Helaine Dreyfus Gants was born on the day the shortest nine inning baseball game in history was played (51 minutes on September 28, 1919) on the eve of the Black Sox scandal and died on Christmas morning in 2012, on the eve of the fiscal cliff, at the age of 93. She was the beloved wife of the late Gustav Ury Gants and is survived by her two sons, Fred of Madison, Wisconsin, and Ralph of Lexington, Massachusetts, and by her five grandchildren: Brendan, Connor, Logan, Rachel, and Michael. In the brief autobiography she penned twelve years ago, she wrote that she "felt very fortunate to have a wonderful husband and great children and grandchildren."

Her adult life was shaped by her commitment to her husband and children. She was the "tiger mom" long before that phrase became popular, not in the sense that she drove her children to achieve (she did not) but because she provided them with the moral and spiritual support to do so. She was relentlessly optimistic; no matter how dark things may have seemed, she would always say, "Everything works out for the best."

Her commitment to her children was shaped by her own childhood, where her parents demonstrated far less commitment to her. Her mother and father divorced when she was five years old, and her father was never a presence in her life. She lived in Manhattan with her mother, and her maternal grandfather, Ralph, whom she loved dearly, and his wife, Sarah. She was an excellent student at Hunter College High School, which she described as "the best high school in New York," but her mother pulled her out of high school after her sophomore year to help her with the dress shop she had just opened in the midst of the Great Depression. She later obtained her high school diploma at night, but to her dying day she felt that her mother had denied her the opportunity of a fine education. She took great pride in the education that she and Ury made possible for their own children.


After she finished high school, she worked for ten years in Grandpa Ralph's diamond business with her great-uncle and cousin. In April 1947, she had a blind date with a man she had heard spoken of for ten years but never met, Ury Gants, who had gone into the used clothing export business after leaving the Navy at the end of World War II. After the date, she left for Washington, D.C. and, as she described it, "He called a lot when I was away that week," and "[w]hen I came back, we had a 'whirlwind' amount of dates." They were engaged in June and married in September. They remained married for 57 years, until Ury died in July 2004. Ury soon left the export business because his business partner was a Hindu living in Dacca, who lost everything when his family had to leave what was to become East Pakistan during the partition of India. Ury soon entered what had been the family business, the sale of fine imported wines, and remained in the wine business until he retired at the age of 81.


After Ralph, her youngest son, entered the fifth grade, she began working at a fine clothing store in Larchmont, New York, where she lived, and remained there for many years until it closed. She then worked for eleven years as a teacher's aide in the local middle and elementary school, pursuing the career she probably would have pursued if she had been allowed to go on to college during the Depression.


She and Ury were able to remain living together in their apartment in Larchmont until Ury's death at the age of 91. She then moved to a wonderful elder community in Bedford, Massachusetts, Carleton-Willard Village, to be closer to Ralph's family, where she remained for eight years until her death. The move required her to leave her many close friends, some of whom she had known since she was fifteen years old (she often said that she was an only child but her friends were like her sisters and brothers). She always felt blessed to be in the company and care of the extraordinary residents and staff at Carleton-Willard, whom she soon thought of as her friends and second family. The final words of this obituary were written by Helaine herself, "All in all, I feel very rich to have such great families and am grateful."

Her memorial service will be held in the Carleton-Willard Village auditorium, 100 Old Billerica Rd., Bedford, on January 12, at 3:00 P.M.

For those who wish, in lieu of flowers, charitable contributions may be made to Hubbard Brook Research Foundation, P.O. Box 282, North Woodstock, New Hampshire 03262, or Doctors Without Borders, P.O. Box 5022, Hagerstown, Maryland 21741-9804.