Dorothy Anne Gray (aka Dotsy) passed away peacefully on March 30, 2023 in the Brentwood Nursing Home of Yarmouth, Maine. She came in like a lion on April 15 (tax day), 1928 and went out like a lamb two weeks shy of her 95th birthday.

The only daughter of Anne Marie McLaughlin (Annie) and William (Willie) Caraccio, Dotsy was born and raised on the Upper West Side of New York City. An only child with a full-time working mother, she was schooled by the nuns and spent her youth accompanying them after school in an era when nuns were not allowed out in public without an escort. The school uniform was skirts and knee socks – freezing in winter but good preparation for the life that lay ahead.

Always a lover of uniforms, Dotsy forsook the nun’s habit for a nurse’s cap and apron that set off her dark Italian hair and big blue Irish eyes. After graduating from the Roosevelt Nursing School, she worked at the Roosevelt Hospital as the head nurse on a private ward. She said you could recognize the Roosevelt nurses – the ones walking down the hall putting on lipstick without a mirror. Dotsy’s was pink until the day she died. She looked so good in her uniform that she became the poster child for the hospital – and kept a newspaper clipping with an iconic photo sitting on a ladder in her white, pressed uniform holding the Hope Diamond. Her favorite patient wrote the lyrics for many of the Broadway musicals she loved, but her favorite story was about the patient who pulled a gun from a policeman’s holster and used it to attempt an escape. Dotsy’s pink lipstick was later credited as one of the tactics used to reclaim the gun without injury.

Dotsy met her husband, Dr. David Henry Gray of New Canaan, Connecticut, at the Roosevelt Hospital, where he was interning. Life was about to change.

The couple left New York to eventually settle in Burlington, Vermont on Lake Champlain. Four ravishing daughters soon followed, much to David’s dismay but to Dotsy’s delight. There they fell in love with Morgan horses and built Ledgemere - a breeding farm – on 350 acres in Shelburne, VT. At its peak, Ledgemere had 25 horses, 100 head of Angus, four pigs, 12 German shepherds (raised for seeing-eye dogs), two golden retrievers, nine chickens and a revolving-door of barn cats. Dotsy retained a life-long love for animals—her dogs above all.

Dotsy and Dave eventually bought a summer home in Boothbay Harbor, Maine, moved their sailboat from Lake Champlain, and spent many happy summers in the Boothbay community and out on the ocean. When the farm hands (4 daughters) left home, the couple sold the farm and moved to their favorite town in Vermont—Stowe, where they spent their twilight years skiing and winning free donuts at their favorite coffee shop through Dotsy’s talent for trivial pursuits. They loved their Stowe and Boothbay friends and neighbors.

Dotsy was loving, cheerful, steady, stylish, smart, beautiful, and the heart of the family. She was a product of a generation that is no more and one of the last to go. She will be missed and forever loved.

She is survived by four daughters and seven grandchildren, with a great grandchild on the way. Dotsy will be cremated and interred with David in the Riverbank Cemetery in Stowe, Vermont to continue enjoying a magnificent view of their beloved Mount Mansfield. In lieu of flowers, contributions can be made to NCAL (the North County Animal League) in Morrisville, VT.