Katharine Heuisler, who as a Red Cross clubmobile captain during World War II dispensed doughnuts, coffee and comfort to thousands of troops on the battlefields of Europe and the Southwest Pacific, died of congestive heart failure Wednesday at her Elkridge Estates residence. She was 83.
Her wartime service sparked her long devotion to the Red Cross as a volunteer and donor.
"The Red Cross was terribly important to her all of her life -- and it [wartime service] was a very happy time for her," said a longtime friend, Libby Grimes of Roland Park Place.
"It was the highlight of her life," said D'arcy Young of Woodbrook, a friend for 60 years. "We'd be playing bridge, and suddenly she was taking us all back to Normandy and all play would cease. She liked to relive those days and tell those stories."
A member of Baltimore's prominent Heuisler family -- a manufacturer of pharmaceuticals and glass -- Miss Heuisler was working in a Baltimore real estate firm when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.
She immediately joined the local Red Cross and drove trucks between Maryland military bases at night while working days on the military radio assembly line at the Bendix Corp. plant in Towson.
She was 31 when she volunteered for overseas duty shortly before Christmas 1942 with 10 other Red Cross members. The following May, she and 18,000 troops sailed to Scotland from New York aboard the Queen Elizabeth.
Miss Heuisler and the other volunteers expected to be driving ambulances and working in hospitals, but they instead baked several thousand doughnuts daily and delivered them to the troops. She made the deliveries in a six-wheeled rolling bakery, towing a portable generator behind.
"I was a doughnut from day one," she told The Evening Sun in an interview in May.
A month after the Normandy invasion, she and the other women were sent to France.
In a letter home to her family, she wrote: "We had to climb over the side of the ship down a swinging ladder 50 feet long. Our clubmobiles were hoisted over first and then we went down and drove them into place. I was shaking so I hardly made it, and I learned later that many of the girls had ropes tied around their waists as added protection. You can imagine the thrill when we hit the shores of Normandy."
During the fighting in Europe, she also dug trenches and camouflaged combat vehicles.
In September 1945, she crossed the Siegfried Line as a member of the first Red Cross team to step onto German soil.
In a 1993 interview in the American Red Cross newsletter, she said of the campaign in Europe: "You had to love it, and God must have given us a special gift to survive. With the bombing and shelling, we were always in danger."
After V-E Day in May 1945, she returned to Baltimore. While eating lunch in Marconi's the phone rang, and it was the Red Cross asking if she wouldn't mind going to the Pacific Theater.
"I phoned Hutzler's for a new summer robe and lightweight undergarments, took a B&O; train from Mount Royal Station and before long was on the steamer Orinoco heading for Manila," she said in the May interview.
After the war in the Pacific ended, she returned to Baltimore and briefly worked for real estate developer James W. Rouse. Then in 1946, she opened the Katharine Heuisler Dress Shop on Cold Spring Lane; it closed in 1964.
Known as "Kassie" or "Kitty," she was the eighth child of Hildegarde Gardiner and Philip Ignatius Heuisler, who was president and chairman of the Emerson Drug Co. and president of Maryland Glass, which manufactured the well-known cobalt blue bottles for Bromo-Seltzer, Vicks VapoRub and Noxema.
She was reared in Catonsville and was educated at the Eden Hall Convent of the Sacred Heart School in Philadelphia. She was a 1929 graduate of the Roland Park Country School.
She was a member of the Elkridge Club.
A Mass of Christian burial was to be offered at 9 a.m. today at the Cathedral of Mary Our Queen, 5200 N. Charles St., Baltimore, with interment in New Cathedral Cemetery.
She is survived by two sisters, Elizabeth Lentz of Guilford and Mary Charlotte Russell of Ruxton; and many nephews and nieces.
Memorial donations may be made to the American Red Cross, 4700 Mount Hope Drive, Baltimore 21215.