Mary Ellen DeWitt Howe – a lady who could make any room “pretty” with a bolt of fabric and a can of paint - passed away June 1 at her home in Kansas City MO. She was 90. Known from infancy as “Pidge,” Mary Ellen was born to Virgil Orr DeWitt and Ellen Lamb DeWitt on March 19, 1927, in Madison, WI, where her father attended law school.

 Pidge grew up sewing doll clothes and drawing flowers in Sioux City, IA with two sisters and two brothers in a household full of nicknames. The oldest child, “Posey,” took one look at her new sister and called her “Idgy,” which later became “Pidge.”  The name stuck through all the way through the University of Iowa, where Pidge earned a degree in art. She had “two favorite brothers” -  William and John, known as “Buck” and “Stub”- and a younger sister, Sarah.

 After stints as a schoolteacher and a secretary, Pidge joined the advertising staff of Younker’s department store as a commercial artist. Her drawings of gloves, perfumes and children’s clothes appeared weekly in The Sioux City Journal in the 1950s and ‘60s. On Aug. 29, 1957, she married her boss, Robert Weare Howe.

 Pidge and Bob worked side by side for the next 30 years, at Younker’s, and then as co-owners of Carpenter Interiors in Spirit Lake, IA, where they moved in 1970. There, Bob ran the home furnishings store, while Pidge became an interior decorator – a profession she had trained for since her dollhouse days, but never actually studied. Soon, her knack for draping fabric and arranging furniture was in demand. According to Pidge, everything had to be “pretty” - or get slipcovered or shut in a cabinet.

 Pidge and Bob moved in 2012 to Kansas City to be with Jennifer, their only child, and her husband, David Heinemann, and their beloved grandsons, Lee and Paul Heinemann. They are Pidge’s survivors along with her siblings Rosanna “Posey” Young, John “Stub” DeWitt and Sarah Jorstad. Brother William “Buck” DeWitt passed away in 2011.

The family plans a private celebration of Pidge’s life at a later date. Please, no flowers. Anyone wishing to honor Pidge’s memory may do so by contributing to the children’s charity where her daughter is employed. (Operation Breakthrough, P.O. Box 412482, Kansas City MO 64141, www.operationbreakthrough.org)

Special thanks to Carolyn Collier for the loving care that made it possible for Pidge to stay in her own home, where Pidge hid the TV in a bookshelf and even decorated the hallway outside her apartment  - displaying a new one of her original paintings on the first of each month.