Obituary: Sylvia Heininger Holden, 1929-2024 

click to enlarge

• Courtesy
• Sylvia Holden

Sylvia Heininger Holden, a pretty, happy “butterfly” of a lady whose kindness was so renowned that National Public Radio reported on it, has died in Vermont, at age 94.

During recent years in her very long life, she was known for flitting about Burlington in a little red car to deliver flowers, chocolate, books, magazines and other small comforts to people she knew and some she did not.

Wherever she lived over the decades, Holden became a pillar of communities, from Montreal’s West Island to the Glebe neighborhood in Ottawa, Canada, where a city park is named in her honor. She was a member of the senior yoga group at Burlington’s Heineberg Club until her death on June 5, 2024.

Sylvia embodied positiveness. When a cataract operation left her eyes sensitive to light, she made vintage and novelty sunglasses part of her look. Uncomfortable pumping gasoline, she found a new friend at the station to help, every time.

She enjoyed giant books, marking choice quotes with slips of paper or reading them aloud to family. Peter Kurth’s Isadora was read back-to-back with dance pioneer Duncan’s own 1927 autobiography. Sylvia clipped newspapers and magazines, with a knack — said her old friend Karl Raab — for sending people what they were interested in.

In recent years, Sylvia accompanied Alfred and son-in-law Michel Laverdiere on expeditions by Subaru to the Charlevoix region of Québec, Montréal, Ottawa and to Massachusetts and the Adirondacks.

As a mom, Sylvia preferred good manners in feral children who took responsibility.

Sylvia’s late husband, Clem Holden, a Green Mountain Club member who was one of Bolton Mountain’s trailblazing “Old Goat” skiers, died in 2020, at age 97. Like him, Sylvia was blessed with good health to near the end of her life.

Around May 5, she and her son Alfred, 66, caught COVID-19. While they both got through it, it took a toll on Sylvia’s immune system, enabling undiagnosed cancers, which moved swiftly. She died surrounded by friends at the McClure Miller Respite House in Colchester. With the assistance of staff from A.W. Rich Funeral Home, Sylvia was spirited away in an honor procession, with family and friends carrying electric candles.

click to enlarge

• Courtesy
• Sylvia Holden

Sylvia Holden was born Sylvia Frida Heininger at Mary Fletcher Hospital in Burlington, Vt., on November 22, 1929. Her family noticed a birthmark in the shape of an airplane, at a time when her father, Alfred Heininger, was deeply involved in efforts to advance the new field of aviation in Vermont.

She grew up in a foursquare house in the then-German and Jewish district on North Avenue, where family still live. Sylvia walked to Lawrence Barnes School a few blocks away, often late for class because “I liked to talk to people I met on the way.”

Habitual congeniality was a bedrock for Sylvia. In the delicate period following 9/11, accidentally traveling with husband Clem’s passport instead of her own, she sweet-talked her way into Canada and home again.

As a young lady, Sylvia took a summer job at a settlement house in Philadelphia. In 1951, upon graduating from the University of Vermont, she was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to study sociology at the University of Vienna, setting sail that August on Holland-America’s New Amsterdam with her friend Mary Hurst.

Cold War tension in postwar, Allied-occupied Austria led to scrapes for Sylvia.

Finding herself on a train through the Russian zone without proper papers, she conferred with passengers in her compartment, who called the conductor, who hid her under a counter in the beverage car.

Another time, after a student event — possibly 1952’s “Ball der technik,” going by a ticket in her scrapbook — Sylvia was called in by American officials, who called the party “a communist ball” and issued her a warning.

Sylvia told of hitchhiking all over Europe and motorcycling to Helsinki with a boyfriend, where with her Kodak Retina she recorded images of the 1952 Summer Olympics.

Back in America, Sylvia got a job with Vermont’s Department of Social Work, adopting as her mentor the vaunted Anna Elizabeth MacWilliams Neville (1924-2022). Needing a car to make her rounds, she bought a new Volkswagen in Montréal, a 1953, which may have been the first in Vermont, as there were no dealers yet.

Sylvia was introduced to Clem by North Avenue grocer Albert Kieslich. One day at his store, she asked, “Who knows about ski wax?” Albert pointed to Clem, who was buying a steak on his way back from Stowe.

The couple married at UVM’s Ira Allen Chapel on July 18, 1954, honeymooning at the family camp, Cedar Ledge, on Coates Island in Lake Champlain. They moved to Montréal, where Clem worked in labor relations for aircraft maker Canadair (later Bombardier, now part of Airbus). Son Jeffrey Holden, born in 1955, accompanied them to live in London, where Clem was sent to recruit aircraft engineers.

After son Alfred arrived in 1958, the Holdens bought a house in the Montréal Island suburb of Pointe Claire, where, among other things, their 1965 home movie, “A Day With the Holdens,” now on YouTube, documented the life of a typical family of that day.

Following the excitement of Expo 67, Clem joined the Canadian government, and the family moved to Ottawa, where Sylvia led numerous public-spirited efforts, notably the creation of new urban parks, for which the City of Ottawa named one in her honor.

click to enlarge

• Courtesy
• Sylvia Holden

Sylvia and Clem retired to Burlington, taking care of her mother, Erna Heininger, until her death in 1991. A lifelong Unitarian, Sylvia did not approve of the Iraq War and demonstrated against it. She supported development in the Old North End that added new life, such as the Scout Coffee shop in Packard Lofts.

She and Clem frequently strolled around their block, Sylvia with her walker, of course stopping to talk to people, dispensing cookies or chocolate Canadian loonies and toonies ($1 and $2 coins).

Sources of late-life happiness for Sylvia were restoration of the Heiningers’ original homestead on Crowley Street by its current residents, Brian Pine and Liz Curry, and renewed activity next door at the old Goethe Lodge (German club).

One day in 2022, a Vermont Public radio reporter spotted Sylvia there, eating potluck in the upstairs dance hall.

“She was the oldest person in the room, but she seemed like the liveliest,” Anna Van Dine writes at Vermont Public’s website, where words and audio are posted. “I wanted to talk to her about how she fills her days.”

Well, one day, leaving Price Chopper in Colchester, Sylvia spotted a man sitting off the parking lot, crying.

“And I went over to him,” she tells listeners, in Van Dine’s story, now widely heard on NPR. “And I said, ‘What’s wrong?’ And he said, ‘My wife’s in the hospital and my life is in shatters.’ And I said, ‘Just a minute,’ and I reached in and pulled out some beautiful flowers. He was thrilled.”

After Sylvia’s passing, a neighbor, David Lines, of Burlington’s diner family, wrote online at Front Porch Forum, “Her (mostly) joyful outlook was as infectious as her determination to insist that humanity could always be better than it was. Having lived through some truly challenging eras in America, she was always steadfast in her faith that justice and a kind gesture would overcome the bleak clouds that often darken the outlook of today’s doom scroll.”

Sylvia’s remains were cremated and for now are home with the family, who include sons Alfred (spouse Michel) of Toronto and Burlington,  Jeffrey (spouse Kaodi Yamada), and their children Amy and Thoma, of Federal Way, Wash. Her brother Oskar Heininger lives in Framingham, Mass. Sylvia’s sister, Erika Sawyer of Vancouver, predeceased her; Heininger, Holden, and Sawyer extended family continue. Sylvia called Ann Gotham and Myra Timmins of Burlington “my adopted daughters.” The Raabs of Vancouver, John Quinn of Colchester, David Barber of St. Albans, and Diana Carlisle, Josette Noll and Gloria Seidler of Burlington were honorary family, with countless others.

The Holdens are grateful to countless neighbors and friends who provided support at the house for years, staff at UVM Medical Center Hospital, and those who joined Alfred and Jeffrey at McClure Miller at the very end of Sylvia’s life.

Sheila Quinn of Texas sent condolences on a card featuring a butterfly, with the note, “I think this butterfly symbolizes the natural beauty she displayed, as she continued to blossom.” A family event is planned; a public memorial service for Sylvia will be held on September 21, 2024, at the First Unitarian Church in Burlington.