GREENSBORO – Ed Donlon, known as “Da” to his grandchildren, and increasingly to others, died on March 2, in Greensboro, after 97 years of a life fully lived.
He was born in New Haven, Conn., November 12, 1928, and grew up in a poor part of the then- prosperous city. He never forgot where he was from or tired of sharing stories about the Italian, Jewish, and Irish families, neighborhood characters, Catholic school and nuns, markets and figures who populated his childhood where he fished with his father, delivered for the tailor and ushered for shows bound for Broadway at the Schubert Theater.
Thanks to a combination of Catholic school education, mentoring, later the GI Bill, and, most importantly, his own creativity and ability to write, Ed found himself in the newspaper business at an early age. Starting as a paper boy, then moving to the newsroom floor of the New Haven Register as a teenager; first as a copy boy, then an obituary writer and junior reporter.
After his time at the Register, he served as a communications liaison in the Army National Guard in Germany, attended UConn graduated from UCLA film school and then attended Boston University’s graduate program as a WGBH Scholar, before starting a career in writing and public relations for trade magazines and IBM. Upon retirement from IBM, he completed a chef’s program at the Culinary Institute in Hyde Park, N.Y.
Ed married Betsy Getsinger in 1956 and had spent the past 70 years with her raising three children, six grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren, moving up and down the East Coast from Connecticut to South Carolina and ultimately to Northern Vermont agreeing on all the things that matter in life, but arguing over just about everything else.
Ed will be most remembered by all who know him for his kindness, his humor, his adaptability, his ability to improvise, his moving and witty dinner toasts at family gatherings, his love of acting and community theater, his garden planting, his enthusiasm for cooking and entertaining and his eagerness to share experiences with his family. Ed loved travel, oysters, Pepe’s pizza, a cocktail or three, the news, and never met a salad or physical activity that he liked.
