Longtime community icon Helen George dies

Even in her final days, Helen W. George was thinking of others.

The longtime community volunteer, who died Wednesday night at the Kingsway Community nursing center in Schenectady, met friends earlier in the week.

“Her daughter Betty Jane knew what was coming and said while Helen certainly wasn’t up for long visits, she thought that perhaps she could do little five-minute visits from people who just wanted to say thank you,” said Denise Murphy McGraw, a past president of the Junior League. “They were people from many walks of her life, Family and Child Services, which she helped found, people like me who knew her from the Junior League. … Just that gesture alone by Betty Jane, I think, meant the world to many of us.”

George, who also covered Schenectady’s social scene as “Gretchen Dorp” for the Schenectady Gazette, was 99. Funeral arrangements by the Baxter-Andrew Funeral Home in Schenectady are pending.

Friends remembered a woman who always seemed to be thinking about her community.

“She kept a scrapbook of everything she’d ever written, and years after she retired, she would call when somebody who had lived in Schenectady, worked at G.E. and had become socially prominent — she knew them all, she had contacts everywhere — she would call me right away when they passed on,” said John E.N. Hume III, editor and publisher of The Daily Gazette. “I can’t tell you how helpful that was, because it gave us time to actually get to work on a nice obit.”

Hume remembered a vibrant personality.

“She just seemed to know everybody, and she was very outgoing,” he said. “She was lovely, very personable. … She was one of these people who everybody liked.”

George kept a busy volunteer schedule. She was associated with the Junior League, Ellis Hospital, the Boys and Girls Clubs of Schenectady, the Day Nursery, United Way, First Presbyterian Church and the Garden Club of Schenectady. During World War II, she worked on a communication network and helped rally people for victory gardens and salvage drives.

George was society editor at the Schenectady Gazette from 1950 until 1976 and also worked in real estate with Veronica Lynch. She was named a Schenectady Patroon in 1991; the Human Services Planning Council gave her the Katherine S. Rozendaal Award in 1987.

Always involved

Karen B. Johnson was the mayor who gave George her “Patroon” honor, which coincided with George’s 80th birthday.

“Helen had a large group of multi-age friends,” said Johnson, now director of planned giving at Proctors. “She was just a lovely, gracious person, very thoughtful, very committed to the community.”

George was always happy to help. “When I worked on the last Proctors Capital Campaign, she was extremely helpful to me, sitting down and talking about people that were involved in the early days of Proctors,” Johnson said. “She’d write Philip (Morris, Proctors’ chief executive officer) notes about something she read about the theater and how excited she was about it, even in the last year.”

During her newspaper days, George seemed to know what was happening all over —— in living rooms, country club and hotel ballrooms, college campuses and airports. Luncheon, coffee and bridge parties, visitors to Schenectady, vacation departures, marriage announcements, bridal showers and academic accomplishments were among news items in Gretchen Dorp’s “Social Notes” columns.

George remembered her work as “Gretchen” in a 1995 interview with The Daily Gazette.

“An awful lot went on in Schenectady in the way of parties, dances, things that are really curtailed now,” she said. “I used to have the pleasure of writing about those things. They were happy, happy happenings, and I used to write about their bridge clubs and their book clubs and when they went to Europe and when their kids got married and they had rehearsal dinners. Now you don’t see any of that in the paper any more.”

The newspaper retired the column when George retired in 1976. George said the paper had changed, but believed people had changed, too — she thought many wanted to keep their vacations and social exercises private.

Debby Mullaney of Niskayuna, like George a past president of the Junior League, thinks Schenectady will miss George’s giving spirit.

“I think that we have lost one of the biggest supporters of the Schenectady not-for-profit community,” she said. “She was always there to help. She was a mentor to women in our community, she was a very special friend of many of us in the not-for-profit sector.

“She gave tirelessly. Even in her advanced years, if you had any questions about how to run a fundraiser, who to involve in a fundraiser, Helen was the first one you wanted to talk to. She had just a wealth of information.”

Niskayuna attorney and former Schenectady County Legislator Cristine Cioffi was 16 when she met George.

“She gave me my first job, and it was at the Gazette,” she said. “I was her summer substitute writer, so when she went out of town, I made all those phone calls, found out who was having weddings or baptisms or parties and wrote the column for her.”

Cioffi described George as a citizen who stepped up to volunteer her time wherever it was needed.

“When she saw the need, she did it,” Cioffi said.

George tried to get others interested in community work.

“There’s so much to do, and if anybody has the energy and the desire, there are many volunteer jobs they can do in hospitals,” she said in the 1995 Gazette interview.

She also talked about playing the piano.

“I’m going to do that in the next world,” she said. “That and figure skate and Rollerblade. It looks like such fun.”