Mary Ann Whitehead, a New York City schoolteacher for many years, died at home in Sag Harbor on Nov. 3 after a short illness. She was 85.
Mrs. Whitehead was a board member of the John Jermain Memorial Library in Sag Harbor and sang as an alto with the Choral Society of the Hamptons. She belonged to the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Manhattan and sang in its choir as well.
In the Azurest community in Sag Harbor, she was a well-known “beach potato” who, with a group of friends, spent almost every summer day on the beach. She enjoyed doing the New York Times crossword puzzles.
A daughter of T. Colson Woody and Irma Madden Woody, she was born on Aug. 12, 1938, in Newark and grew up in Orange, N.J., spending every summer in Sag Harbor from the age of 7 until she and her husband became full-time residents in 1989.
She graduated from Smith College, for which she served as class secretary for several terms, and earned a master’s degree at New York University.
For 49 years, she was married to Arch S. Whitehead, proprietor of the executive search firm Arch S. Whitehead Associates, first in Manhattan and later in Sag Harbor, where she worked after her retirement from teaching. Mr. Whitehead died in 2009. Later, Mrs. Whitehead was engaged part time in her family’s funeral business in Orange, the Woody Home for Services, where her funeral service took place on Nov. 11.
She is survived by three children: Ann Moore of White Plains, Colson Whitehead of Manhattan, and Lynn Whitehead of Springfield, Mass. Her son Clarke Whitehead died in 2018.
She is also survived by two sisters, Ida Woody-Wells and Irma Francis, both of New Jersey, and five grandchildren, Alexander and Christopher Moore, Richard Goods, and Fig and Beckett Whitehead.
