January 5, 2006

Louise “Tootsie” Gartner

Louise Gartner's father came from Russia and met her mother, who was from St. Louis, before the couple married and moved to Texas. Her older sister was born in Cushing, Texas, where her father worked in dry goods and later men's suits before the family settled in Dallas. There he ran a used-car lot and invested in property. Louise grew up in Oak Cliff, at an address she still remembered on North Windemere, and moved to South Dallas in high school when her mother, whom she called a pioneer, wanted her among Jewish children. Her father belonged to a very religious congregation, while her mother joined Temple Emanu-El, where Louise attended Sunday school.

After graduating from high school in South Dallas, Louise attended college and earned a degree from the University of Illinois, studying home economics with design courses. She won a prestigious scholarship to a New York design school but set it aside when her sisters urged her to join their growing business. That business became Page Boy, a maternity clothing company that began as a small shop in the Medical Arts Building and grew into a manufacturing operation with factories and retail stores in cities including Los Angeles. Louise served as the designer while her sisters handled merchandising and business operations. Page Boy earned national acclaim, was featured in leading magazines, and staged what was described as the first maternity fashion show in New York. Louise married a man from Topeka, Kansas, and continued working while raising her children.

After 27 years, Louise retired from Page Boy and, following her husband's death in 1981, turned to philanthropy with remarkable energy. In Israel she established a chair at the Weizmann Institute of Science in her husband's honor and funded natural medicine research at Hadassah University Hospital. In Dallas she helped launch a charitable produce program with the North Texas Food Bank that has distributed millions of pounds of fresh produce to the needy, supported a common cents youth giving program in the Dallas schools, founded an alternative medicine research effort, and helped create a hyperbaric medicine center at Baylor and a center for age-related vision loss. Honored as an outstanding philanthropist and by many organizations, she remained active, guided by her belief in what she called God incidences and her devotion to her daughter, son, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.

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