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A memorial service for Jean Collier Wirth, who died on January 18, 2018, surrounded by her three sons and her grandson, will be held on Sunday, June 24, at 2 p.m. at Starr Boggs restaurant in Westhampton Beach, on what would have been her 94th birthday.
Born in Ottumwa, Iowa, to Edward and Marguerite Collier, she was a drum majorette for the high school band, turning many heads when dressed in the band uniform. She later headed east, to New York City, in 1945, in search of bigger game.
She graduated from New York University with a bachelor’s degree in the arts. Somewhere in the middle of her independence, a date was arranged by mutual friends with an eligible bachelor, a lawyer, a native New Yorker. Laughter and then love were unavoidable and she married Morris Aaron Wirth on December 21, 1955.
The arts were her constant pursuit and second passion, and she affiliated herself with numerous collectives, including the 1010 Players Theater Group, the Needle and Bobbin Club, and the Isabel O’Neil Foundation for the Art of the Painted Surface.
Survivors said “the life of the spirit also helped define her,” as was evident in her decades long relationship with and worship at the Park Avenue Christian Church.
Charity also played an important role in her life. She was indispensable to the founding of East End Hope for Hospice, and had an instrumental role in the first two designer show houses at Meadowcroft and Kinkora.
Locally, she and her husband were among the founding members of the La Ronde Beach Club, and original investors in their good friend Starr Boggs’s first restaurant.
She was the biological mother of three sons, Bob, Billy, and John, and one grandson, Alec, but, survivors said, it must be noted that she mothered, sheltered, and cared for any and all the wayward types who followed her charismatic boys back to her Park Avenue apartment or the home on Quantuck Bay.
Mrs. Wirth was predeceased by her husband, Morris.
on Jun 12, 2018