Before online social networks were even a concept, Louise Endel had the “magic Rolodex” that connected people with opportunities in New Haven — and made the city a better place.
That’s how people will remember Endel, along with her cheerfulness, optimism, and community commitment.
Endel died Monday of the Covid-19 at the age of 98.
Matthew Nemerson referred to that “magic Rolodex” when he recalled how, in 1982, he was looking to return here rather than take a job in D.C. He knew Endel, and called her for advice.
“She told me to call Sam Chauncey, who was about to start Science Park. With her letter of introduction, I started as Sam’s deputy five weeks later,” recalled Nemerson, who went on to head the Chamber of Commerce and serve as New Haven’s economic development chief.
“Years later Louise would be a better conduit to many regional CEOs than anyone else as I needed to sign people up for leadership slots at the Chamber,” Nemerson said. “Her role in finding the right donors and senior staff for most of our major arts groups, especially in the darker days of the late 1980s and 1990s, was critical to New Haven emerging as the state’s creative leader. Behind the scenes, Louise was doing her best with the social calendar to keep civil war from breaking out between St. Raphael’s and Yale-New Haven in the late 1990s and 2000s when the hospital and insurance wars were getting serious.”
“Before Malcolm Gladwell popularized the idea of the super-connector, the person who knows everybody in town and saw her or his role to make useful connections and introductions on a continuous basis, New Haven had Louise,” Nemerson observed.
Endel for a while ran a welcome-wagon company (with Nemerson’s late mother Vivienne) called “Hello New Hello New Haven.” But it was mostly in informal ways — through the connections she made as an omnipresence at public events, fundraisers, dinner parties — that she served as one of her generation’s top behind-the-scenes social networks.
She was involved in countless communal efforts involving the arts, healthcare, civil rights and politics. She served on 52 local, state, and national boards, including at the Long Wharf Theatre, Elm Shakespeare, St. Raphael’s Hospital Foundation, LEAP, the League of Women Voters, Girl Scouts, and Ridge Road School’s PTA, according to her daughter, Susan Kerner.
Endel and her late husband Charles were founding members of Ridge Top Club, the first swimming club in the area to eschew racial and religious discrimination, Kerner said. In the early ‘60’s Endel helped organize the Panel of American Women, which gathered audiences to address racial and religious prejudice.
From the start Endel was a booster of New Haven’s International Festival of Arts & Ideas.
Former festival Director Mary Lou Aleskie recalled Endel’s infectious enthusiasm: ” If she was eating an ice cream, it was the best ever. If she was seeing a performance, it was like nothing else, anywhere else. She loved life and the people around her so completely. She will forever be a reminder of how to live life to the fullest with passion and abundance of heart.”
Aleskie’s husband, Peter Webster, recalled how Endel helped out however she could: “She drove our daughter to swimming lessons, she sat on our porch on Wooster Place, she was impeccably coiffed and tailored at every event possible, and she was, she is, adored by all who knew her.”
Community Foundation for Greater New Haven CEO Will Ginsberg called Endel “New Haven’s ultimate connecter of people, and in that sense she as much as anyone made our city truly what it is — a great community. She knew almost everyone, and her love for our community was returned many times over by her legions of friends. Louise also loved politics, not just as a power game, but as a way to work with people to make her community better. She was passionate about her politics, as she was about everything and everybody.”
Louise Endel is survived by her three daughters: Susan Kerner (Paul) of New York, NY; Barbara Spinner (David) of Newton, MA; Patricia Endel of Lake Mary, Florida; six grandchildren: Andrew (Ali), Jeffrey (Lisa), and David Kerner; Laura Arvidson and Jamie Spinner (Christina), and Sam Skardon (Leslie); and six great grandchildren: Max and Benjamin Kerner, Hannah and Nicky Arvidson, and Charles and Jackson Kerner.
A funeral is to be held at a later date, after the pandemic passes. In the meantime, daughter Susan Kerner asks people to record memories for a video memorial tribute she is putting together. She can be reached at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).
Memorial contributions may be made to Long Wharf Theatre, Elm Shakespeare, L.E.A.P., Mary Wade Home, or to the South Carolina State Senate campaign of Louise’s grandson Sam Skardon. Beecher and Bennett Funeral Home is in charge of arrangements.