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Jane Pratt Fitzpatrick, 89; business founder revived Stockbridge inn

Mrs. Fitzpatrick, shown on the porch of the Red Lion Inn and in the Country Curtains shop in Stockbridge in 1981, was a longtime trustee of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.Globe file photo by Richard Carpenter/Richard Carpenter
Jane Fitzpatrick in the Country Curtains Shop, July 28, 1981.Richard Carpenter/file

At 17, Jane Pratt Fitzpatrick began supporting herself, and that independence and strong spirit never wavered as she and her husband founded the Country Curtains mail-order company and reinvigorated the Red Lion Inn in Stockbridge.

Country Curtains began in the couple’s dining room in the 1950s. Jane and Jack Fitzpatrick took over the Red Lion Inn in 1968, when it was on the cusp of demolition. They bought the Blantyre, a country estate in Lenox, in 1980 and turned it into a top resort.

“She was the quintessential American leader,” said Anne Hawley, director of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. “She was a civil leader with Jack, a business woman, philanthropist, entrepreneur.”

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Mrs. Fitzpatrick, whose beauty was immortalized in a 1972 portrait painted by her friend Norman Rockwell, died of renal failure in her Stockbridge home Nov. 9. She was 89 and just nine days shy of turning 90.

Long involved in the arts, Mrs. Fitzpatrick spent more than two decades as president of the board of the Berkshire Theater Festival. She also was a longtime trustee and overseer of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

“I was the only trustee from this area for years,” she told the Globe in 1999. “I felt like the unofficial hostess of Tanglewood.”

When Mr. Fitzpatrick, a former state senator, died in 2011, BSO managing director Mark Volpe noted that “he and Jane were the driving forces in making Tanglewood what it is today.”

Mrs. Fitzpatrick also formerly served as a trustee of the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge.

“Elegant, strong, smart, and generous, Jane was a force of good in the world,” Laurie Norton Moffatt, the director, wrote on the museum’s website.

Mrs. Fitzpatrick decorated her home with artwork by Rockwell, whose work she and her husband collected. They were friends with Rockwell and subjects of the artist’s paintings.

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“I found her very caring and attentive to everyone,” Moffatt said in an interview, adding that among Mrs. Fitzpatrick’s personal gestures was writing individual thank-you notes. “She had this philosophy that all things were possible. I think that was an infectious spirit.”

Born Jane Pratt, Mrs. Fitzpatrick grew up in the small, hilly town of Shrewsbury, Vt., a daughter of Mary Townsend Pratt and Carl Arthur Pratt, a Mayflower descendant. She attended a one-room schoolhouse before traveling 10 miles a day each way to attend Rutland High School, where she met John H. Fitzpatrick. Their first date was on her 15th birthday.

Starting work at 17, Mrs. Fitzpatrick became a department supervisor in a military depot in Hartford.

“I suppose I could have gone to college, but I would have had to work my way through,” she told the Globe in 1981, adding: “I liked earning money. I liked the independence.”

She married Jack Fitzpatrick in 1944 when he was on a brief leave from serving in the Army. After World War II, he was working for Lincoln Stores when they launched Country Curtains from their home in Western Massachusetts.

Mrs. Fitzpatrick had put up plain cotton muslin curtains in their living room, drawing admiration from friends. “There’s something about light coming through unbleached muslin that warms a room,” she told the Globe in 1981.

Although her husband conceived of the larger idea to create Country Curtains, Mrs. Fitzpatrick honed in on the details, drawing sketches for the first sets of curtains while looking after their daughters.

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“It was all very simple,” Mrs. Fitzpatrick told the Globe in 1999. “People would send us the money; we would send them the merchandise. I loved it all from the very beginning, even when I didn’t have a typewriter and was doing everything by hand.”

For a while she ran the company out of her dining room, said William Booth, chief executive of the company. Even in her later years, Mrs. Fitzpatrick, who was partial to floral patterns in her curtains, could be a dominating presence in the production room.

“If we didn’t do it right, she’d come back and do it for us,” Booth said.

She also demanded the best from her employees. “Jane just expected people to be able to do anything, and with her backing, they were able to,” Booth said, noting that Mrs. Fitzpatrick once encouraged an employee with no writing experience to become a copywriter.

Mrs. Fitzpatrick never taught her daughter Nancy to sew curtains, but did show her how to iron a shirt, her daughter recalled. “She was critical,” said Nancy, who lives in Stockbridge, “but we learned how to do things pretty well.”

She recalled that her parents ate every meal at the Red Lion Inn.

“One of the best things about this job is that I don’t have to cook anymore,” Mrs. Fitzpatrick told the Globe in 1981.

Mrs. Fitzpatrick also always made her daughters’ Halloween costumes. Nancy’s favorite was the year Mrs. Fitzpatrick dressed her as a pilgrim.

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While traveling in Europe, Mrs. Fitzpatrick loved visiting hotels and studying fashions she could incorporate into Country Curtains. During those rare moments when she wasn’t working on her curtain business and hotels, or spending time with her philanthropic endeavors, she read nonfiction about the World War II era. Her daughter said she also enjoyed looking at different styles of wallpaper, shopping for antiques, and spending time with her grandchildren.

Partly because of her husband’s Senate runs, Mrs. Fitzpatrick was active in Republican politics.

Hawley said Mrs. Fitzpatrick became adept at fund-raising and was willing to always write a check for the Gardner Museum.

She was with Mrs. Fitzpatrick in 1980 when she decided to buy the Blantyre. Hawley recalled touring what was then an old, desolate building with Mrs. Fitzpatrick. It was falling apart, parts of the roof were missing, and there was water damage throughout, but Mrs. Fitzpatrick turned to Hawley and said: “I think I might buy this. . . . It might make a luxury hotel.”

Such fearlessness was inspirational, Hawley said.

“She had this visualizing mind,” Hawley said. “That’s how she could make those interiors.”

In addition to her daughter Nancy, Mrs. Fitzpatrick leaves another daughter, Ann Fitzpatrick Brown of Stockbridge; a sister, Mary Ann Snyder of Largo, Fla.; two grandchildren; and three step-grandchildren.

Mrs. Fitzpatrick’s memorial service was held in First Congregational Church of Stockbridge on Nov. 18, which would have been her 90th birthday. The reception was held at the Norman Rockwell Museum.

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Nancy said her mother dressed in clothes that were comfortable, but elegant. “She wore the perfect amount of jewelry and she wore a lot of pink,” she said.

Hawley recalled that she met Mrs. Fitzpatrick in an elevator of the State House years ago when Mr. Fitzpatrick was a state senator.

“I was taken by her beauty and elegance,” Hawley recalled. “She was just a force of nature.”


Melissa Hanson can be reached at melissa.hanson@globe.com.