(above) Irma Sammon Mirante, a bibliophile, leader of volunteer organizations, and 1981 Cranford Citizen of the Year, passed on February 2, 2020.
Irma Mirante, Cranford Citizen of the Year 1981
Irma Sammon Mirante, a bibliophile, leader of volunteer organizations, and 1981 Cranford Citizen of the Year, passed on February 2, 2020.
Irma Mirante was born April 8, 1921 in Stamford, Connecticut. She had three sisters, Molly, Joan and Marsha and one brother, Roger, all predeceased.
She was the first female editor of the newspaper at Snyder High School in Jersey City, NJ (a position she chose over cheerleader) as well as editor of “The Bandstand,” a Tommy Dorsey big band newsletter. She graduated from Pace University, where she studied advertising and marketing and won the Mademoiselle Magazine Career Contest, resulting in a job at Franklin Simon department store in New York. She was an advertising copywriter and her first reporting job was obituary writer for a Jersey City newspaper.
She married “the boy next door”: Princeton honors grad Albert Mirante (d. 1978.) The couple lived in Dayton Ohio when he worked with the Army Air Corps at Wright Field during WWII, then raised their family in Elizabeth and Cranford, New Jersey.
Ms. Mirante served as President of the New Jersey Parliamentarian Association, and was consulted by numerous organizations on bylaw revisions. She was a prominent leader of Women’s Clubs in New Jersey as president and board member. She was even president of a society of past Women’s Club presidents.
She introduced the reading sorority Epsilon Sigma Omicron to New Jersey and set its record for the most book reviews. During the 1980s-90s she wrote a book review column for the Cranford Chronicle. She was Historian of the NJ State Federation of Women’s Clubs and an honored member of NJ Press Women’s Club.
Ms. Mirante founded Cranford’s Friends of the Library in 1978 and was President of the Library Board. She was named Cranford Citizen of the Year in 1981 (described as “a leader in every organization or endeavor in which she has participated”) and honored as a New Jersey Woman of Achievement by Douglass College in 1985.
