Shelter Island Reporter obituary: Mildred ‘Mickey’ Rein
Mildred “Mickey” Rein, a part-time Shelter Island resident for more than 60 years, died of natural causes in September 2025 at her home in Boston, Mass. She lived two days into her 100th year.
Mickey and her then-husband, Martin, both sociologists, became smitten with the Island starting in the early 1960s when they visited friends from New York for a summer weekend. This led to a summer rental of their own, then the purchase of a house on the corner of Bowditch and Midway roads for $13,000. After her retirement from Massachusetts state government, Mickey spent four months a year in a ranch house on St. Mary’s Road that was her pride and joy. Her children, Glen and Lisa, cannot wait to get back to the Island every summer.
Mickey’s last few years were not good ones, but it was a life full of professional achievement, close family relationships, a few wonderful friendships and a post-retirement life of pursuing her passion for pottery. She learned to throw her first pots on the Island in a class held in a studio on Route 114 across from the IGA. Mickey also learned to drive on Shelter Island at 72, taught by a very patient retired Shelter Island School teacher, Jack Reardon. It was the only place she would ever feel comfortable behind the wheel.
Mickey grew up poor in Brownsville, Brooklyn, a neighborhood of Jewish immigrants where kids played stickball in the street. Her mother was a garment worker and proud member of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. Her father was a member of the Communist Party who was educated in Warsaw but worked in New York as a tailor.
After getting a free education and majoring in philosophy at Brooklyn College, Mickey worked for the New York City welfare department, knocking on doors on home visits to make sure that women receiving welfare payments were not working at the same time. This was the start of a lifelong fascination with welfare as we knew it. After raising her children, Glen and Lisa, she returned to school to earn a degree in social work, then a Ph.D. at Brandeis University. Her dissertation “Dilemmas of Welfare Policy,” later became the first of two books on the welfare system.
Mickey’s skills as a seamstress were unmatched. She was a fabulous cook.
Like all of us, Mickey embodied contradictions. She got an advanced degree when many women of her generation worked in the home, but if you called her a feminist, her hackles went up. Her analytical mind turned to mush when it came to the failures of Communism and her insistence that the experiment in Russia, China and Cuba had worked in many ways.
She and her ex-husband became great friends in divorce, and when he fell ill with Alzheimer’s, she visited him every week in his assisted living facility bearing pants and socks from Eddie Bauer.
She had a lifelong interest in health, healthcare and health problems until the end, demanding that her children Google her ailments on the Internet and print out what they found to guide her in her medical assessments. She insisted that she knew more than they did and certainly more than her doctors.
And she pursued her love of non-academic writing on topics of the day, publishing OpEDs in the Boston Globe and other newspapers and having several letters to the editor accepted by the New York Times that protested former House Speaker Paul Ryan’s plans to cut the social safety net.
Mickey was never happier than in a beach chair at Hay Beach, the glorious water beckoning to her side stroke, her spot in the sand firmly established as she kibbitzed with three generations of friends about politics, the state of the world and the best restaurants on the Island.
