Gloria and I became friends in the 1970s when we formed a weaving group with a small group of friends.  Several times a month we got together to experiment making a variety of basket types using natural and bought materials.  Gloria became an accomplished basket maker, and later helped identify some of the Historical Society’s baskets.

In 1986, Gloria agreed to curate the Society’s collection of antique clothing and textiles. This enormous job involved cataloging the hundreds of donations made to the Society over the years, and continuing to enter donations as they came in.  Gloria not only cataloged each item, she organized the collection and entered each item on her computer at home.  She also purchased archival boxes to house the collection and painstakingly wrapped each item in tissue paper before packing it away and assigning it a box number.

In 2014, when the Society’s digitizing committee asked Gloria to inventory the collection, there were more than one hundred archival boxes of varying sizes, containing more than a thousand items of clothing, accessories, and various textiles, plus five full racks of dresses.  The Costume Room of the Heard House was stacked to the ceiling.

When I heard Gloria needed an assistant to help inventory the collection, I eagerly volunteered.  For several days a week, during one whole season, we carefully unwrapped each item in every one of the boxes and checked it off against Gloria’s computer list. I was astounded at the quality of items and humbled by the amount of loving care she had put into preserving the Society’s precious collection.

In the end, everything was accounted for, and Gloria’s devoted husband and the Society’s most valued “keeper of the house,” Roger hauled all the boxes back from the South Bedroom where we’d worked, to the Costume Room.  Had I finished a master’s degree program, I could not have learned more than what Gloria taught me about antique clothing and textiles during our many sessions. She knew the history of every style and fabric of each and every item, and most astoundingly she knew every member of every Wayland Family who had donated the item.

I feel blessed to have been a friend of Gloria.

Ev Wolfson