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The following was submitted by The League of Women Voters of Winchester:
When Joyce Westner was about 10 years old, she decided to start a newspaper for her neighborhood, which she wrote in pencil. It had a circulation of one and there was no second issue.
But she started volunteering at that early age, selling Girl Scout cookies in the neighborhood, and as a teenager collecting for the March of Dimes, and delivering political flyers in Brighton to get the City of Boston firefighters a raise (her father was a firefighter).
Majoring in journalism at Northeastern University, she wrote articles and eventually became copy editor of the Northeastern News as well as of an intercollegiate newspaper. Volunteering took her to the Philippines as a member of the United States Peace Corps where she met her husband, a German volunteer. They have two children who were born and raised in Winchester.
Why Winchester? They originally lived in Wilmington and Joyce would take the commuter rail into Boston. In springtime, she’d notice all the flowering trees and shrubs on the commute through Winchester and decided it would be a great town to live in.
She was a stringer for the Arlington Advocate and the Winchester Star, and eventually became a technical training developer and manager. Full-time journalism jobs paid very little and were hard to get, and technical writing paid a lot better.
As a federal sub-contractor, her favorite project was for FAA air traffic controllers, when they adopted new Windows-based technology for tracking aircraft in flight. She had a team of trainers who traveled to air traffic control centers around the world — at the time, the FAA had them in Guam, Frankfurt Germany, and Singapore.
In Winchester, she organized a farm awareness committee to help save Wright-Locke Farm and even ran for Town Meeting so she could vote in favor of selling the non-working acres of the farm to the newly formed Wright-Locke Farm Conservancy, and she spoke eloquently at Town Meeting.
Her hobby is botanical art (painting plant portraits with botanical accuracy and aesthetic qualities) and she was president of the New England Society of Botanical Artists for four years.
She also volunteers with Legacy Winchester, an organization started by Peter Engeldrum and Shukong Ou which seeks to archive digital items, including photos, videos, and spoken words at www.LegacyWinchester.org.
She joined former resident Mary McKenna to get Winchester the Commonwealth’s Cultural District designation for the downtown, and she helped Ruth Trimarchi petition Town Meeting to change the name of the Board of Selectmen to the Select Board.
With members of the town’s Communications Study Committee, she formed the free, non-profit Winchester News, and continues to write articles about the many, many volunteers who make the world a better place. But she did none of this alone (except the one-issue newspaper) — it takes a village to accomplish all of these endeavors!
The League of Women Voters of Winchester is proud to recognize Joyce’s many accomplishments and continuous outstanding service to our community on Thursday, Sept. 18, from 6:30 - 8:30 p.m. at the Town Hall Auditorium located on 71 Mt. Vernon St. in Winchester.
See the LWVW website for more details.
