Gloria Winston, ninety-three, East Side of Providence
BY JAMIE COELHO
“ I
was born in 1926. How old does that make me?”
says Gloria Winston. “I’m ninety-three.”
Winston is the oldest living volunteer at the
Miriam Hospital in Providence, where she’s
worked with patients since 1956. “I go once a week, and I work
in the cancer facility where people are getting chemotherapy,”
she says. “I serve people lunch, chat with them, give them warm
blankets and a hot cup of tea.”
She lives at Laurelmead Cooperative in Providence in an
apartment decorated with Asian and African art she’s collected
from her travels all over the world and walls and shelves are
filled with family photos. “I’ve traveled to a lot of places, and
anytime I saw something I liked, I would bring it back,” she
says. She speaks with the knowing advice of a great-grandmother
who has lived and seen it all, and she gives great dating
advice, too. She has three children, twelve grandchildren and
seventeen great-grandchildren.
Winston grew up in Providence on the corner of Waterman
and Wayland Avenue, directly across from what came to be
Wayland Square. The house at 229 Waterman Street where she
lived has been torn down and the location is now Mare Rooftop,
which overlooks the city, as well as apartments.
“I’ll tell you about my house. It was built in 1886 by the Thurbers
of Tilden-Thurber. The Gorham family [of Gorham Silver]
had lived there and my father bought the house in 1922. It was
a Victorian house, and it had eighteen rooms and six fireplaces,
and it had a northern light,” the best light for artists, says Gloria.
“My father graduated from the Art Students League of New
York. He was an artist and that’s why he bought the house.”
Her father, Samuel Winston, started the greeting card company
originally called the Japanese Wood Novelty Company on
Summer Street in Providence in 1906. It was later named Paramount
Greeting Card company and moved to a mill building in
Pawtucket, which was recently destroyed by fire. Her father
died at age fifty when Gloria was only five years old.
She and her two sisters, Dorothy Nelson and
Bernice Gourse, all went to public schools, including
John Howland, Nathan Bishop and Hope High School.
Gloria’s mother, Ruth, instilled volunteerism in the
sisters who were thirteen and eight years apart. They
all graduated from Pembroke College — the women’s
college in Brown University — where Winston majored
in sociology and minored in psychology.
“During that time, I met a handsome midshipman
from the Naval Academy, whom I later married,”
Winston says. “When I met [Jimmy Winston], I was
just a junior in college and my mother always said
to her girls, ‘The single most important thing I can
give you is an education.’ Mother said I needed to
graduate before I married Jimmy, because ‘no one
can take your education away.’ ”
They wed on December 5, 1948, and raised three
children on the East Side. Gloria and her sisters worked
at Paramount, where her sisters were both editors and
she worked part-time while taking care of the children.
At Paramount, Winston organized a first-of-its-kind
program that allowed employees to volunteer during
working hours to deliver Meals on Wheels.
Growing up in Providence, she was involved in
many things. She and her sisters helped out at Temple
Beth-El with their mother. “I organized Girl Scouts
and Cub Scouts and made my husband a cubmaster,”
she says.
During the ’70s, Winston worked for the Council
of Jewish Women through the Hebrew International
Aid Society. “We would meet new Americans entering
the country from Russia, Egypt and Cuba by
plane, the train or bus, and | | CONTINUED ON PAGE 130
72 RHODE ISLAND MONTHLY l MAY/JUNE 2020