'A Force of Nature': Eleanor Whitmore, Passionate Advocate for Early Childhood Education, Dies at 98

In 2019, at the age of 96, Eleanor Whitmore paid a visit to the child care center on Gingerbread Lane Extension in East Hampton that bears her name.

Wearing a bright orange shirt, she was seated in a room full of prekindergarten students, in a red chair, a children’s picture book resting in her lap.

A broad and equally bright smile spread across her face as she listened to the children, seated on the carpet in front of her, sing the ABCs.

“That’s wonderful!” she said enthusiastically when they finished. “You’re way ahead. You are going to be the smartest children in the school!”

Whitmore died on November 9, in Louisville, Kentucky, where she had gone to live with her daughter, Christine, in recent years. She was 98.

During the more than 60 years that Whitmore lived in Amagansett, she earned a reputation as one of the biggest advocates for the local community, tirelessly volunteering her time and seemingly boundless energy to a number of different charities and local organizations. But there was no cause closer to her heart than lifting up and supporting working families across East Hampton Town.

Whitmore was a pivotal founding member and eventual namesake of the Eleanor Whitmore Early Childhood Center, which was previously called East Hampton Day Care at its original location on Cedar Street. The center was founded by a group of like-minded residents in the community who banded together to meet what was a dire need for affordable, reliable and enriching childcare and preschool education in the area after Head Start, the government run program, pulled out of East Hampton in 1976.

Whitmore joined the center’s board in 1990, and had an immediate impact in many ways, including in a crucial fundraising effort that allowed the center to greatly expand on what was a donated home on Gingerbread Lane Extension. She helped secure a $500,000 donation from her brother-in-law, Willet F. Whitmore, who left the generous gift to the center in his will.

She was a charming and engaging host at many fundraising events and dinner parties, often hosted at her own home, and was known to put her skill at cooking and baking to work for the cause.

Her chocolate chip cookies were particularly famous. Joan Overlock, director of development for the center, recalled that she once brought a fresh-baked batch to the home of Alec Baldwin before making a pitch to him to help support the center financially.

Overlock recalled another story she’d heard about Whitmore and her dedication to making sure the center always had the funding it needed. After getting into a minor fender bender in East Hampton in her later years, she spent the ambulance ride to the hospital talking to the EMTs about the center, and secured a donation from the ambulance corps.

“She was a force of nature,” Overlock said. “She raised a lot of money, and was really the impetus behind the building of this center.”

According to both Overlock and Tim Frazier, the center’s executive director, Whitmore’s dedication to the center went far beyond her fundraising efforts. She cared deeply about helping working families and their children in the community, and wanted the center to be not only a place where children could be cared for, but where they would be immersed in an educationally enriching environment on a daily basis. The center was renamed in her honor in 2013.

As recently as a few months before her death, Frazier said Whitmore would still call the center more than once a month to check in on everyone — the children, families and staff.

“One of her questions was always, ‘What are we doing for literacy?’” Frazier said. “She was so interested in how young children learn how to read, and making sure they have proper literacy skills.”

Overlock said that Whitmore was an astute observer of what was going on in her community, particularly when it came to families and working parents who were struggling to balance their jobs and caring for their children.

“What Eleanor saw was that women who were working in domestic services often had to either leave their kids in the car or drag them along to work,” she said. “She kept seeing this over and over again and at a certain point I think she realized that there needed to be a bigger facility and a more productive day for the kids. When Eleanor got involved, not only did she help expand the facility in terms of its capacity, she also expanded its mission.”

Throwing herself with gusto into serving those in need was a theme of Whitmore’s entire adult life. She was born in Queens on October 2, 1925, to Madeleine and John Bamman, growing up with a brother, John, and two sisters, Mary Jane and Madeline, all of whom predeceased her.

Whitmore was a lifelong member of the United Methodist Church, and a member of the East Hampton Methodist Church since the 1950s, teaching Sunday School there for many years. Her faith in large part informed her heart for community causes, and her outspoken passion for civil rights and social justice causes throughout her life, as well.

Whitmore studied to become a registered nurse at St John’s, a small hospital in Queens. During that time, she was introduced to Charles “Doc” Whitmore, her future husband. They were married when she finished school in 1947 at the age of 22, and moved to Amagansett in the 1950s. Together they raised four children — sons Charlie and Jack, and daughter Christine, who survive her, and another daughter, Jane, who predeceased her; and had 12 grandchildren and five great-grandchildren

Eleanor and Charles started a family nursery and tree business, which is still thriving today, under the name Charlie and Sons Landscapes. Several years after her husband started the tree and nursery business, Whitmore opened the Amagansett Flower Shop on Montauk Highway in their hometown.

Charlie Whitmore, who in recent years handed over operations of the family business to his sons, Matias and Chico Whitmore, described his mother as being “relentless” and “always on the go.”

“She was a hard worker, and that helped tremendously, because she had a lot on her plate,” he said.

In addition to her work with the center, which is her greatest legacy, Eleanor was also a pillar of the Methodist Church for decades, and an avid and active member of the Ladies Village Improvement Society of East Hampton and the Amagansett Village Improvement Society, running and organizing various fundraising events for both organizations for years.

“She didn’t know how to say ‘no,’ and she kept going and going,” Charlie Whitmore said. “She was extremely personable, and enjoyed people, and people enjoyed her.”

Despite everything she was involved in, and all she did for others in the community, Whitmore found time to enjoy life and her family. The Whitmores were all ocean lovers, spending a lot of time at the beach, as longtime members of the Atlantic Beach Association in Amagansett.

She and her husband were known for being avid ocean swimmers, and their daughter, Christine, shared one particular memory about her mother swimming out to the barrels that were placed in the water at that time, in lieu of buoys.

“My mom and dad would always swim out to the barrels, and do laps back and forth,” she said. “I remember one day there was a shark sighting and mom was out in the water, and we were on the beach and could all see the fin of the shark. The lifeguard was blowing the whistle but she just kept swimming back and forth. She never really knew there was a shark there.

“When she came in, she didn’t care. She said, ‘It was fine, nothing happened.’ She really never missed a beat.”

Christine said her mother was the kind of woman who did it all, from raising her own children, then running a business, and all the while immersing herself in various community causes and helping others in a seemingly never ending variety of ways. She recalled a time in the 1970s when her mother and her friend, a neighbor, heard about two young Black men who had been “picked on,” she said, and sent to jail in Riverhead. They worked to put up the bail money for their release.

“She was a very driven woman,” she said. “She was readily available to anyone and everyone, and just being a good human being and a good citizen was so important to her. She would not only say it, but she did it.”

A fundamental belief that a community should work together to lift everyone up was at the core of almost everything Whitmore did, according to her granddaughter, Mariah Whitmore, the child of her son Jack.

Mariah moved back to the area 11 years ago, and has been serving since then as a board member at the center, and as a nonvoting member in more recent years as she also works in the family business. Over the last decade, she witnessed firsthand her grandmother’s dedication.

“Her biggest passion was the center and really serving what she perceived as an unmet need in our community,” she said. “She really took the center and ran with it, and had an ever escalating goal for it. The center kept meeting these expectations and goals, so she kept upping the ante.”

One of the final goals that Whitmore had hoped to achieve at the center — and which the center is working toward — is expanding to provide infant care, for babies as young as 3 months old. Currently the center is open to children ages 18 months to 4 years old.

The need is constantly there, as evidenced by the long waitlist for a spot in the center’s programs. Continually growing to meet that need was always a goal of Whitmore’s, her granddaughter said, and she kept pushing toward that goal well into her 90s.

“She’s a great example of what one person can do and the effect they can have on a community, on a group of people, on ways of thinking,” Mariah Whitmore said. “I think she’s a testament to the fact that sometimes one person can really be a catalyst for bigger things.”