Year in Review, 2022— Shelter Island profile: Carolee Gray, a life of family, service and a lot of fun

A look back at some of the Reporter’s most important profiles and stories of 2022, this one from July.

Over the kitchen sink in Carolee Gray’s West Neck home, a heron painted on a window blind steps out of high grass toward a conch shell. Nearby, a painting of a seahorse hangs in a frame on the cabinet, and a shell tucked into a nook over the back door is so precise you’d swear you can hear the sea in it. On the corner of a hall closet is the image of a robin feeding her young.

In the dining room of Gray’s home is a pen and ink drawing made by her father more than a century ago. Looking at her father’s work takes her back 80 years to her childhood and the wellspring of her interest in painting.

“I would sit in the kitchen with him and say, ‘Daddy, draw me a squirrel.’” she said. “He could draw anything.” A drawing, which hung in her grandmother’s living room and then in her mother’s bedroom before it came to her, will pass one day to her granddaughter.

At 90, she’s in the prime of her artistic life. 

Ms. Gray has lived on Shelter Island for 35 years. Her husband Gordon passed away a decade ago, after tough years during which Ms. Gray cared for him.  She’s blessed with family nearby; her son Michael lives in the Heights with his wife Dede, and her granddaughter Claudia Cline lives in the city with her husband Chris and their new baby, Devon.

She is teaching her great-granddaughter to talk. “I taught her the other day to say, “Oh phooey.’” 

Ms. Gray has impish tendencies. Her modest blue-green shirt seems to shimmer, and upon closer inspection is covered in spangles. She insists that the goldfinches at her bird feeder are performing a pole dance. She wonders if I know how long a hummingbird’s tongue is (I do not) and announces, “As long as their beak. I Googled that.”

She grew up in Princeton, Ind., one of the four girls at her high school who got engagement rings over Christmas of their senior year. She married Gordon Gray, a boy she had known since she was 9, and delivered groceries to her family. In those days, if a bride worked it was probably because her husband was not making enough money to support them, so she didn’t.

Ms. Gray was barely 20 when their son Michael was born shortly before they left Indiana in 1952, leaving both their families behind. “I always say that Gordon raised me, and Michael educated me,” she said. “Mike was a baby when we moved away, which broke everybody’s heart. I have a small family, but a very close one.”

Gordon started working for Sears as a receiving clerk, and rose over the years to be an executive in the automotive division at the Sears Tower in Chicago. As he moved up at Sears, the family moved with him. Nine times.

“Every time I moved it was a crisis,” Ms. Gray said. “I made a nest, I was happy to be there, and it was always a disaster. It wasn’t the move itself, Sears took care of all that.” She said. “You make friends, and it just breaks your heart. Except for Wayne, N.J. I was not upset about leaving New Jersey.” 

After Gordon’s early retirement from Sears, they moved to Chattanooga, Tenn. and ran an auto parts store. “I learned more about a car than I ever wanted to know. Being in the South, we were considered Yankees. One of our best customers once asked me the difference between a Yankee and a damn Yankee.   He said a Yankee is someone who comes to the South and a damn Yankee is one who comes and stays.  I said, ‘Thank you.’” 

She helped customers in the front of the store, while Gordon worked in the back, “Some shade-tree mechanic would come in looking for a part and say to me, “I want to talk to one of the guys.’ I’d tell Gordon, someone needs you.”

And here is where Ms. Gray’s tough-guy childhood nickname came in handy.  “He’d listen to the customer and then say, ‘Butchie, go get what he wants.’  I knew exactly what they wanted, and where it was, but they didn’t trust me to know.”

Carol and Gordon moved to Shelter Island to live near their son Michael and his family who had already lived in the Heights for many years. In 1988 the Grays joined the Presbyterian Church when she passed by one Sunday when the windows were open, and heard the choir.

She served on the committee that chose a new pastor after Bill Grimbol retired in 2012, (she dubbed it “the preacher-pickin’ committee”) and helped supply and serve meals for homeless people in cooperation with the Southold Presbyterian Church. She served as an elder for two terms and was deacon.

After Gordon passed away in 2012, Ms. Gray asked Mary Lou Eichorn, a friend who owns the the Cornucopia Gift Shop, if she had any ideas about what she should do with herself, and Ms. Eichorn suggested painting. “So, I painted sand dollars with scenes of the North and South ferries,”  she said. “They sell very well.” In her decade of peak creativity, in addition to decorating her own home, Ms. Gray has painted wooden boxes, framed images of birds and sea life, and step-stools for friends and family, some of whom have, as she says, “Floated aloft.”

“Sometimes I forget to eat. I don’t have a studio, I have a card table set up in the bedroom. I put a snack out and all of a sudden, it’s 5 o’clock and I have not eaten it. I’m painting instead of eating.”

She often writes a cheeky greeting or inspirational message in the objects she decorates. For one friend she wrote, “Butterflies are God’s confetti sent to earth in remembrance of His Love.”  Then there was the toast she included with a box painted for former Town Board member Chris Lewis, “Cheers and brassieres.” 

When someone suggested she couldn’t write that in Chris’s box, she said, “Watch me. I can do what I want to do.”

Lightning Round — Carolee Gray

What do you always have with you? A spoon ring that Gordon gave me.

Favorite place on Shelter Island? Right here in my chair.

Favorite place not on Shelter Island? Kennebunkport, Me.

When was the last time you were elated? When my great-granddaughter called me Nana.

What exasperates you? People who ride their bicycles in the middle of the street.

What is the best day of the year on Shelter Island? This year it was my birthday, April 8.

Favorite food? Homemade meat loaf. 

Favorite person, living or dead, who is not a member of the family? Chris Lewis. She’s educated, interesting and fun.