Karen McCorkle Consolini

December 26, 1931 - January 13, 2024

Karen passed away in Lewes, Delaware, where she had resided since 2010. Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma to Maxine and John McCorkle, Karen grew up primarily in California, graduating from South Pasadena High in 1950. She attended Colorado College.

When Karen was a teenager, she had an experience that profoundly influenced the person she became:  in 1949 she traveled to Europe with a youth group mission, an 'Odyssey' organized by activist pastor Dr Henry Gray of the Oneonta Congregational Church, South Pasadena. The experience of meeting her peers in the still war-ravaged UK, hearing their stories and helping to rebuild the literal rubble of their lives, changed hers forever.

Karen was a smart, brave, independent and liberated young woman of the 1950s. After leaving Colorado College, she moved alone to New York City into a tiny walk-up apartment in the heart of bohemian Greenwich Village. Karen embarked on a career in the fashion industry, which occupied her for the next 25 years. She started in retail, but it was in the fashion textile industry where she made her mark. At Chemstrand, her job was planning programs and advertising campaigns with both fasihon-textile manufacturers and retailers across the U.S. One of her favorite projects was decorating the Monsanto House of the Future at Disneyland's Tomorrowland in the late 1950s.

In 1963, Karen and her former husband Bob Consolini, were co-founders with four other couples of a Montessori school on Manhattan's Upper West Side, St Michael's Montessori, which both of their children attended. Originally occupying the basement of a church, it continues to this day as a much larger, expanded institution in its own building, Metropolitan Montessori. This was one of Karen's proudest life achievements.

In the late 1960s Karen went to work for E.I. duPont as Fashion Director for Women's Wear Retail. Two years later she pioneered a program of fashion trend analysis, resulting from the requests of retailers eager for textile and fashion trend information in advance of their seasonal buying trips. Through interviews with textile mills, clothing manufacturers and leading fashion journalists, this research culminated in a bi-annual report which Karen delivered twice a year, in person, to retailers in 22 U.S. cities, seven European countries, and Mexico. A passionate and talented lifelong cook, Karen moved away from the fashion industry in the early 1980s and started cooking professionally. For many years she was the personal chef to Pare Lorentz, a documentary filmmaker in America.

Karen is survived by her daughter, Marella (James) Rodewald of Hudson Valley, New York; and her son Marcus (Meg) of Osaka, Japan; and one granddaughter.

Parsell Funeral Homes, January 17, 2024