Bethel, VT – Thomas Wells Greene died Saturday October 24, at the Gifford Medical Center in Randolph Vermont.
In 1942, Tom was born in his childhood home, a 17th century saltbox known as the “Acadian House” in Guilford, Conn. He was the fifth son of Kathryn (Kit) Mott and Kenneth (Ted) Greene. His older brothers were Teddy, Jim, Richard and Jack. Two years after Kenneth’s death, when Tom was just six years old, Kit married Robert (Bob) Collyer Washburn, who became Tom’s loving stepfather. Family life centered around the Greene Gallery Gift Shop and the Greene Art Gallery on Whitfield Street in Guilford. Kit’s sister Linda helped look after the boys while Kit and Bob ran the businesses.
The life that Tom led was unconfined by convention. He lived in Mexico where he studied archeology at the Ciudad Universitaria in the 1960s. On his return to Connecticut, he married another Guilford resident, Kathy Flynn. They moved to the Boston area and he went to work as a buyer for Design Research in Cambridge, Mass., and later, at DR in San Francisco. He returned to Guilford in the late 1970s divorced, with his young son Sean, and worked as a landscaper with Ted Ozyck, where he became a stone wall specialist, remarking on his work as “reverse archeology.” Tom and Sean resided in the apartment above the Greene Gallery Gift Shop with Tom’s widowed mother Kit.
The next chapter of Tom’s life began with falling in love with Beverley Potter. They married in 1985 and Beverley’s children Lisa, Tim, Marcey, Heather, and Caitlin joined his life and embraced him as a father of their own. The next 35 years are filled with moves between Connecticut and Vermont. Tom spent the later part of his working career as a rural route carrier for the Guilford USPS, retiring in 2011. His last years were spent joyously in West Wheelock, Poultney, and Bethel, Vt., where he and Beverley (Lulu) enjoyed creating amazingly beautiful homes, visiting with children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, gardening, mowing, felling trees, burning brush, and especially reading.
Tom leaves behind his loving wife Lulu, brother Jack, children Sean Greene and his wife Molly Burnham, Lisa Tremaine, Tim Tremaine, Marcey Tucker and her husband Bill, Heather Heffernan and her husband Peeker, and Caitlin Strong; nieces and nephew Caterina Verde, Valerie Bennouna-Greene, Philip Greene, Stephanie Greene and Madeleine Hykes; grandchildren Emily Bixby, Annie Tremaine, Phoebe Tucker, Eli Tucker, Benjamin Greene, Bella Tremaine, Adelaide Greene, Georgia Greene and Wesley Strong, and great-grandchildren Tristan, Emmitt and Riley Braman. The family will gather privately and are planning a celebration of Tom’s life on his birthday August 24, 2021, in Bethel, Vt. In lieu of flowers, please buy yourself a book and read it. That’s what Tom would like best.
