Nina W. Wainwright

Nina Walker Wainwright, a graduate of the Brearley School in Manhattan and of Pine Manor College, outside Boston, was very energetic throughout her life in the pursuit of a broad variety of civic causes and charitable activities. She died at home on Dunemere Lane in East Hampton Village on Friday after a long illness, her family said. She was 88.

Mrs. Wainwright was a founding member of the Volunteer Organization of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a group that numbered only 12 when she began donating her time as a docent in 1967, but that now numbers more than 1,400. She led the Ladies’ Board of the Boys’ Club of New York, helping organize, among other things, a fund-raiser at the Plaza Hotel for some 500 guests. For three years she served as the president of the Colony Club, the storied private social organization for women on Park Avenue 

On the South Fork, her full-time home for the last 15 years of her life, she was an active member of the Maidstone Club and the Garden Club of East Hampton. Her late husband, Carroll Livingston Wainwright Jr., was a descendant of Peter Stuyvesant on his father’s side and of the railroad magnate Jay Gould on his mother’s. When they married in the summer of 1948, she was already known to the readers of The New York Times — which reported on the wedding day and what she wore (a tulle gown and an heirloom-lace veil) — as a debutante of extraordinary beauty; he was a student at Yale University and a former member of the Marine Air Corps. Over the years, Mrs. Wainwright and her husband fostered an avid interest in the environment and land preservation — most notably in Montana, where they maintained a second home.

By any standard she was an early user of the internet, which allowed her to keep in close contact with her grandchildren, her family said. Throughout her life, they said, she maintained standards of behavior and of style that were admired by all who knew her.

She was born in New York City to Delos Walker, general manager of R.H. Macy, and his wife, the former Nina Sebring. The Walker family divided its time between New York City and East Hampton, where the young people’s summer social life revolved around sports and swimming at the Maidstone Club, dances with friends at the Devon Yacht Club, and the July fair put on by the Ladies Village Improvement Society.

Mrs. Wainwright is survived by her sons, D. Walker Wainwright of East Hampton and Mark L. Wainwright of Los Gatos, Calif., as well as by her sister, Judith Walker Laughlin of East Hampton. Four grandchildren and five great-grandchildren also survive. When her husband died in 2016, they had been married for 68 years.

Memorial donations have been suggested to the Boys’ Club of New York, 287 East 10th Street, New York 10009.