Vitaline McGovern O’Connell O’Toole, adored and adoring mother of Thomas Bartley, Owen Sinclair (d. 2017), Ellen O’Toole Hubbard and Peter Justin, grandmother of Emily McGovern Hubbard (23), Annie Brewster Hubbard (21), John “Jack” Tan O’Toole (12), Violet Clara O’Toole (9) and Evan McCartney O’Toole (11) passed away peacefully on April 19, 2019 surrounded by her family. She was 83.
Vitaline – “Vitty” or “Dash” – was born February 2, 1936 in Hartford, Conn. She attended Fernwood School, The Junior School (which later became Renbrook School) and Oxford School, whose headmistress wrote on Vitty’s 10th grade spring report, “Vitaline is interested, full of questions, and always ready to volunteer an opinion,” characteristics she refined throughout her life and instilled in her children. Vitty went on to earn a Bachelor of Arts in Art History from Wellesley College, where, in addition to her studies, she wrote and performed in countless musical shows and developed lifelong friendships, recognizing in 2017 class notes how those four years “opened the eyes and heart of this only child to a view of what we are and can be.”
She began her career in the editorial department of Doubleday, the publisher in New York, where she met Thomas Patrick O’Toole, whom she married in 1958. Four children followed as the family moved south to Washington, D.C., where Vitty would serve as a trustee of the Children’s Hospital Medical Center. In addition, in the 1980s, Vitty reignited her fire for performance, co-starring in Hexagon, the nation’s capital’s original political, satirical, musical comedy revue.
She returned to New York in the 1990s and then to Connecticut, where she lived by the shore in Madison for the rest of her life. In Madison, she was an active member of the community, helping start the thriving Madison Cultural Arts organization that now entertains thousands every Fourth of July on Madison’s historic town green. She supported many local organizations in fields from the arts to children’s well-being to those working to protect Connecticut’s fragile coastal environment. Most recently, Vitty was planning her next appearance in the Madison Beach Club’s summer show The Follies, in which she first appeared at age 14 in 1950.
Vitty was predeceased by her parents, Vitaline McGovern O’Connell and Maurice Francis O’Connell of West Hartford, Conn. “My mother was born in Ireland,” Vitty wrote her Wellesley classmates in those 2017 class notes. “I’m the child of an immigrant. How about you?” Vitty: full of questions across nine decades. With this in mind, in lieu of flowers, kindnesses could be made to the International Rescue Committee or Madison Cultural Arts. Memorial details to follow.
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