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FOCUS ON PHILANTHROPY
Doug and Elaine Grundmeyer
New Orleans rightly boasts of its cultural riches. But it’s the city’s remarkable sense of intimacy—its ability to foster connections between people and place, past and present—that truly sets it apart.
For Doug and Elaine Grundmeyer, onetime high school sweethearts at Ben Franklin, the connections run deep. Both New Orleans natives—she grew up in Gentilly, while he was raised in Algiers—they treasure the city’s vibrancy and resiliency. Happily settled now in the Garden District, they can map their family histories across the regional landscape. Elaine’s father, Joseph Harold Toscano, a construction superintendent, helped to build the Superdome—while Doug’s dad, Raymond, an entrepreneur, founded a chain of auto-supply stores on the West Bank. Doug’s maternal grandparents and earlier Lanaux ancestors ran a citrus plantation in Plaquemines Parish.
A passion for culture pervades the Grundmeyer home. Doug, a board member of Southern Rep theater, brings a master’s degree in literature and a flair for writing to his work as an appellate lawyer with Chaffe McCall LLP. Elaine, in turn, credits her love of the theatrical to her mother, Lillian Bennett. Indeed, a fascination with “movie stars and Hollywood” enticed her to California for college at UCLA and Berkeley. She and Doug settled on the West Coast early in their marriage, but they were soon drawn home by a desire to raise their daughter, Sarah, near her grandparents and extended family. Sarah later became a classical ballerina and international dancer.
The lure of family was one of the first things that brought Elaine to The Historic New Orleans Collection. She perused sacramental record indices and other genealogical resources to trace her family’s roots back to Bordeaux, Nantes, and other locations in Europe. And she turned to the archives, again, in search of a more contemporary connection.
Like so many readers, Elaine had been charmed by John Kennedy Toole’s classic, A Confederacy of Dunces—and struck by the familiarity of the novel’s cast of eccentrics. But in Elaine’s case, the familiarity was of a different degree. “I would read the stories, and 1 would say, these are like my family stories,” she recalls. And then she learned that Thelma Toole, the author’s mother, was a Ducoing by birth. “That’s one of our family names,” Elaine explains, “and I thought, well let me see if I can track it back.” Her curiosity brought her to the Williams Research Center, where “it didn’t take that long at all to find the person who connected everybody together.” Thelma was from “the same area where my mother had grown up, in Faubourg Marigny, near Elysian Fields. My mother grew up on Dauphine Street—and I grew up hearing about Dauphine Street, which always sounded so exotic and wonderful!”
After Katrina, the Grundmeyers found renewal at The Collection. “You were open and sharing your resources,” Doug notes, recalling that THNOC was the first museum in the city to reopen after the storm. “The crews were still in the streets, first responders were still here, and yet we could go to The Historic New Orleans Collection.” Elaine concurs: “I had been doing my research right before Katrina, and when I found myself going back, getting back to my research, I wanted to cry. It just felt like such a continuation, a sign that the city would survive, and that we all would.” Doug and Elaine are proud to be members of The Collection’s Laussat Society. They appreciate the fellowship that comes with membership—and, they both chime in, “the parties!”
Enthusiastic patrons of the arts, the Grundmeyers encourage others to get involved, too. “I think that this generation after Katrina is really going to be remembered,” Elaine muses. “This is really the time for everybody to step up.” And, as Doug explains, “you see the results” of membership in The Collection. “You’re carrying on the tradition. It’s a living, vibrant organization. You’re not just preserving artifacts, you are part of the future.”
The Historic New Orleans Collection Quarterly 13