It would have been hard to catch Shirley Greer without her lipstick.
It would have been hard to catch her not dressed to impress, too, and even when people came to visit her in the hospital, one of the first things they would notice were her perfectly manicured fingernails, said her daughter, Gillian Ann Greer of Vinings.
“I could have been standing next to her in a Chanel suit and still couldn’t compare to my mother,” she said. “She even sat in the house with lipstick on. She was like a great dame.”
A great dame who was also a fixture in her community of Vinings, where she was involved in everything from her antique shop to the Vinings Village Woman’s Club, and where everybody knew and loved her, said Karen DeRuyter, board president of the Vinings Historic Preservation Society.
“If she were out in one of the local dining establishments everybody would come and talk to her,” she said. “She was such a pillar in our community.”
Shirley Brown Greer of Vinings died Monday from complications of a heart attack at Signature HealthCARE of Buckhead. She was 82.
Her funeral is scheduled for 11 a.m. Saturday at Peachtree Presbyterian Church in the Kellett Chapel. Entombment will immediately follow at Arlington Memorial Park. The family will receive friends from 6-8 p.m. Friday at H.M. Patterson & Son Arlington Chapel, which was also in charge of the arrangements.
Greer lived an active lifestyle full of games of bridge and antique shopping, and she was always on the go. For the past 10 years, she’s traveled to England twice a year in search of the perfect antiques for her shop Antiques of Vinings, which she and her friend Jackie Scott opened together in 1982.
The business was very important to Greer, and she had the innate ability to pick out the perfect pieces for her shop, Gillian Greer said.
“She would go into those antique booths in England and walk right up to something,” she said. “I don’t know where she got it from, but she just had the antique eye.”
Shirley Greer also owned a house on Lake Lanier, where she and her family gathered and enjoyed endless numbers of weekends by the water. There was nothing more important to Greer than her family, and she greatly cherished the memories they made on the lake, said her son, Paul Olds Greer of Woodstock.
“That was her favorite retreat for family,” he said. “One of her favorite things to do was sit on the dock with her family and friends.”
Shirley Greer’s longtime commitment to the community of Vinings earned her a long list of friends, all of whom will remember her by her larger-than-life attitude. She lived life to the fullest, and she left a legacy that won’t soon be forgotten, DeRuyter said.
“I just could never picture the world without Shirley in it,” she said. “She was amazing, and she will be missed by so many people.”
In addition to her daughter and son, Greer is survived by another daughter, Gail Greer Gordon of Sandy Springs; another son, Clark Olds Greer of Stockbridge; a stepdaughter, Jane Roberts Greer of Savannah; six grandchildren and one great-grandson.
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