Len Augsburger writes:

In the 1950s, there was something odd going on at the Newman household in Clayton. A chute was hooked up to a window near the driveway thatled into the basement. Every so often, a car pulled up to unload.

The goods turned out to be donated books - tons of them. Each pile needed to be sorted, priced for resale: five cents for most books, a dime for the nice ones, maybe $2 for a rare find.

"Then it got a little bit out of hand," Andy Newman, recalling his childhood home, said of the operation. "It got very, very large. The house was always full of one project or another."

The used book drive eventually became widely known as the Greater St. Louis Book Fair and a signature of Evelyn E. Newman, queen of the resale fundraiser.

The books supported St. Louis' first interracial day care, but over decades of philanthropy, Mrs. Newman, a no-nonsense heiress to the now defunct Edison Brothers Stores Inc., was involved with all sorts of causes in St. Louis.

"She got things going and then she moved on to the next creative endeavor," said Emily Pulitzer, who with Mrs. Newman and others was a founding director in 1980 of The First Street Forum, what is now Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis.

Mrs. Newman, of Clayton, died Tuesday (Sept. 1, 2015) at Barnes-Jewish Hospital after a brief illness, family said. She was 95.

She leaves behind a legacy of getting things done in the St. Louis culture and charity scene.

In 1960, she helped create a high-end used clothing store to support the Scholarship Foundation of St. Louis. Since then, ScholarShop stores in Webster Groves and Clayton generated about $23 million in interest-free loans and grants for college students, said Faith Sandler, executive director of the foundation.

"She really was the catalyst of founding the ScholarShop," Sandler said. "It was her brainchild, her idea, her energy."

In the 1980s, Mrs. Newman was the first executive director of Forest Park Forever, the nonprofit organization that has helped turn the park into one of the region's biggest attractions.

"She was very, very important in our early years," said Lesley Hoffarth, who now leads the group. "She really had attention to detail and fabulous ideas."

Evelyn Edison Newman was born July 25, 1920, in Atlanta. Her family moved to St. Louis nine years later to be close to the country's shoe manufacturing hub. The family business, Edison Brothers, grew into a publicly traded company that at its peak had 2,000 stores before ending in bankruptcy in 1995.

Mrs. Newman married Eric P. Newman in 1939. Eric Newman, 104, a retired lawyer for Edison Brothers Stores, is a rare coin and currency scholar and collector.

Auctions from his collection in recent years principally funded more than $60 million in donations to a foundation in the couple's name to make grants mainly to St. Louis-based institutions.

At Washington University, the couple helped create the Eric P. Newman Education Center at the School of Medicine, several professorships, scholarship funds and the Newman Money Museum on campus.

To read the complete article, see:
Evelyn Newman: Queen of St. Louis fundraising has died (www.stltoday.com/news/local/obituaries/evelyn-newman-queen-of-st-louis-fundraising-has-died/article_04e98817-3143-566e-beaf-e46c59e8dfc6.html)

Ten years ago, Mrs. Newman told the Washington University Magazine "I am an idea person. I love spotting trends and I have always been interested in retail because of my family."

That family was the Edisons. The Edison Brothers and their shoe business, which went by a number of names, was founded in 1922 and moved from Georgia to St. Louis in 1929. It flourished in a town known for shoes and booze, and became a titan in the American shoe business. In the late 1940s, for example, it was the largest chain of women's shoe stores in the country.

Mrs. Newman benefited from a good education and an interesting one. She graduated from John Burroughs School in 1937, attended Goucher College in Baltimore and Washington University as well. But her true alma mater, she always said, was the "University of Eric Newman." He, as was she, is a very smart man indeed. He, at the age of 104, survives his wife.

Throughout - in her personal life and in business - Mrs. Newman carried herself with warmth, grace and cultivated elegance. She was a womanof exuberance and enormous energy too; in fact, right until the end, she seemed forever youthful -- so spry, so vigorous, so vital the family wasgenuinely surprised she had died.

"Her spunk and with-it-ness disguised how old she was," her son, Andrew Newman, said. "She was always reinventing herself - examining this concept or that concept."

To read the complete article, see:
Evelyn Edison Newman: Creative philanthropist made it fun for others to contribute (http://news.stlpublicradio.org/post/evelyn-edison-newman-creative-philanthropist-made-it-fun-others-contribute#stream/0)

Ken Bressett writes:

Joel Orosz writes:

Roger Burdette writes:

To read the New York Times obituary, see:
EVELYN NEWMAN (www.legacy.com/obituaries/nytimes/obituary.aspx?page=lifestory&pid=175746457)