Helene C. Chaseage 97, died at Kendal at Hanover, NH on Wednesday, May 20th. She was born Helene Giannina Cosenza on April 13, 1918 in New York City to Dr. and Mrs. Mario Cosenza. Her father, a noted classics and renaissance scholar, was also Dean of the Faculty at Brooklyn College, the first American of Italian descent to hold such a position in the United States. Dr. Cosenza came to the United States from Naples as a child in 1888. Her mother, born Verena Bostroem, whose own father sojourned in the United States at the time of the Civil War to soldier for the Union cause, immigrated from Estonia (at that time part of Russia) in 1892.

Mrs. Chase attended high school in Rockville Centre New York, graduated from Middlebury College in 1938, and later earned a Master Degree in Library Science from Southern Connecticut State College. She was an assistant librarian at the high school in New Canaan, CT, and later at the School of the Holy Child in Potomac, MD. In the early 1960's she established the library at the newly opened branch of University of Connecticut in Stamford. She was a pioneer in the use of media as a learning resource.

In 1939, she married Loring DuBois "Chuck" Chase, whom she had met at Middlebury and with whom she was to have two sons. With Mr. Chase, who became an ordained minister in the Congregational Church, she exercised her own strong sense of vocation in Ledyard, Durham, and New Canaan, CT, and later in Westmoreland Hills, MD. After retirement, she and Rev. Chase moved to Keene, NH and then to Kendal. Her husband of 64 years predeceased her in 2004.

Mrs. Chase is survived by her sister Louise Aldrich, her sons Christopher and David and their wives Karen and Jayne, three grandsons (Geoffrey, Andrew, and Augustus), two granddaughters (Susan Hahs and Kelly Karli), and four great-grandchildren (Theodore, Bruin, Fiona and Genevieve). She is predeceased by her sister, Rita Moore.

Mrs. Chase was an avid reader and in mid-life took up tennis and golf. She loved entertaining friends at the family summer cottage in Northfield MA. She will be remembered for her bright smile, her financial acumen, her strong sense of family, and for encouraging and supporting the vast array of personal and professional projects undertaken by her sons, daughter-in-laws, and grandchildren.

A Memorial Service will be held at Kendal at Hanover sometime in June. Interment will be private.

Arrangements are under the direction of the Rand-Wilson Funeral Home of Hanover, NH.