Katharine (Kit) Eaton Dreier, a longtime Cambridge resident who helped forge sister-city ties with Yerevan, Armenia, during the Cold War, has died at 96.
She passed away at home in Lincoln Sept. 28, her youngest daughter holding her hand.
Kit was one of the public-spirited Cambridge moms of the mid- to late-1900s who volunteered, formed civic networks and helped build community during the era of participation preceding the social fragmentation that Harvard Professor Robert Putnam described in his 2000 book “Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community.”
She sang in choruses, grew vegetables and painted watercolors into her 90s. In earlier years she played tennis and the cello, hosted dinner parties and scribbled effusive letters to friends and relatives worldwide.
Kit loved raising children, until they grew into teenagers and became perplexing. The kids generally came back around to her in their 20s.
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Born at Mount Auburn Hospital in 1930, Kit was the third child of Gertrude Sturgis Eaton and Richard Jefferson Eaton. Their first-born son, Richard, died in infancy. Kit was close to her older brother, Toby, and younger brother, Jeff.
At age 10, Kit moved with her family to a house in Lincoln with a barn, a tennis court and a pasture. Decades later, she would vividly recall her shock at 11 upon hearing from a neighbor of Japan’s 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor.
Kit’s father, who had served in World War I, re-enlisted in 1943, serving as military governor of Leipzig during the Allied occupation. Amid wartime rationing, Kit’s mother, Gertrude, closed the Lincoln house temporarily and moved with the three children to Cambridge.
They lived on Brattle Street with Gertrude’s sister, Katharine (Kay) Sturgis, Kit’s namesake. Kit attended Shady Hill School, which would play a formative role in her life.
Back in Lincoln, her father returned from the war, Kit went on to Concord Academy, commuting in a Model A Ford. Her brothers went to Harvard in the family tradition, but Kit attended Smith College, doing her junior year abroad in Geneva and graduating in 1952 with a BA in political science.
She returned to Shady Hill to complete the school’s apprentice-teaching program, then taught at schools in England.
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In 1956, Kit married Arthur Hinton Read, a Scottish mathematician and mountaineer who had spent World War II decoding Nazi military messages in a top-secret project outside London. The couple lived in St. Andrews, Scotland, where Arthur taught at the university.
Their son Rich was born in 1957. Daughter Kate was born two years later.
Kit co-founded and directed Almost New, a nonprofit clothing exchange. She tried to convince administrators of Rich’s school to amend a requirement that shorts be worn in student uniforms throughout Scotland’s bitingly cold winters.
Tragedy struck in 1961. Arthur, who had scaled peaks in Canada, Europe and Pakistan, was killed by an avalanche while climbing in the Scottish Highlands. The closeknit St. Andrews community rallied in support.
Kit moved back to the States with her two children in 1963, retaining some British pronunciations and habits, such as eating with her fork in her left hand. She settled in Cambridge with the kids, enrolling them at Shady Hill School.
Kit taught there and at the Buckingham School. She played cello in a chamber music group and shepherded the kids to piano lessons with varying results.
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At a Cambridge dinner party in 1965, Kit met Ted Dreier Jr., a psychiatrist and fellow cellist. While courting, they often drove separately, unable to fit both cellos into one car.
Kit and Ted married at Harvard University’s Memorial Church in January 1967. Their daughter Lisa was born that October. Another daughter, Ruth, was born in 1969.
The couple remodeled a duplex on Fayerweather Street into a single home with a separate entrance to an office where Ted saw patients.
He and Kit sang for many years in the Harvard-Radcliffe Chorus. They listened to WBUR and NPR and watched public television on a small black-and-white TV, limiting viewing by the kids to a half hour a day. Kit read the Christian Science Monitor and The New Yorker, while Ted skimmed The Wall Street Journal.
In 1975, Kit and Ted built a rustic house on Martha’s Vineyard. In all, they spent more than 50 summers on the island.
Kit volunteered in the peace movement, helping to persuade the Cambridge City Council in 1985 to make Yerevan, then in the Soviet Union, a sister city. With Cambridge resident Ariadne Forbes, she opened Friends Gallery, a Huron Avenue clothing and crafts boutique.
Kit went on to work at the Cambridge Art Association, piloting her Volkswagen bus into downtown Boston to install large modern paintings in lobbies of law firms and banks. She helped curate an exhibition sponsored by the association, “Creative Collaborations: Artist/Architect,” combining her interests in art and design.
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Kit and Ted moved in 1994 from Cambridge to Belmont, where they remodeled another house, landscaping its garden with berry bushes and goldfish ponds.
Kit was elected to Town Meeting, Belmont’s legislative body. She helped to start conservation organizations that preserved land for future generations.
In 2018, Kit and Ted returned to the town where she was raised, moving into the Commons in Lincoln retirement community. Ted died the next year at 89.
With a fellow resident from Cambridge, her first cousin Anne Watt, Kit co-founded the Commons Green Initiative to address climate change, an issue that deeply concerned her.
To Kit’s great sadness, her daughter Elizabeth (Lisa) Low Dreier, of Cambridge, lost a battle with breast cancer in 2024.
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Brought up during the Interwar Period, Kit had raised her children during the 1960s and ‘70s, a tumultuous era that included assassinations, protests and in Cambridge, the 1970 Harvard Square riot. The turmoil bewildered her at times but never disrupted her poise.
Kit had a long line of au pairs from Sweden, Brazil, Britain and beyond. She encouraged her kids to travel widely and explore, as she did.
Ever resourceful, she excelled in connecting friends, finding acquaintances housing and solving innumerable problems for her kids. When Rich was in high school, Kit knocked on a door in Porter Square, obtaining permission from the homeowner for him and a classmate to chain their bicycles to a porch railing each morning before they caught a train to Concord.
As a talented watercolor painter, Kit could have pursued a career as an artist. She could have become an arts administrator after completing graduate work in museum studies in 1993 at the Harvard University Extension School.
Instead, she focused on family, friends and the wider world.
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Kit’s survivors include her son, Richard Read and his wife, Brenda, of Seattle; two daughters, Katharine (Kate) Read Villars and her husband Thom, of Norwich, Vermont, and Ruth Antoinette Dreier, of Sebastopol, Calif.; a granddaughter, Nehalem Kunkle-Read, of Seattle; a brother, Jefferson Taft Eaton, of Lincoln; and a sister-in-law, Barbara Beate Dreier, of Livingston Manor, N.Y.
A celebration of life will be held at 2 p.m. Dec. 9 at First Parish in Lincoln.
Arrangements are under the care of Dee Funeral Home & Cremation Service of Concord.
Donations in Kit’s memory may be made to Green Cambridge or the Union of Concerned Scientists.
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