Adele Louise Mills, 87
Adele Louise Mills died of complications from liver cancer on Nov. 27 at Island Health and Rehabilitation. She was 87.
Louise was born in Seattle, August 30, 1922 to Col. Marmion Mills and Adele Hoppock Mills. She spent her early childhood in Birmingham, a suburb of Detroit. She graduated from high school in Evanston, Ill., and moved to the west coast with her parents in the 1940s, to live in Seattle. She graduated from the University of Washington, and later from a business college in Seattle and began work as a secretary.
One of her first jobs was organizing USO shows at Fort Lewis, where her father was the officer in charge of transportation, during WWII. After the war she lived and worked in San Francisco, then returned to Seattle, working for Sunset Magazine and for a travel business. She became a travel agent, and subsequently traveled all around the world, scouting the best hotels and adventures for her clients. Some of her favorite places to visit were Turkey, Madeira, Spain and Portugal.
As a teenager, she learned the bagpipes, and performed with a pipe band in Seattle and Washington, D.C. She once soloed for half-time entertainment at Husky Stadium.
Her parents moved to Bainbridge Island in the mid-fifties. While Louise worked in Seattle, she was a frequent visitor on the weekends and became good friend with the neighbors, Carl and Corinne Berg. Louise was fond of giving regular parties at her parents’ home in the area know as “the Green Spot” on Murdon Cove. Many of the guests were talented singers who would perform with Corinne Berg, a music teacher and accomplished pianist.
In 1956, Louise and Corinne organized a public performance of the musical “Down in the Valley” with their local singing friends, to be held at the Bainbridge Grange. With the proceeds from the show, they put together the Island’s first community theatre company— Bainbridge Light Opera Association (BLOA). In 1978, the company changed to its current name, Bainbridge Performing Arts (BPA).
Louise was always interested in fashion and from the gift of a trunkful of fine dresses, she began to assemble, through gifts and flea market purchases, an impressive collection of haute couture finery, many of them one-of-a-kind designs by the best know designers in the clothing industry, and spanning most of the 20th century. Louise produced fashion shows, raising money for various musical and artistic organizations, including BPA, Bainbridge Music and Arts, and even the Seattle Art Museum, displaying the gowns on her many friends who acted as models on the runway.
During the 1980s, Louise and Corinne, teamed with Michele McCrackin, to produce a number of successful fund-raising musical revues, featuring local talent costumed in some of the fashionable gowns from Louise’s collection. In 1991, a capital campaign for BPA’s new theater building was kicked off by an anonymous donation from a Bainbridge resident, in honor of Louise and Corinne, and there is a plaque in the garden of the theater, commemorating them.
In 1994 Louise produced her favorite play, “The Play’s the Thing”, and with the cast and crew of the successful venture, she donated the proceeds of the show as seed money to start a smaller theatre company called Island Theatre that would focus on more adventuresome plays for adult actors and audiences.
Louise was a long-time member of the Bainbridge Church of First Christ Scientist on Madison Avenue and Bainbridge Music and Arts.
She is survived by her nephew, Mark Turnham and wife Rita, of Camas; god-daughter, Adele Berg-Layton and husband David and their two daughters, of Bainbridge Island.
A memorial event has not yet been arranged. As a memorial to Louise, her fashion collection is being catalogued and prepared for preservation as a community resource. Memorial contributions for this purpose may be sent to Adele Berg-Layton, 4558 Old Mill Road, Bainbridge Island, WA 98110. Cook Family Funeral Home will handle burial arrangements.
