Joan Tyor Carlson, a longtime Sag Harbor resident who survived cancer three times, died on Jan. 8 at the Hamptons Center for Rehabilitation and Nursing in Southampton. A gifted storyteller who wrote for both national and local publications, among them Billboard magazine and Collier’s, she was also a ghostwriter on several autobiographical books. She was 88 and had complications from Alzheimer’s disease.
Born in New York City on Aug. 30, 1933, to Milton Tyor and the former Renee Rosenstock, Ms. Carlson attended Hunter College High School and Barnard College, ultimately graduating from the Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, N.Y., in 1955.
A first marriage to Roland Martines ended in divorce. In 1971, she met Richard D. Carlson of Shelter Island, a naval architect and sailboat racer, who was relaxing with friends at the Oar during a break from the Storm Trysail-Block Island Race Week. Not long after, they married and moved to Sag Harbor, but always returned to the island in the summer, usually by sailboat. Her husband died in 2014.
Though a newcomer to Sag Harbor in 1971, Ms. Carlson quickly became a great networker, her family said, and was generous in helping any friend or acquaintance find a home or a job. More than once she played matchmaker, with varying degrees of success. She was a deeply involved member of the community — ready, said her daughter, Dicie Tyor Carlson of Sag Harbor, to join any and all committees, too many to name.
At the suggestion of an antiques-dealer friend, she started a local guide to antiques shops, with a map hand-drawn by her husband, and drove all over the East End to distribute them, making friends and clients along the way. Some dealers preferred to pay in trade, her daughter said, and so the family home became quite the collection of folk art “primitives” and other quirky additions.
Ms. Carlson was a voracious reader and writer who once wrote a romance novel. In her later years, she worked for the East Hampton School District as director of the adult education program. Her networking brought many teachers into the fold, and the program throve.
Having cancer three times changed her view on life. She was known to say that “life is too short and precious to ever do anything I don’t want!”
In addition to her daughter, Ms. Carlson leaves a brother, Peter Tyor of Winnetka, Ill. Another daughter, Catherine Perry Martines, died before her.
Memorial donations have been suggested to Fighting Chance in Sag Harbor, online at fightingchance.org, or to the Alzheimer’s Foundation of America, alzfdn.org. A celebration of her life will take place in the spring.
