Spend just an hour with Eleanor Whitmore and you know you have met someone extraordinary. Not that she would ever say so. She focuses not on what she has done, but on what she has gotten from the doing.
Mrs. Whitmore, who turned 80 last weekend, has been a longtime champion of the East Hampton Day Care Center and will, despite her protests, be honored at a fundraiser for the center on Oct. 22 at the Maidstone Club.
While she may not want to talk much about herself, she is eager to talk about the day care center.
Mrs. Whitmore and her late husband, Charles E. (Doc) Whitmore, had four children. She was able to stay at home with them, but she said she feels “very strongly about women that have to work and the care of their children. . . . It takes two incomes for most families to make it today and their children are entitled to go into a safe place.”
She joined the center’s board in 1990, when it was on Cedar Street and directed by Jayne Casiel. It quickly became her favorite charity. When her brother-in-law, Willet F. Whitmore, who later died of cancer, asked her to suggest a worthy cause, she named the day care center. He left $500,000.
“That was the first big step in our building,” Mrs. Whitmore said on Friday at her house in Amagansett. Fund-raising parties hosted by Jane and Jack Rifkin and the efforts of David Wilt, the board’s chairman, helped the center build a new facility on Gingerbread Lane Extension, Mrs. Whitmore said.
The day care center has had some great successes, but “it has not been such a popular charity that people just want to give us money,” she said. “It’s not easy raising money for day care. Our budget is high because we want to pay the teachers well, because we think they deserve it and we expect a lot from them.”
The center now serves about 120 children between 18 months and 3 years old and has a waiting list. Mrs. Whitmore’s dream is for it to take on infants as well, which is a costly proposition. When that finally happens, she said, she can retire from the board.
“I think she’s wonderful and she deserves a lot of credit for a lot of things she’s done quietly,” said Joan Denny, a fellow board member who also serves on the Ladies Village Improvement Society with her. “She’s an inspiration,” Ms. Denny said.
Mrs. Whitmore’s own inspiration has been her church. She has been a member of the East Hampton Methodist Church since moving to Amagansett in the 1950s, and the church’s philosophy of acceptance, inclusion, and charity has influenced her deeply, she said.
She taught Sunday school at the church for 45 years and is a lay leader there. Although the congregation is small, she said, “I love that we’re multicultural.”
Mr. Whitmore started a tree moving and nursery business in Amagansett, and she went along with him to buy the big trees in the early days. She could often be seen pedaling alongside him as he made his rounds on bicycle to check on the trees he cared for.
With four children she had her hands full, but decided to take on a fifth temporarily, hosting an Argentine exchange student for a year who really became a member of the family. Because he was Jewish, Mrs. Whitmore began to attend services with him and to learn a bit about the Jewish faith and customs. She still keeps in touch.
“When I was a little over 45, I decided to do everything that I ever wanted to do,” Mrs. Whitmore recalled. She asked her family for a canoe for Christmas and paddled 119 miles of Maine’s Allagash River, including nine miles of the Chase Rapids, with the forestry service.
She bought a piano and took piano lessons, then took singing lessons. “I figured I owed it to anybody that sat next to me in church. That wasn’t as successful.”
She had always wanted to sleep under the “big sky,” so she climbed the Cottonwood Butte Mountains in Idaho, again with the forestry service, to do just that.
Over 10 years she visited Egypt, Israel, China, and Europe. “I did almost all my traveling by myself. My husband never wanted to travel. He was very happy on his bicycle here,” she said.
She started her own business, an antiques store called the Amagansett Shop that morphed into the Amagansett Flower Shop before long.
Mr. and Mrs. Whitmore had always talked about his business over coffee in the morning. When she started one of her own, “I told him I had equal time.” “My husband was always supportive. He said he didn’t care what I did as long as I did it in town.”
The business turned out to be “a godsend” when her daughter Jane died in an accident in 1979. “It was a tremendous, tremendous help in my bereavement.”
Mrs. Whitmore also did charitable work through her business. A president of the Amagansett Village Improvement Society for many years, she was also in the East Hampton Ladies Village Improvement Society. She supplied flowers and plants to the societies’ events, and made sure that every booth had an arrangement at the L.V.I.S. fair. She also organized the L.V.I.S. barbecue for 25 years.
After her daughter died, her church asked her to become its representative to Catholic Charities, which was working with a Vietnamese family that had just moved to town. She took on the project with gusto, becoming advocate, ambassador, and grandmother all in one. She remains close with the family and still thinks of the children as her grandchildren, she said.
At the same time, she began to work with the town’s disabilities board, helping to establish two houses for the mentally disabled in East Hampton. She was a community liaison, talking to church groups about the mentally disabled and hosting open houses. She stayed on to work with the clients for seven years.
“I don’t feel as if I’ve done anything so wonderful,” Mrs. Whitmore said Friday. “I do it because I love to, and I can’t say no.”
As for that list she came up with after turning 45: “I did them all, I did everything,” she said.
