Barbara Winslow Grant

Barbara Winslow Grant, a former charity fund-raiser and leader in school volunteerism who was the wife of one New York Times publisher, the mother of another and the grandmother of a third, died on Saturday in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif. She was 90. Her death, at a retirement home, was confirmed by her son Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., the chairman of The New York Times Company. Mr. Sulzberger succeeded his father, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, as publisher in 1992 and as chairman in 1997. The elder Mr. Sulzberger was married to Ms. Grant from 1948 until they divorced in 1956. He died in 2012. Mr. Sulzberger Jr.’s son, Arthur Gregg Sulzberger, was named publisher in 2017. Ms. Grant was born on March 31, 1928, in Paris to Theodore F. Grant, an importer of animal hides, and the former Helen Fisher MacDonald, a secretary. The Grant family moved from Paris to Barcelona and then to the United States in 1932. As a young woman, Ms. Grant was a student at the School of American Ballet in New York and went on to dance professionally, appearing at City Center, the Metropolitan Opera and New York City Ballet, among other venues. Ms. Grant was in college and working in The Times’s executive offices when she met Mr. Sulzberger. His father, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, was the publisher at the time. After they married at her parents’ home in Westchester County, N.Y., she resumed her studies at Barnard and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in fine arts in 1951, the same year Mr. Sulzberger graduated from Columbia College after serving with the Marines in the Pacific. During the 1960s, she worked for the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Her two subsequent marriages — to David S. Christy, an economist and adviser to the Afghan resistance during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, and Jerry Johnson, who worked at the Menninger Foundation in Topeka, Kan. — also ended in divorce. Mr. Christy died in 2015. She moved to California in retirement in 1991 and to Rancho Palos Verdes in 2008. In addition to her son Arthur and grandson Arthur, Ms. Grant is survived by a daughter, Karen Sulzberger, from her first marriage; two children, David Christy Jr. and Sarah Christy, from her second marriage; and six grandchildren. Her brother, Theodore Jr., and sister, Elizabeth, died earlier.