Sally Smith Cross

Died February 2, 2022

Born in 1929 in New York, the daughter of F. Harold Smith and Pauline V. Curtiss, Sally rapidly developed a broad affection for any person who traversed her path: her city and country neighbors, her classmates at The Chapin School and Vassar College (1951), and her colleagues in the administration of Sloan-Kettering Cancer Institute, which she joined after college. She rejoiced equally in summer hijinks with her family in Washingtonville, NY and the exhilaration of winters filled with classical music, art, and vibrant conversation.

In the early ‘50s, Sally joined the Blue Hill Troupe and met the very tall and rather reserved banker William R. Cross, Jr. (1917-2002). The wedding of close friends a few years later set a romance in motion. They married on June 14, 1958, and soon became parents to three children (Bill, born 1959, Polly in 1960 and Fred in 1962). Her long-widowed mother-in-law Julia welcomed the growing family into the brick townhouse to which she had moved four decades earlier, when her husband Bill was a baby.

In 1973, their Bedford, NY weekend house became their principal home, complemented by a Chilmark, MA cottage whose simplicity sweetened Sally’s Vineyard joy. For more than twenty years of Bill’s battle with Parkinson’s, Sally’s marriage was her ministry and mission.

In 2006, four years after his death, she moved to Newbury Court in Concord, MA, where she flourished amid new friends and activities she embraced with enthusiasm. She took special delight in travel (best of all with grandchildren) that stretched minds and legs in equal measure. In her later years, an able cadre of loving, wise, and faithful aides allowed her to live and die there in dignity, safety and comfort.

— Thanks to the Vineyard Gazette, Martha’s Vineyard