Eileen Mintz made everyone feel as if they were her best friend. It’s the sentiment many people conveyed at her funeral Monday. Mintz died of cancer of the gall bladder on Feb. 1, 2009. She was 66.
“Sometimes you meet somebody and there’s this connection that you make pretty quickly,” said Rita Lowy, a friend of Eileen’s for 32 years, who with her husband Robert, spoke at Eileen’s funeral. “We made that connection.”
The two, who had met at their daughters’ gymnastics class at the Jewish Community Center, attended each other’s lifecycle events — and in Eileen’s case, helped in planning those events — and spoke on the phone every day, Lowy said.
“I can’t imagine a lifecycle event without her, because she was always there and always suggesting this or that,” Lowy said. “When my daughter got married, she arranged to have the cake made for us, exactly to my daughter’s specifications…. If somebody was having a baby, she would make the shower.”
It was that sense of organization and her love of making people happy that pushed her to start a public relations business centered around her greatest passion: Food. Her first gig came in the early ’90s at the Sorrento Hotel, where she was hired on the spot.
“When she got the job at the Sorrento, we were very proud of her,” Lowy said. “We realized how good she was at her job very quickly. The chef just fawned all over her.”
Mintz’s client list included the well-known Salty’s restaurant and her work expanded into a column she wrote for the Mercer Island Reporter. Mary Grady, editor of the Reporter, said that even as Eileen became more ill, she still made her deadlines.
“We thought we should say, “˜Hey, Eileen, it’s okay…you need to take care of yourself, whenever you have time it’s fine. We’ll work around you,'” Grady said. “We quickly learned she needed her schedule, she needed us to rely on her, and of course she’d get it done, of course it would be perfect and wonderful.”
Grady could always sense Eileen’s enthusiasm and personality in her writing, and how the flavors of what she was tasting came through to the readers.
The column “was just such a great addition to our paper,” Grady said. Eileen’s last column appeared in December.
But her love of food — and her ability to prepare it — began long before it became a profession.
“I remember being in first grade and having the teacher turn on the TV,” her son, Dan Mintz, said. There was his mother doing a cooking demonstration on KCTS. She also hosted TV segments called “Cheap Eats” in which she would find good restaurant values around town.
And, added Dan, when his mother entered cooking contests — which she did often — she would usually win.
“She won several awards,” he said.
She also won a microwave oven from an appearance on “Hollywood Squares,” an introduction to Frankie Avalon in an Annette Funicello look-a-like contest, and a husband who adored her up to the end.
Eileen DuBonne grew up in Seattle’s Laurelhurst neighborhood, was confirmed at Temple De Hirsch, and graduated from Roosevelt High School. She spent a year at the University of Washington before she met her husband, Dave Mintz. They married when she was 19 and had the first of their three children, Dan, when she was 20.
Family always came first for Eileen, whether it was being there when the kids arrived home from school or, later on, spending time one-on-one with her five grandchildren.
“She was just a great mom to all of us, always very involved with family,” said Dan. “You didn’t always know that because you’d see her so much in the community.”
As her kids grew older and got married, she built special relationships with her daughters-in-law as well.
“Eileen never had an unkind word for anyone. She looked for the good in everything,” wrote Elaine and Patti Mintz in a letter read at Eileen’s funeral. “She didn’t like controversy and would do anything to avoid it. She was the glue in our extended family as well as a problem solver. Anyone who ever had the pleasure of meeting Eileen always walked away from her feeling good, because she just had that “˜magic’ in her to make everyone she came across feel special.”
Her community involvement included being a founding member of Congregation Beth Shalom and several stints on the board of Herzl-Ner Tamid Conservative Congregation, as well as being active in ORT and Hadassah.
“As a Jew, Eileen inspired us to believe in the beauty of the Jewish people,” Rabbi Jay Rosenbaum of Herzl-Ner Tamid told the standing-room-only crowd at Eileen’s funeral. “As a human being, she inspired us to believe in the beauty of life and to be as passionate and as enthusiastic as she was. And, because Eileen believed anything was possible, she was able to convince us to stretch ourselves, too.”
Rabbi Rosenbaum said that he too had felt as if he were one of her best friends.
“When Eileen walked into a room, everything came alive,” he said. “She was so full of enthusiasm for life, she was so gloriously optimistic about everything. She was so passionate about everything. You could not help but catch her spirit.”
Eileen gave her time to many different local charities outside of the Jewish community as well, and would often persuade the restaurant contacts she’d made to pitch in with donations of food and money.
“For Eileen the greatest achievement she could imagine was to help someone else succeed,” Rosenbaum said. “It’s no wonder Eileen did so well in public relations. As talented and gifted as Eileen was herself, she took even greater pleasure in mentoring others.”
Eileen is survived by her husband Dave; sister Lucille; brother Dick; brother-in-law Joe; children Dan (Elaine), Robert (Patti) and Gina (Paul) Benezra; five grandchildren; and many friends.
— Joel Magalnick