Mathilde Salomon

Madison - Mathilde ""Tilly"" Salomon (nee Loewen), 88, died on October 31, 2010 at Oakwood Village West in Madison. Her funeral will take place on Monday November 1 at 10 AM, at Cress Funeral Home, 3610 Speedway Road. Born May 3, 1922 in Frankfurt, Germany, she was the daughter of a British mother and a German father. Her parents were assimilated, secular Jews. Losing jobs and schooling under Nazi persecution, the family fled to New York in 1937. Bilingual, and fun-loving in an un-German way, Tilly took happily to her new country. In 1944 she married her fellow refugee George Salomon. She did retain some lifetime old-country attachments: the British royal family, Mozart operas, and poems of Heinrich Heine. Pressed to support the family, she attended Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where she learned the arts of dressmaking and millinery. What started as a job eventually became an art. When Tilly had earned enough to send her sons to college, she gradually shifted to quilting, dressmaking, macrame, and basketry. As a crafts teacher, she used to say ""Anything worth doing is worth overdoing."" Stylish, and outspoken, she exerted her increasingly assertive opinions with a witty twist. She was active in the NAACP from the 1950's on, and later in pioneering feminist groups that rested less on dogma than on deep female friendships. None of this impeded a long and close marriage, ending with George's death in 1981. A lover of tropical sun, Tilly reveled in Mexican, Italian, and West African excursions, of which many tiny keepsakes brightened her last dwelling in Madison. She is survived by her brother, Erwin Loewen of Rochester, NY, her sons Frank Salomon of Madison and Richard Salomon of Seattle; and three grandchildren, Jesse, Malka, and Abraham Salomon.