Gertrude “Gitty” Wind Scheft
Gertrude “Gitty” Wind Scheft, whose early passion for Massachusetts Democratic politics was eventually eclipsed by her lifelong passion for Massachusetts golf, passed away peacefully at Carlton-Willard Village in Bedford August 17. She was 99.
Upon graduating from Radcliffe in 1946, Scheft volunteered for her first campaign, when war hero John F. Kennedy sought James Michael Curley’s suddenly vacated congressional seat in the 11th District. With his father financing and running his campaign, the young Kennedy established residency in an apartment at 122 Bowdoin Street, across from the Massachusetts State House. Scheft’s primary job was to clean the apartment. Over the years, whenever asked about her initial impressions of the eventual 35th President, Scheft would say, “the most charismatic, but not the tidiest…”
Scheft worked for numerous Democratic state and local candidates, and served as a Massachusetts coordinator on both Adlai Stevenson Presidential campaigns. In 1948, she was a delegate at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. By the early 1950s, she was the first female executive secretary of the Massachusetts chapter of Americans for Democratic Action.
When Foster Furcolo was elected governor of the Commonwealth in 1956, his office wanted a recurring morning television showcase for his wife, Kay, to appeal to stay-at-home housewives and mothers. They recruited Scheft, who had studied acting in prep school and college, to be her cohost. “Coffee with Kay” ran weekly for two years on WNAC.
Scheft reunited with Kennedy to work on his Presidential campaign in 1960. During an early staff confab, she told then Pennsylvania businessman and top Kennedy aide Milton Shapp her idea for an international volunteer program for recent college graduates. Shapp passed on the idea to the candidate, and is widely credited with promoting the concept that became the Peace Corps.
In addition to politics, Scheft spent her life devoted to various philanthropic pursuits. In 1964, Governor Endicott Peabody appointed her a trustee of Metropolitan State Hospital, a groundbreaking institution devoted to the mentally ill.
Born in Brockton in 1923, the fourth of six children to local leather magnate Max Wind and his wife Dora, by the late 1950s, Gitty (her father’s pet name that stuck) was busy raising six children of her own with Bill Scheft, the son of Beverly shoe wholesale-retailer Harry Scheft, who regularly did business with Max Wind. The two had been set up by their respective mothers in 1942 while Gitty was at Radcliffe and Bill at Harvard Business School. On their second date, they played golf. They were uniquely well-matched as players, a rarity in the male-dominated world of golf in the 1940s. The instant bond proved to be a strong (and fertile) soil on which to build their 65-year marriage. Bill Scheft passed away in June, 2008.
Gitty, who had begun playing golf at the age of seven at nearby Thorny Lea in Brockton, took to the game with rabid fervor. She had the benefit of learning the nuances from her older brother, Herbert Warren Wind, a 3 handicap by the time he turned 20 who would eventually become universally recognized as the Dean of American Golf Writers.
During her eight-decade playing career, Scheft won club championships at four different country clubs and in 1972 was First Flight runner-up for the WGAM (Women’s Golf Association of Massachusetts) championship. In 2000, shortly before she stopped playing, Scheft miraculously shot her age (77) at Sterling National Country Club.
She also gave back to the game off the links, serving as WGAM President from 1983-1989 before stepping down to become the first female president of the Francis Ouimet Caddie Scholarship Fund in 1990. Two years before, she successfully spearheaded a movement to get the United States Postal Service to print a commemorative stamp honoring the 75th anniversary of Massachusetts amateur prodigy Ouimet’s unlikely victory in the US Open over former champions Harry Vardon and Ted Ray at the Country Club in Brookline. Under her watch, the Ouimet Fund became and remains the largest independent scholarship fund in New England.
Gertrude “Gitty” Wind Scheft is survived by her six children, her seven grandchildren and her great grandchild.