Remembering Sally Chatterton Smith

Mar 30, 1938 - Jan 24, 1997

Sally Chatterton Smith was beautiful, funny, adventurous, creative, and deeply curious about the world. She was born Sally Edith Chatterton in New Canaan, Connecticut, the second of four daughters, and grew up alongside her sisters Phyllis, Pamela, and Penelope. Family remained an important part of Sally’s life. And Cape Cod, where generations of her family gathered over the years, became one of the places she most deeply associated with home, family, and summer. Sally was an artist at her core. She earned her MFA in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design and carried an artist’s eye into nearly everything she did. She loved color, texture, and composition. She was imaginative and unconventional, and creativity was less something she practiced than a way she moved through the world. As a young woman, Sally made her way to New York City, where she built a life filled with friends, art, music, food, and adventure. She loved jazz clubs and good restaurants, martinis and dinner parties, travel and beautiful things. She was quick-witted, warm, and glamorous in a way that seemed effortless. Food became another expression of Sally’s creativity. She worked as a food stylist in New York, creating elaborate dishes for advertisements and print campaigns, and later she became a chef. She loved menus, restaurants, wine, and the ritual of gathering people around a table. On her honeymoon through Europe, she kept a diary less about sightseeing than about what she and her husband, Gerry, ate and drank along the way: wine in Italy, cheese in France, and memorable breakfasts in Ireland. Sally met Gerry when she was thirty-seven, after years of living independently in Manhattan. Their courtship began with the kind of story she loved to tell: after missing a blind date with him, she opened her apartment door the next morning with wet hair and offered him a Bloody Mary. By that afternoon they were flying to Atlanta together. They married a few months later on Cape Cod. Two years later, at forty, Sally became a mother to Claire. Motherhood was one of the deepest joys of her life. She adored her daughter and poured herself into raising her. She was the kind of mother who would lie on the bed at night talking through friendship troubles, heartbreaks, dreams, and all the confusing parts of growing up. She had a way of reminding Claire that whatever felt overwhelming in the moment was not the whole world. Sally knew how to make life feel full. There were family trips, long summers, lots of pets, tennis matches, parties, and meals that stretched late into the evening. Hers was a house where friends were always welcomed and always fed. Sally died on January 24, 1997, at the age of fifty-eight. She left behind Gerry, Claire, her sisters, family, friends, and many people who loved her deeply. She also left behind recipes, photographs, artwork, stories, traditions, memories of meals and trips, and a particular way of moving through the world with style, humor, creativity, curiosity, and appetite.