Louisa B. Reynolds, a longtime Gibson Island resident who wrote a history of the exclusive Anne Arundel County enclave, died Monday of multiple organ failure at Roland Park Place.
She was 99.
Louisa Butter, the daughter of a German glassblower and a homemaker, was born in Baltimore and raised on Williams Street. "She spent summers at a family compound on Rock Creek," said her daughter-in-law, Suzanne Nelson Wilbur of Gibson Island and Vero Beach, Fla.
Mrs. Reynolds was a 1928 graduate of Eastern High School and attended the Peabody Conservatory of Music, the culinary school at Cornell University and the Johns Hopkins University.
She was a graduate of Strayer's Business College and as a young woman was an active member of the Vagabond Players, where she became friends in 1929 with an aspiring actress, Mildred Natwick.
Ms. Natwick, who died in 1994, went on to have a successful career on Broadway and in movies and television.
"Mildred had an absolutely natural talent," Mrs. Reynolds said in a 1994 interview with an Evening Sun reporter. "She was not good-looking at all. She got where she was on her acting."
Mrs. Reynolds was there the day when two New York talent scouts asked Ms. Natwick if she were interested in working in New York.
"I don't ever think she gave a bad performance," Mrs. Reynolds said.
During World War II, Mrs. Reynolds was a Red Cross canteen worker in Baltimore.
In the 1950s, she went to work at the Sheraton Belvedere Hotel, where she was public relations and banquet manager.
In 1965, she married Harry Clay Reynolds, who had been manager of the Belvedere for more than two decades, and lived in the hotel until his retirement in the late 1960s, at which time she also retired.
The couple also had a home on Gibson Island, the gated island community that was developed for wealthy Baltimoreans and Washingtonians in the early 1920s. They moved in 1987 to Easton, where they resided until Harry Reynolds' death in 1986.
Mrs. Reynolds had started living on Gibson Island in the late 1940s with her first husband, Dr. Joseph Thomas Nelson Jr., a Baltimore dentist. The couple later divorced.
While living on Gibson Island, Mrs. Reynolds became an accomplished bay sailor and had been a member of the board of directors of the Gibson Island Club.
As president of the Gibson Island Garden Club, she chaired numerous flower shows. Her flower arranging earned her many awards.
She was also active in the cultural life of the island, organizing and directing various theatrical and musical reviews that were fundraisers for St. Christopher by the Sea, the island's nondenominational church.
"I first met Lou 35 or 40 years ago, when several of us on Gibson Island gathered on a winter's day to do a reading of a Noel Coward play and we had a really good time," said Helen V. "Honey" Passano. "After that, we started putting on dinner shows with singing and acting — what we called ' Showtime' — at the Gibson Island Club."
Mrs. Passano described her as a "woman of joy and entertainment" and of "many talents."
She admired Mrs. Reynolds' ability to organize shows and dinner parties and get people to work with one another. "While she was a joyful person, she was no Pollyanna. She was a person who could work with people. She knew how to manage people and to get things done," she said. "And everything she did, she did with great elan and style."
Louise M. White, a friend and frequent Gibson Island visitor, described Mrs. Reynolds as "quite a character."
Mrs. Reynolds wrote "Heresay," an informal, illustrated anecdotal history published in 1978 by the Gibson Island Historical Society.
"Nothing in this booklet is guaranteed to be true. Stories continue to be changed," Mrs. Reynolds wrote in the book's foreword. "Memories play tricks on all of us. However, I have tried to set down as much lore as possible without hyperbole."
In a thumbnail sketch of the Gibson Island Club that opened in 1924, Mrs. Reynolds wrote that the favorite drink served there was a mint julep.
"These delectable concoctions made by the hundred were served with much flair. Someone said his pleasantest memory of the Club was a seat in a Gibson Island chair on the Club lawn at sunset with a perfectly-made mint julep," she wrote.
One night, she wrote, a bartender complained that his hands hurt and when the club manager took him to the hospital, the diagnosis was frostbite.
"This seemed ridiculous in the middle of the summer until it was learned that the man had been packing ice into glasses for mint juleps," she wrote.
While living in Easton before moving to Roland Park Place in 1990, Mrs. Reynolds was a member of Christ Episcopal Church and the Talbot County Garden Club.
During this time, she edited "Magician in the Kitchen, Genie in the Garden," a fundraising cookbook for the Federated Garden Clubs of Maryland. She also was a volunteer at Easton Memorial Hospital.
For a decade at Roland Park Place, she edited and wrote "News & Notes," the retirement community's newsletter, which included interviews with residents and staff, book reviews, poetry and fiction.
Mrs. Reynolds had been a founding member of the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum in St. Michaels. She also had been a member of the Baltimore Public Relations Council.
She enjoyed attending the theater, playing bridge, quilting and painting.
Plans for a memorial service were incomplete Thursday.
Also surviving are two grandsons and three great-grandsons. Her son, Joseph T. Nelson III, died in 2003.