Sally W. Porter

Born in 1922 in Springfield, MA to Harry R. Wheat and Alice Ormsbee Wheat, Sally Ormsbee Wheat, along with her younger sister Ellen, enjoyed an idyllic childhood filled with fond memories of dances, shopping, bike rides to the Forrest Park Zoo, playing in the dingle (a small wooded valley),and wonderful desserts and treats prepared by their beloved housekeeper Trilda. Summers were spent at a family cottage at Black Point, CT, where lifelong friendships were formed. On graduation from high school, Sally attended Mary Baldwin College for a year, then transferred to Mount Holyoke College, where she studied art history. After college, she was recruited by the Department of the Navy to go to Washington, D.C. to participate in the war effort, as a code breaker decoding the Japanese code. There she met Harry Lee Porter, Jr., her future husband. The couple had two daughters, moving several times for her husband’s work with the Soil Conservation Service of the Department of Agriculture. A devoted wife and loving mother to her two daughters, Sally continued to pursue her art, both pastel portraits and a variety of watercolors, including landscapes and floral subject matter, and an occasional acrylic. She was thrilled to have a painting accepted for an American Watercolor Society show in New York City and the same painting was featured in a book, Making Color Sing: Practical Lessons in Color and Design by Jeanne Dobie. She later worked for several years as Assistant Art History Librarian at Bryn Mawr College. After their oldest daughter passed away from a long illness, Sally and her husband retired to a house they had built in Stanardsville, Virginia, overlooking beautiful rolling foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. They became active members of the community and formed many lasting friendships. Following the death of her husband in an auto accident, Sally moved to an apartment nearby, where she stayed for about a decade, continuing to participate in community and church activities and intermittently visiting her sister and brother-in-law in Florida. In her mid 70’s she decided to leave Virginia and move to the Quadrangle, a Continuing Care Retirement Community in Haverford, PA to be near her younger daughter. There she lived contentedly for the next 25 years. After a brief illness, Sally passed away peacefully at the age of 103.
Donations to Shriners Hospital in her honor would also serve as a tribute to her father, an orthopedic surgeon who volunteered there.
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