Aurelie Dwyer Stack
Former Newsday senior editor and longtime Mattituck resident Aurelie Dwyer Stack died Sunday, Sept. 4, 2011, at her residence at The Shores at Peconic Landing in Greenport. She was 86.
Born July 31, 1925, in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, she moved with her family to Westbury, back to Brooklyn, then to Rockville Centre, where she graduated from St. Agnes High School in 1943.
She earned a B.A. in English from C.W. Post College in Brookville, N.Y. She attended the University of California, Los Angeles, for a year, studying art, then studied at the Parsons School of Design in Manhattan for a year.
Before her career at Newsday, she worked in different jobs, including as fashion illustrator in the advertising department at W.T. Grant department store in Manhattan and as an ad copywriter and fashion illustrator at Franklin Shops department store in Hempstead in 1948.
She was a publicist for a television program about World War II submarine warfare called “The Silent Service,” which aired from 1957 to 1958. She was deeply interested in the submarine service and its veterans and was made an honorary member of the Submarine Veterans of WWII.
Ms. Stack was hired at Newsday in September 1960 for the section Paging Women, a society column — in her words, “any news deemed at that time of interest to women.” She had a number of editing jobs and, in 1974, became the editor for the Viewpoints section and then executive news editor for Part2, Newsday’s feature section. She developed a reputation as a grammarian, and proudly wore a T-shirt from her family reading: “I am the Grammarian about whom your mother warned.”
She married John Stack on Valentine’s Day, 1976, and retired in August of that year. They moved to Mattituck to live full time in a summer house she had purchased in the late 1960s, and she enjoyed married life for seven years.
Ms. Stack returned to Newsday in 1983 as a part-time copy editor on the Features desk, and retired for good on July 31, 1987.
She loved the North Fork, and was a member of Eastern Long Island Quilters Guild and entered her quilts in shows, winning awards for many of them.
She was involved with the Southold Landmark Preservation Commission and Southold Historical Society, in particular with the town’s 350th anniversary and the relocation and restoration of the Bayview Schoolhouse in Southold. She helped to organize, along with a group of people, fundraising to pay the cost of moving the schoolhouse from a potato field to the Town Green, where it now sits.
She also enjoyed researching her family’s genealogy, going back several generations and getting original documents of family members’ emigration from Ireland.
She was predeceased by her husband, John, who died in September 2008, and her brothers, John Dwyer, Owen Dwyer and Joseph Dwyer.
She is survived by a sister, Dorothy Maag of Pinehurst, N.C.; a brother, Charles Dwyer of Leesburg, Va.; six stepdaughters: Margaret Maguire of Annapolis, Md., Sharon Willse of Mendham, N.J., Ruthanne Marchetti of Windsor, Conn., Beth Tompkins of Annapolis, Md., Nancy Stack of Melrose, Mass., and JoAnn Maguire of Randolph Center, Vt.; seven grandchildren; four great-grandchildren; and a large, beloved extended family.
Visiting hours will take place Friday, Sept. 9, from 7 to 9 p.m. at Coster-Heppner Funeral Home in Cutchogue. A funeral Mass will be held Saturday, Sept. 10, at 10:30 a.m. at St. Agnes R.C. Church in Greenport. Interment will be private.
Memorial donations may be made to East End Hospice at eeh.org or the Peconic Land Trust at peconiclandtrust.org.
This is a paid notice.
