Henry and Rosalind Walter gave generously to the American Museum of Natural History, the Pierpont Morgan Library, Long Island University, the college scholarship program of the United States Tennis Association and the North Shore Wildlife Sanctuary on Long Island.
Some gifts came through what is known today as the Rosalind P. Walter Foundation. The Walters served as trustees or directors of many of the organizations they gave to.
Rosalind Palmer Walter — friends called her Roz, not Rosie — was born on June 24, 1924, in Brooklyn, one of four children of Carleton and Winthrop (Bushnell) Palmer. Her mother was a professor of literature at Long Island University.
Rosalind grew up on her family’s estate in Fairfield, Conn., and her parents sent her to the Ethel Walker School in Simsbury, Conn., one of the first college preparatory boarding schools for upper-class women.
By the time she graduated, Europe was at war, and after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 spurred the United States to declare war on Japan, Germany and Italy, she was recruited, at 19, as an assembly line worker at the Vought Aircraft Company in Stratford, Conn., not far from Fairfield. (The family later settled in Centre Island, a village in the town of Oyster Bay on Long Island.)
Ms. Walter’s story caught the attention of the syndicated newspaper columnist Igor Cassini, who wrote about her in his “Cholly Knickerbocker” column. And that, in turn, inspired the songwriters.
A year after the war’s end, Ms. Walter, by then working as a nurse’s aide at Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan, married Henry S. Thompson, a lieutenant with the Naval Reserve and a graduate of Stanford University, at the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church. They had a son, also named Henry, before the couple divorced in the 1950s.
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/04/us/rosalind-p-walter-dead.html
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