SayWhatClub Online Voices September 2015
Woody's Eulogy
Edward S. "Woody" Shelton
Copyright 2015
Good afternoon everyone and thank you so much for coming today. As all of you by now must know,
this is NOT a funeral…
It’s not a memorial service…
Instead, .what you are here for today on this beautiful September day is in fact a Celebration. It’s a day
to celebrate the amazing, fascinating, colorful, rhinestone-and-sparkle enhanced multi-faceted life of
Emily Wingert. A day that under other circumstances would have been a perfect day for her to be
driving in her convertible {with the top down – of course} to one of her favorite diners, with jazz
blaring on the radio.
My mother always insisted that when her time came, she didn’t want a somber sad funeral or memorial
service, what she wanted was for people who knew her or cared about her and her family to have a
party, with food, drink, music and people sharing stories.
So….. we’re here to do our best to honor that request.
As Laura just mentioned, I am speaking to you today on behalf of all three of her children. My message is
delivered as a collaborative effort.
I hope to be able to share just a few of the many facets that made our Mom who she was. Take her
name for example, as a school girl she was Emmy, as she grew up, she grew into Emily, then of course,
Mom, then Mimi (because she was too young and too cool to be Grandma), then Jazzy. This was a woman
who was just too multi‐dimensional for just one name!
She was a very different person in each stage of her life, just as all of us are, However, as we have come
to learn, she was also a very different person depending on who was viewing her and from what
perspective.
My sister, Laura, used to tell her girls that different people could see the same things very differently.
She would explain by using her hands like this:
You can look at your hand from one side and it looks bumpy with knuckles and tanned from the sun, but turn it over and it looks like something very different, maybe pink and smooth, or rough and calloused from hard work, or viewed from the side it looks like something different yet again. So, a hand is not a hand, it all depends on who is looking at it and from what viewpoint.
Our Mom was just like that example, growing up with her, we saw her hands from the palm side ‐ rough
and coarse from hours on the tennis court. But others saw the top side of her hands, her manicured
nails, often decorated and airbrushed in one theme or another.
Mom never did anything partway. If she was going to do something, it was go all in or don’t bother
starting at all.
She was kind of a Renaisance woman, a lover of music and the arts, Jazz, Broadway, opera, modern,
impressionist and of course her collection of African and Oceanic art, she loved it all. She was also very
crafty from knitting beautiful sweaters to hand-making beautifully wrapped boxes with complex ribbons
and bows that could be re-used for many years. Many people told her how they saved and collected
these boxes as decorations. She was a physically and mentally agile woman. Whatever she did, she
always gave it her best effort. She was a working mom, well before it became the norm, but she chose
what she wanted to do for that work.
She ultimately had three totally different “careers” other than being a Mom, which as many folks here
know is a full-time career itself.
Her first business evolved from an effort to help a valued friend in need, turned into a kidnapping and
from there into her first foray into owning one of the first female-owned security guard and private
detective agencies in the country.
Back in about 1974, a close friend’s ex-husband was refusing to return his child to his mother after a
parental visit in New York.
Mom drives into the city with her friend and concocts a scheme to get the boy and his father into her
car. At the time she is driving a tiny Fiat convertible (this was the start of a long succession of
convertibles that lasted until the day she died.) At this point, she has no idea what to do so she just
starts driving downtown, hoping that she can come up with a plan. Finally she pulls over to the side of
the road in front of a building in lower Manhattan and tells the father to jump out and check the
building directory for a name she made up, WHICH HE DOES! As soon as he gets a few steps away from
the car, she drops the car into gear, pops the clutch, pulls a U‐turn across the street and takes off
smoking the tires and probably leaving about a ½ inch of rubber on the pavement. She drives like a
rocket back trough the Lincoln Tunnel back to Montclair.
It was at this point that she realized that maybe she hadn’t really thought this all the way through, as the
father knew perfectly well where she lived.
That’s when she pulled out the Yellow Pages (See‐ there used to be this big yellow book with lots of ads
that people paid lots of money for, to list their services in hopes that people would call. I
know…Googling is so much simpler.)
At any rate, she started looking for Armed Security guards to
protect us, should the angry man who had been outsmarted by this lady in the bright orange Fiat decide
to come searching for his son or to cause harm to us. It was that search for the armed guards that led
her to Mark Ten Security, a company that provided the service. She saw something in the business and
felt that she could help grow this company. She invested in the company and became a partner in the
business and as I mentioned earlier, never one to do something part way, she dove right into the deep
end, learned everything she could about the business and soon ended up as the sole owner. In so doing,
she became one of the first female licensed private investigators admitted to the American Society for
Industrial Security, an honor she was very proud of.
About 15 years later, she sold the business and
moved on to her next adventure.
Not one to sit still for very long, even as she was preparing to sell the company, she had set her sights on
the next facet of her life. She decided that she wanted to combine two of her passions, fine dining and a
love of Jazz music. She bought an old rundown dive bar in Montclair, in a pretty rundown section of
town … a huge risk (now we call this gentrification), and created Trumpets Jazz club and Restaurant
featuring world-renowned musicians, some of whom you’ll hear playing here today as guest performers
along with some extremely talented jazz musicians who are students here at Montclair State University.
She poured her heart and soul into this and it became her passion. The club developed a reputation for
both fine food and great music and she loved every 18-hour day, seven days a week of it for 10 years.
Until she very suddenly started losing her hearing and she had to close Trumpets.
[Editor's note: the jazz club and restaurant was bought out by a young couple, and it continues to this day.]
Her hearing loss was devastating. She felt isolated, cut off from the world and became very depressed.
Again, not being one to sit still for very long, she heard about this thing called the internet and chat
rooms which she thought might help her at least communicate with her children, now grown and moved
away, as she really couldn’t hear on the telephone any more (little did she know that this internet thing
would effectively kill off those yellow page books that she had relied on). She dove in, bought a
computer, taught herself whatever she needed to know, learned how to “surf the web”, chose an AOL
user name of JazzyOne and stumbled upon this small newly formed group of late deafened adults that
had started a sort of online support group called the SayWhatClub.
This became her new passion and lasted almost 20 years, right up to the day she died.
“Jazzy” as she became known to all of her online friends, quickly discovered how the internet and the
SayWhatClub allowed her to communicate and more importantly to share what she was learning about
her own deafness, and the various tools available to help others. Back into the deep end she dove! She
was meeting all kinds of new friends on the internet, and to the horror of all three of her children, she
started inviting these new friends (total strangers of course) to her home for pool parties! When we first
heard about this, all three of us tried to tell her how dangerous this was, she didn’t know these people,
she didn’t know if they might hurt her, steal from her, or worse. We all knew better! We all knew that
you don’t just invite people you meet on the internet to your home. In fact I drove down from Connecticut to
attend one of these parties, just to see what kind of people were showing up. She brushed our concerns
off and said, "You don’t know these people like I do. They’re fine."
Well in fact she was right! The number of SayWhatClub folks from all around the world from the US, to
Australia and New Zealand, to South Africa, to Amsterdam and many other places who have written to us
over the past month to express their love and appreciation for “Jazzy’s kindness and willingness to open
up her heart and her home" to many of the people who themselves had suffered with the isolation and
loneliness from the loss of their hearing, has been so amazing and eye-opening to all of us. In fact one
couple, who I believe are here today, met at one of her parties and ultimately got married and asked
Jazzy to stand up for them as a witness at their marriage ceremony at City Hall in New York! We
certainly knew how passionate she was about this group, but we really didn’t know how great her
impact was on so many people.
Her greatest accomplishment and passion with respect to the SayWhatClub was based on those pool
parties. She discovered that if folks could get together to meet and talk about their common issues,
they no longer felt so isolated and they benefitted greatly from the connection with others. Based on
that, and given her almost full-time commitment to the Board of this volunteer-operated organization,
she decided that the SayWhatClub should arrange conventions in different cities around the United States so folks
could meet and learn and have fun despite the limitations that they felt would limit them.
One
convention a year quickly turned into several plus a few international ones as well. For many years, she
would travel to various cities, to meet with the convention bureaus and chambers of commerce to scout
out the location and venue for the next convention. She also led the efforts to provide scholarships for
folks who couldn’t afford to go to these conventions. Now, almost twenty years since she first
discovered the SayWhatClub, it has grown exponentially and the conventions that were so important
to her have become a mainstay of the organization. In fact, at the last SayWhatClub convention she attended,
she was presented with an award [the Spirit of SWC award], recognizing her contributions to the organization. She was so
touched by this recognition and hung it proudly on her wall, surrounded by photos of her most prized
possessions, her family!
This desire to help others; to connect with people with similar passions; to educate or provide access to
education, especially to those who couldn’t obtain the education on their own, was a consistent theme
throughout the many facets of her amazing life.
Trying to describe her in just one dimension is virtually impossible. Like the hand that looks different
from each side. To us, she was Mom, a strong, independent, no-nonsense parent. But she was also the
parent who loved to take us all away someplace warm at Christmas time, but made sure that she packed
a tiny Christmas tree, complete with decorations, and presents.
To others who were fortunate enough to benefit from her desire to reach out and help anyone who
needed some love and guidance, some of whom actually lived with us for anywhere from a couple of
weeks to many years, she was a safe haven, or an escape from an unpleasant living situation, or simply a
bonus mom, who was willing to listen, or help with reaching a goal that might have been otherwise
unattainable.
She was a teacher, mentor, and guide to folks in the Jazz world, starting a Jazz for Kids program in
Newark to help keep kids off the street and out of harm’s way.
As Jazzy to the people affected by hearing loss, she opened the door to many who were otherwise
isolated and cut off from the rest of the hearing world. She found the way to share her experience with
deafness and the remarkable experience of regaining some of her ability to hear by having bilateral
cochlear implant surgeries; she used that experience to help others make the decision to have the
surgery as well.
As Mimi, she was the sparkling, rhinestone-wearing grandmother with the airbrushed manicured
fingernails who was so cool because she ran a Jazz Club, loved to travel, loved to have the grandchildren
come to visit and swim in her pool. She was Mimi, who treated them like grownups and took each of
her grandchildren on a grown up one-on-one trip to celebrate their high school or college graduations.
I’m sure that I have gone over the time I allotted myself, but I have barely scratched the surface of the
multi-faceted, sparkling, amazing person we are here today to celebrate.
So….I will leave it now to a few others to fill in some more of the detail of what made Mom, Mimi, Jazzy
or Emily special to them.
We will next hear from my daughter Dana and Laura’s daughter Jackie who will speak for Mimi’s
grandchildren, Dana, Jackie, Katie, Samantha, and Liz,
followed by Mom’s brother, Brian Peierls, who would like to share a few stories on behalf of Emily’s
siblings, Barbara, Jeff and Brian.
We’ll also hear from Laura’s and my father, Philip Shelton. Another interesting facet, as despite having
been divorced for over 56 years, they have remained friends.
They have all promised to keep their remarks, comments or stories down to just 3‐5 minutes so we can
wrap this up and get inside to the food, drinks, music and celebration.
So without any further ado, . . . Dana and Jackie…….
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