In Memoriam

Eleanor McGowan Byrne, widow of Horace F. Byrne, died Monday, February 6, 2006, in Palmetto Health Richland. She was born in Steubenville, Ohio, on January 16, 1921, to the late Charles Batchelor McGowan, a banker, and Bertha Droege McGowan, a Columbia native. Eleanor spent her childhood in Ohio, Long Island, N.Y., and Rhode Island. She spent three formative years in France, from 1931-1934, where she became a native French speaker and developed a life-long love for the country and its culture. Eleanor attended high school at The Mary C. Wheeler School in Providence, Rhode Island, then Mt. Holyoke College. In 1941, she left college to work for the Free French in Washington. She spent two years in that post for which the French government awarded her the title Chevalier de l'Ordre de l'Etoile d'Anjouan.
Eleanor then served as a translator at the United Nations in Lake Success, New York. While there, she met Horace Byrne, whom she married on November 4, 1948. After her husband joined the State Department in the early 1950's, they spent the next 16 years in postings in Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Sudan and South Africa. After living for a period in Washington and Boston, in 1976 the couple moved to Columbia. She returned to college at USC, earning two advanced degrees in fine arts. For the next 25 years, she devoted herself to painting and teaching, displaying her work regularly at galleries and museums in S.C. and Washington, and winning numerous awards. She was an active member of Trinity Cathedral, the Explorers Club, a volunteer at several Columbia shelters, and a long-standing member of the Alliance Francaise. For her contributions to French culture, the French government named her a Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Palmes Academiques in 1985. Eleanor is survived by three children, Deborah Babel of Boone, NC; Charles Byrne of Richmond, California; and Malcolm Byrne of Washington DC; two sisters, Sally McGowan Rice of Wolfboro, NH and Mary Lee Allison of Freedom, NH; and seven grandchildren.