. It’s fantastic, and it’s a great sign of hope.”

    There will be a funeral service at 11 a.m. tomorrow at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church for Sandra Cantey, a Wooded Oak Lane,  East Hampton, resident who died on Friday at Southampton Hospital.

    An obituary will appear in a future issue.

    Irene Dynenson Steinman lived through one of the 20th century’s darkest times. The longtime resident of the Northwest area of East Hampton died on Nov. 30 in West Nyack, N.Y. She was 85.

    She was born in Lodz, Poland, in 1927. In 1941, her family fled the invading German army for Russian-controlled territory, where they obtained visas from Chiune Sugihara, Japanese diplomat to Lithuania. Sugihara is credited with saving the lives of thousands of Jews by way of the travel visas he issued.

    Unfortunately, Irene Dynenson’s family did not survive. Several days before the Germans invaded the Soviet part of Poland, she alone went to visit an uncle, a physician in a town still under Soviet control. When her uncle was pressed into service to treat wounded Soviet soldiers being evacuated to the east, he took Irene Dynenson with him.

    After the war, she returned to Poland, then studied in Geneva and helped Holocaust survivor children. She became an instructor at the Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants, the home for children of the Holocaust in France.

    Relatives and friends brought her to the U.S., where in 1951 she earned a bachelor’s degree in her fourth language. She met and married Jerry Steinman of the Bronx. After raising their two sons, she obtained a master’s degree in library science from Columbia University. For the next 40 years she worked as vice president and treasurer of Beer Marketer’s Insights, the family business.

    She is survived by her sons, Benj and Glen, and three grandchildren. Memorial contributions were suggested for the University of Southern California’s Shoah Foundation, the Institute for Visual History and Education, 650 West 35th Street, Suite 114, Los Angeles 90089-2571.

    Louise Turissini, who lived in Noyac year-round from 1968 to 1995, died on Dec. 24 in Indianapolis. She was 96.

    Ms. Turissini began visiting Noyac in 1947 with her husband, Dan Turissini. In 1968, they became full-time residents. After he died, she lived there until 1995, when she went to live with family. While living in Noyac, she was a member of the Sag Harbor Columbiettes, a Catholic women’s organization.

    She was born Louise Monchiero on Feb. 11, 1916, in New York City to the former Teresita Zaghini and Luigi Monchiero.

    Ms. Turissini had been a seamstress and homemaker, her son Edward Turissini of Indianapolis said. Also surviving is her son Richard Turissini of Gardenerville, Nev., five grandchildren, and four great-grandchildren. A son, John Turissini, died before her.

    Visiting hours will be this evening from 7 to 9 at the Yardley and Pino Funeral Home in Sag Harbor.

    A funeral Mass for her will be said tomorrow at St. Andrew’s Catholic Church in Sag Harbor at 10 a.m. Burial will follow at the church cemetery on Brick Kiln Road.

    Elizabeth Marie Dragotta, a lifelong resident of Amagansett and East Hampton, died on Sunday while vacationing with her family in Palm Beach Shores, Fla. She was 74 and had been ill for some time.

    Ms. Dragotta was born at Southampton Hospital on May 5, 1938, to Mark Ryan and the former Marie Mott. She was raised in Amagansett and lived in East Hampton during adulthood, said Michael Fasano, her son-in-law. She later returned to Amagansett, living there for another decade until relocating to Hawthorne, N.J., where she spent her final years with her daughter, Debra Fasano, and her family.

    A graduate of East Hampton High School, she married her high school sweetheart, Frank Dragotta, on Dec. 29, 1956. Mr. Dragotta died in 1997.

    Ms. Dragotta — Liz or Betty to her friends, Nannie to her grandchildren — worked for the East Hampton School District for 15 years, Mr. Fasano said, serving as a classroom assistant at the John M. Marshall Elementary School.

    Her greatest pleasures in life were her family, going to the beach, sailing with friends, and shopping, particularly at Chico’s in East Hampton, said her family.

    In addition to her daughter and son-in-law, Ms. Dragotta is survived by her son, Joseph Dragotta of Pleasanton, Calif. She is also survived by her brother, Mark Ryan of East Hampton, and six grandchildren.

    Visiting hours was held yesterday at the Scillieri Funeral Home in Paterson, N.J. Additional visiting hours will be from 4 to 8 p.m. tomorrow at the Yardley and Pino Funeral Home in East Hampton. The Rev. Steven E. Howarth will preside at a funeral on Saturday at 10 a.m. at the Amagansett Presbyterian Church, to which Ms. Dragotta belonged. She will be cremated at Cedar Lawn Cemetery in Paterson, N.J.

    The family has suggested donations to the Amagansett Presbyterian Church Scoville Hall restoration fund at P.O. Box 764, Amagansett 11930.

    Juana Maria Bahamondes-Castro of Queens Lane, East Hampton, died at Southampton Hospital on Dec. 11 after a yearlong illness. She was 77, having been born in Las Cabras, Chile, on June 12, 1935.

    Born to Abraham Castro and Rufina Donoso, Ms. Bahamondes-Castro was one of 12 children, all of whom immigrated to this country.

    She was married to Jose Bahamondes, who survives, and had enjoyed life as a parent and homemaker.

    In addition to her husband, she is survived by the couple’s five children. They are Paulina, Veronica, Ximena, and Mauricio Bahamondes of East Hampton and Luis Bahamondes of Sag Harbor. Three sisters, Luz Castro of East Hampton and Elisa and Elsa Castro of Queens, survive, as do eight other siblings, who live in North Carolina and Texas. She also is survived by nine grandchildren and by 40 nephews and nieces.

    The Yardley and Pino Funeral Home in East Hampton was the site of visiting hours on Dec. 13, and a funeral Mass was celebrated the next morning at Most Holy Trinity Catholic Church in East Hampton. Burial followed in Most Holy Trinity Cemetery.

    Through her active roles in the Bridgehampton community and with riding and racing of horses and her charitable work, Lynn Dart Wesnofske touched the lives of many people. Ms. Wesnofske, of Brick Kiln Road in Bridgehampton, died on Dec. 26 at Stony Brook Hospital from complications from pneumonia. She was 71.

    She showed dogs and was a partner in racing standardbred horses. In addition, she was an active member of the Devon Yacht Club in Amagansett and the Pelican Isle Yacht Club in Naples, Fla. The family’s Ocean View Farm property was the site of several of the Peconic Land Trust’s Through Farms and Fields benefit events.

    Other civic organizations that Ms. Wesnofske was involved in included the Community House Association and the Bridgehampton Village Improvement Society, where she was an officer and director and active in its fund-raising and communications for many years. She also helped found Peconic Landing, a residential community for older people, in Greenport.

    Ms. Wesnofske was born Lynn Ainsworth Dart on January 28, 1941, in Mount Kisco, N.Y. She was the daughter of Donald D. and Lois Urion Dart. She was educated at St. Margaret’s School in Waterbury, Conn. and Westchester Community College.

    Before marrying, she worked as a medical laboratory technician at Southampton Hospital and founded a Bridgehampton-based mailing and word-processing business in the 1970s called Wordtech.

    She married Raymond Wesnofske of Bridgehampton in 1964 and had one son, Christopher Wesnofske of New York City. Both survive her. She is also survived by her sister, Joan Dart Ogren of Connecticut, to whom she was especially dedicated.

    Funeral arrangements were by the O’Connell Funeral Home in Southampton and services were held at the Southampton Presbyterian Church, where she was a congregant.

    The family has suggested memorial contributions to the Bridgehampton Village Improvement Society, P.O. Box 872, Bridgehampton 11932, the Peconic Land Trust, P.O. Box 1776, Southampton 11969, and the Southampton Hospital Foundation, 240 Meeting House Lane, Southampton 11968.

    Beate Sirota Gordon, the author of the key women’s rights aspects in the post-war Japanese Constitution, died of pancreatic cancer at home in Manhattan on Dec. 30. She was 89.

    Ms. Gordon, who had summered in Amagansett since about 1990, was attracted to the South Fork by its art scene. “She had dear friends in the arts community,” her grandson Sam Gordon said.

    A gifted linguist who spoke six languages, she was born in Vienna, Austria, on Oct. 25, 1923, to Leo Sirota and the former Augustine Horenstein.

    Her father was a renowned classical concert pianist and, during a tour of Japan, fell in love with the country. With the threat of Nazi Germany growing, the Sirota family emigrated from Austria to Japan in 1928.

    Living in Tokyo, Ms. Gordon first began studying at a German school, but her parents pulled her out as the Nazi influence over the school increased, transferring her to an American school in the Japanese capital when she was 12.

    Her gift for language was apparent from a young age, and she was admitted to Mills College in Oakland, Calif., at the age of 15 in 1939, studying modern languages, and graduating in 1943.

    By that time the United States was at war with Japan, and from the start of the war until its conclusion, she had no contact with her parents.

    She comfortably spoke German, English, Russian, French, Spanish, and Japanese. At the end of World War II, wanting desperately to reconnect with her parents, she became an interpreter for the Army of Occupation’s executive staff in 1945. She discovered her parents had made it through the war, malnourished but unhurt.

    When the new Japanese constitution was being written in secret by General Douglas MacArthur’s staff, though she was then only 22, she was asked to write its women’s rights section, which still stands today. In all, the draft took seven days to produce, with Ms. Gordon the only woman among a group of some 24 men.

    Her future husband, Joseph Gordon, was chief translator and interpreter for the U.S. military intelligence. They married in January 1948 and remained together until Mr. Gordon’s death in August.

    The couple had two children, Nicole Gordon and Geoffrey Gordon, both of New York City.

    She joined the Japan Society in 1954, becoming its director of performing arts in 1958. She became director of performing arts for the Asia Society in 1970.

    In these roles, she became involved in bringing new artists and performers from Japan and Asia to the States, as well as working with American performing artists.

    Some of the personalities and performers she worked with in their early years were Yoko Ono, John Cage, and Robert Wilson.

    In 1995, her memoir, “The Only Woman in the Room,” was released in Japan, becoming a best-seller there, and made her a cultural celebrity. The English-language edition was released two years later. In 1998, Ms. Gordon was awarded the Order of the Sacred Treasure by the Japanese government, according to an obituary for her that appeared in The New York Times.

    Besides her two children and Mr. Gordon, she is survived by two other grandchildren.

    A memorial for her will be held at the Asia Society at a date to be announced.

    The family asked that donations in her memory be made to her alma mater, Mills College, 5000 MacArthur Boulevard, Oakland, Calif. 94605.

    Jonathan L. Auerbach, a resident of and lover of all things Sagaponack for the past 20 years, died of cancer on Nov. 29 in New York City with his family by his side. He was 70 years old.

    Mr. Auerbach, who was the founder and managing director of Auerbach Grayson and Company, which provides international securities research, execution, and settlement for United States institutions. He was also a dedicated supporter of the arts, serving in leadership roles at the Shakespeare Globe Center in the United States, as well as the Globe Center in London, which he helped found.

    He produced the underground film “Vortex,” which was selected for the New York Film Festival, among others, and appeared in the film “Belladonna,” which premiered at a Whitney Biennale.

    A man of wide-ranging interests, he loved vintage car road rallies, as well. In 2000 he became involved in the Bridgehampton Road Rally. This May, he took part in the Trans-America Rally, which covers the over 4,000 miles between New York City and Vancouver, British Columbia. He made the trek with his son Jake Auerbach acting as navigator, crossing the country in a 1951 Chrysler New Yorker. He also participated in the New Jersey Vintage Grand Prix and the Mount Washington Climb to the Clouds, among other rallies and motoring events.

    Born in Philadelphia on Nov. 25, 1942, he graduated from the Noble and Greenough School, a boarding school in Dedham, Mass. He went on to Yale University, where he was a member of the R.O.T.C., and served in the Army as a first lieutenant after his graduation in 1964.

    He began his career in international securities trading and marketing in the 1970s and founded his own firm in 1993. He had a deep interest in the developing world, particularly in Africa. He traveled the continent, not just as a businessman but as a humanitarian.

    In 2003, according to an article published the Noble and Greenough School, he met Wangari Maathai, who ended up winning the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize. That meeting led him to support a reforestation project in Kenya through the Green Belt Movement, which Ms. Maathai had herself become involved with in the 1970s. The Green Belt Movement is an environmental organization that empowers communities, particularly focusing on women, to conserve the environment and improve their lives.

    Ms. Maathai spoke to Mr. Auerbach’s alma mater in 2008, and said, “Be appreciative of nature. There is a lot about nature you don’t see and don’t understand, but you should nevertheless appreciate it.”º

    Mr. Auerbach set up a scholarship at Noble and Greennough, to provide assistance for students primarily from emerging markets.

    He also was a trustee of the Dwight School in New York City.

    Mr. Auerbach split his time between Sagaponack and New York City, and had been planning before his death to move to Sagaponack full time.

    He was a member of the Peconic Land Trust and was a supporter of the Hampton Library in Bridgehampton, along with his wife of 23 years, Anne Luce, who survives.

    In addition to his wife, he is survived by his children, Gabrielle, Jake, Nick, and Sasha Auerbach, all of New York City, as well as his father, Joseph Auerbach, who lives in Boston, and a sister, Hope Pym of Kent, England.

     His mother, Judith Auerbach, and a son, Patrick Luce Auerbach, died before him.

    Mr. Auerbach was buried at Edgewood Cemetery in Bridgehampton.

    The family is planning for a memorial service in the new year.

Harry Gilbert Carlson

    Harry Gilbert Carlson, an expert in the literature of William Shakespeare and Henrik Ibsen, died on Saturday at Stony Brook University Medical Center of complications from an infection. He was 82.

    A funeral service will be held tomorrow at 10 a.m. at St. Michael’s Lutheran Church in Amagansett.

    He was a professor emeritus at Queens College in the department of drama and theater, and was the author of “Out of Inferno: Strindberg’s Reawakening as an Artist,” published in 1996, and “Strindberg and the Poetry of Myth,” published in 1982. He was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship in 1966.

    According to Richard Gambino, a member of a coterie of Shakespeare enthusiasts, a typical evening involved gathering around a piece of audio-visual equipment to watch Shakespearean productions Mr. Carlson had recorded from films and videotapes. Discussions followed.

    It all started with a small TV on the top floor of a house in East Hampton. Mr. Carlson’s collection included about 2,000 DVDs of plays by Ibsen and Shakespeare. In recent years, the group met on Saturday mornings at the Amagansett Library.

    Mr. Carlson was born in 1930, the son of Harry C. Carlson and the former Bertha A. Johnson. His parents were immigrants from Sweden. He lived in East Hampton for many years in a house built by his father, a carpenter. Mr. Carlson is survived by his wife, Carolyn, who has advanced Alzheimer’s disease.

    During the Korean War, Mr. Carlson served in the Army. He asked to be discharged in South Korea so he could teach Shakespeare to Korean college students. Mr. Gambino said Mr. Carlson told the story of the time he was reading a passage from a Shakespeare play to illustrate the universality of the playwright’s insights and noticed that his students were nodding their heads. He asked why. One of them answered, “Shakespeare must have been a Buddhist.”

    He went on to teach Ibsen’s and Shakespeare’s works in Europe and the U.S. He also served as a director, producer, and sometime actor in a great many productions for the rest of his life.

    Mr. Gambino wrote: “The opinions universal among those many who knew Harry Carlson on hearing of his death are all so many variations on: ‘Now cracks a noble heart. Good night, sweet prince; and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.’ ”