Obituary:
Louise C. Sawyer
March 8, 1920- March 7, 2018
A memorial service will be held in her honor on Saturday, March 24, at 1:00 p.m. at the First Unitarian Church on Union and 8th Streets in New Bedford. All friends and family are invited to attend.
Louise Cook Sawyer, 97, died in her home on March 7, 2018, one day shy of her 98th birthday, after a brief illness. She was the daughter of Raymond H. and Gertrude (Flanigan) Cook and the former wife of the late Hermon Reneau Sawyer.
She was born in New Bedford, attended local schools, and graduated from New Bedford High School in 1937, where she was the salutatorian of her class. She attended Smith College, where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. After graduation in 1941, she did graduate work on an exchange fellowship at the University of Puerto Rico. She was fluent in Spanish and four other foreign languages.
After nine years of residence in Sao Paulo, Brazil and upon her divorce in 1956, she returned to New Bedford and from 1957 to 1966 worked in the New Bedford YWCA as Program Director for adult classes and clubs. From 1966 until her retirement in 1987 she was employed by the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children as a social worker in the field of child protection. During the last 16 years of her time with the MSPCC, she worked in the Taunton office in the agency’s Family Counseling Services.
She remained an active volunteer at the YWCA, serving two terms on its board of directors and one year as president. She was a member of the Smith College Club of Southeastern Massachusetts, and served at various times as secretary and president.
One of the founding members of the Memorial Society of Southeastern Massachusetts, now the Funeral Consumer’s Alliance of Southeastern Massachusetts, she was a charter member of its board of directors and its first president, an office that she served from 1977-1983 and to which she was re-elected for a second six-year term in 1989. While working at the MSPCC, she was also an active member of the Community Health Improvement Council of Greater Taunton, in which she served on the Executive Board as secretary and, later, president.
Mrs. Sawyer was a member of the first Unitarian Church in New Bedford and served three separate terms on its board of trustees, during one of which she held the office of vice chairman. She had been active in a number of church committees and in editing an occasional newsletter, the Eighth Street Extra.
As a volunteer at the New Bedford Whaling Museum, she served as a docent for a number of years before turning to work on its log-reading program, studiously combing through the daily logs written by captains of various whaling ships to uncover historical points of interest. She had acted as program director for the museum’s Volunteer Council and for 17 years wrote a column for the Council’s newsletter, Spoutings. For several years she was an active guide for tours of the New Bedford Historic District as a member of the New Bedford Walking Tour-Guides Association.
She was an enthusiastic gardener and the subject of a lengthy piece focusing on her garden that appeared in The New Bedford Standard Times.
She is survived by a daughter, Virginia S. O’Leary of Roswell Georgia and Philip W. Sawyer of Dennis, Mass.; a grandson and a great grandson; and dozens of nieces, nephews, grand-nieces and nephews. Her older sister Eleanor Cook Lang, who also grew up in New Bedford, passed away in August 2017.
Funeral arrangements are by Perry Funeral Home in New Bedford.