NAME(S) ON TILE:                 FLORENCE S. CALLOMON

DONOR NAME(S):                   JANE CALLOMON ARKUS

JAMES V. CALLOMON

Our mother, Florence S. Callomon, was a leader for more than 60 years in community cultural and social-service organizations and an accomplished team player in the Western Pennsylvania Women’s Golf Association.

She was born in Washington, Pennsylvania, but was whisked off to New York almost immediately when her father joined the Gimbels chain headquarters as buyer/importer of china and glass.  She graduated from The Ethical Culrure School in Manhattan and received her “higher education” in Europe, traveling with her father on extended buying trips and after her father’s death, living with her mother in Paris for a year.  There she studied art at the Academic Julien, and upon her return to Manhattan put her talents to work as an advertising illustrator for Gimbels.  After a brief courtship she married Dr. Verner B. Callomon, a prominent Pittsburgh internist and pulmonary disease specialist, with whom she enjoyed a loving lifetime partnership.

Pursuing her cultural interests, she became a pioneering member of the Women’s Committee of The Carnegie Museum of Art, and an officer and lifetime advisory board member of the Pittsburgh Symphony Association.

She served as President of the Women’s Auxiliary of Allegheny General Hospital, a World War II nurse’s aid at Magee Women’s Hospital, an officer of the Ladies Hospital Aid Society of Montefiore Hospital, the American Jewish Committee (lifetime) and the Rodef Shalom Temple Sisterhood.

Known to her friends as “Flo” and described as a “dynamo,” she was still swinging a golf club at 85.