Elise Chisolm, a retired Evening Sun features columnist who wrote humorous family life essays, died of congestive heart failure Monday at the Keswick Multi-Care Center. The former Catonsville resident was 83.
Born Elise Townsend in Jackson Heights, N.Y., and raised in Bryn Mawr, Pa., she attended the Baldwin School and was a graduate of Lower Merion High School. She made her social debut in 1940 at the Philadelphia Academy of Music. Family members said she was a child of the Great Depression and did not go to college, but attended the Philadelphia School of Office Training.
She briefly worked for the Pennsylvania Railroad during World War II and met her future husband, Navy officer Guy M. Chisolm Jr., at the Philadelphia Navy Yard's officers' club. They married in 1944 and, after the war, lived in Amarillo, Texas. The athletic Ms. Chisolm was the city women's tennis champion for four years.
Ms. Chisolm began writing for papers in Texas; she wrote for the Amarillo Globe News and the Amarillo Citizen before moving to Catonsville in 1965, when her husband was selected as a managing architect and planner for a new school, the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. They lived on the college campus for many years, while he was the physical plant director.
She became a social news reporter for the old Evening Sun in 1967 after writing for the Catonsville Times.
"She thought of herself as a mother first. She wrote a family humor column," said Lucy Acton, a former Evening Sun colleague who is now editor of Mid-Atlantic Thoroughbred. "She was very charming and had a great sense of style. She could talk to anybody and was a down-to-earth person, very kind, but she certainly had a Social Register background. She had known hard times."
Ms. Chisolm's column, initially called "Woman Power" and later "Etc/Elise T. Chisolm," appeared three days a week in the old afternoon paper. She wrote lightheartedly of family life and also about celebrities visiting Baltimore.
"Lee filled the newsroom with warmth, humor and a 'just us girls' way of sharing gossip with other women. She was both regal and self-deprecating, an irresistible combination," said Stephanie Shapiro, a fellow reporter. "Lee's career straddled the days when the women's pages were a newspaper staple and a new age when feminism and women in the work force changed the direction of features sections across the country. Her columns reflected Lee's willingness to grow with the times."
Her writing connected with her audience: A 1985 letter to the editor read, "Keep it up Elise - we love you. Her little story was so warm and so full of gentle feelings that one could be there on the beach with her, and cry inside for her - and for oneself, too."
In her more than 20 years in the paper, she discussed the breast cancer diagnosis of a friend and how to treat senior citizens - "They want respect," she wrote in 1989. "But they don't want reverence."
Her son Richard Chisolm of Baltimore described his mother as a "combination of Lucille Ball and Gloria Steinem."
Her columns were collected in the 1999 book Are we there yet?
"She believed that love and laughter would trump pretension and conceit - and she always believed in the power of women," her son said. "She was a fun writer who thought you didn't have to be macho and boring. She believed, slowly and surely, about emerging feminism."
She retired in 1990. Family members said she was very social and kept a wide circle of friends.
"She had the essential quality of brightness," said a friend, Adelaide Rackemann. "If I had her to dinner, she brightened the evening."
While becoming physically frail recently, Ms. Chisolm retained a positive outlook.
"She remained larger-than-life and was always thinking about where to have a lunch out with friends," said her daughter, Susie Chisolm of Baltimore.
A memorial service will be held at 1 p.m. Saturday at St. Bartholomew's Episcopal Church, 4711 Edmondson Ave., where she was a communicant.
In addition to her son and daughter, survivors include another son, Guy M. Chisolm III of Cleveland; another daughter, Sally Buck of Richmond, Va.; a brother, David Townsend of Charlotte, N.C.; five grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren. Her husband died in 1996.
jacques.kelly@baltsun.com