Isolde Chapin, Association Executive, 84, Washington Post

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/13/AR2010071306443.html

Isolde Chapin Association executive

Isolde Chapin, the retired executive director of Washington Independent
Writers, a professional society for freelancers, died of respiratory failure
July 5 [2010] at her home in Washington on her 84th birthday.

Starting in 1980, Ms. Chapin spent more than 20 years as executive director
of Washington Independent Writers, now known as American Independent
Writers. Until recently, she was an information desk volunteer for the
Library of Congress.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Ms. Chapin held editorial jobs at Dance
and Vogue magazines, among other places. She also did advertising work for
the New Yorker magazine and spent two years as the assistant to the New York
editor for publisher Houghton Mifflin.

Under her married name, Isolde Weinberg, she wrote a freelance column for
The Washington Post in the mid-1960s about volunteer opportunities in the
area. In the 1970s, she was a part-time writer for the National Center for
Voluntary Action.

Isolde Chapin was born in New York and raised in Springfield, Mass. Her
mother, who was involved semiprofessionally in opera, named her for a Wagner
opera.

Ms. Chapin was a 1946 summa cum laude graduate of Vassar College and was
elected to the Phi Beta Kappa honor society. She later received a master's
degree in women's studies from George Washington University. She earned a
teaching certificate from a Montessori teaching center and helped to
establish Montessori schools in Washington and Arlington County.

Her husband, Jules Weinberg, whom she married in 1952, died in 1961.

Survivors include two children, Laura Silberman of Hilton Head, S.C., and
Jonathan Chapin of Los Angeles; and two grandchildren.

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Adam Bernstein