Having grown up in an English, Irish, and Scottish military family in Europe as well as India and Singapore, Maralyn Rittenour seemed destined to be a fiddle foot for the rest of her long life.
She worked at a number of quite different jobs, including at the United States office of Christie’s; the Special Military Intelligence Section in Hong Kong; the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge, England; the Hong Kong Trade Development Council; as the commercial attaché in the Quebec Delegation in New York City, and here in East Hampton as the director of the East Hampton Historical Society. She also managed to pack in work for the governments of the U.K., Hong Kong, and Canada in trade development.
Mrs. Rittenour spent a large part of her life in this country, particularly in New York City and East Hampton, where she and her second husband, Charles Rittenour, built a house in Springs in 1973.
She was traveling in Italy over the summer when she started feeling unwell. Once she returned, she was quite ill, with lymphoma as it turned out, and she died on Aug. 18 at Stony Brook Southampton Hospital.
She was born in Dublin on April 14, 1938, the daughter of the former Moira MacDermot and Wakefield Christie-Miller. She was educated at St. Mary’s Convent in Ascot, England, and at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland.
Mrs. Rittenour, working for M.I.6 at the time, was first married to a young English dentist, Ian David Calder, who was a hobbyist explorer. They went to live in the Northwest Territories of Canada, where he did free dental work among the Inuit. The couple often flew to the Arctic to canoe and snowshoe together. In the summer they sailed their Lightning sailboat on Great Slave Lake.
In 1967 Dr. Calder died of hypothermia in an attempt, with a friend and the friend’s son, to be the first to navigate the Back River, which flows into the Arctic Ocean.
In 1970, having returned to Manhattan, where she had worked as a young woman for Christie’s, she met and married Mr. Rittenour, a banker. He died in 2010.
It was partly the experience of having lived near the Arctic Circle that awakened in her a thirst for travel, she once said. Aside from her frequent trips to all sorts of places, including to see family members in England and Ireland, vacations in Europe with her husband, and treks of her own in Morocco and climbing 17,000 feet up Mount Kanchenjunga in the Himalayas, once she was spending more time here, Mrs. Rittenour also took care of people’s dogs at her house in Springs.
She was a member of the Garden Club of East Hampton and a volunteer at the Animal Rescue Fund of the Hamptons and in the executive offices of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. After her husband died she continued as a member of the Devon Yacht Club, where she regularly played bridge and tennis and participated in the book club.
After a story about a trip she made at age 80 to Antarctica appeared in The East Hampton Star, that writer and Mrs. Rittenour’s friends and family urged her to write a memoir, which she did. “Thursday’s Child” was published by Post Hill Press in April. She was invited to be at Authors Night here on Aug. 13 but was unable to attend.
“The book,” her friend Joan Baum said, “was the culmination of a lifetime’s dream to celebrate her good fortune and wide friendships, increasingly augmented by the people she met whose dogs she belovedly cared for. . . . She did go far and left a legacy of risk, generosity, compassion, and dedication to friends and organizations.”
Many cousins — 31 first cousins — in England and Ireland survive.
Mrs. Rittenour was cremated. On Thursday, Sept. 8, at 11 a.m., a funeral Mass will be said by the Rev. Ryan Creamer at Most Holy Trinity Catholic Church on Buell Lane in East Hampton. Memorial donations have been suggested to the Animal Rescue Fund of the Hamptons at P.O. Box 2616 in East Hampton or arfhamptons.org.
