obituaries

Florence Schoff, who was the Minnesota Symphony Orchestra's oldest subscriber, began attending concerts in Minneapolis when she was a teenager.

Schoff, who was a leader in the Jewish community, died at her Minneapolis home on Feb. 8. She was 101.

Until she was 100, Schoff could be found in her seat in the front row of Tier One at Orchestra Hall, listening intently as she had done nearly every week since the hall opened in 1974.

She first heard the old Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra in the 1920s.

"The playing was a little rough back then," she said in a 2002 Star Tribune article. But she loved all the music directors, she said -- some more than others.

"I like a more dramatic conductor," she said.

When she turned 100, she was serenaded by the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra at the Ordway Center during one of its Friday morning concerts.

Schoff attended the SPCO's inaugural concert on Nov. 18, 1959, at the St. Paul Central High School Auditorium.

"To her, every concert was unbelievable," said her daughter, Diana Lewis, of White Bear Lake. Schoff was a regular patron of all the arts, she said.

Schoff was born in New York City in 1906 and raised in Edmonton, Alberta, where as a teenager she played the piano for silent movies.

The oldest of four children, she moved with her family to Minneapolis when she was 16. She gave piano lessons, earning $5 a lesson to help pay for school. In the 1920s, she earned a bachelor's degree in music, studying piano at the University of Minnesota.

Her first husband, Paul Kunian, owned beauty salons and manufactured hair dryers. Kunian, with whom she had two children, died in 1964.

For two decades, she attended the symphony with her second husband, Francis Schoff, a retired college professor and a former music critic who always brought his scores with him to read along with the music. He died in 1994.

As she once told her friend, Michael Anthony, former music critic for the Star Tribune, "Music is my life."

"Florence was a smart, generous woman," Anthony said. "She was a discerning listener."

Anthony recalled fondly that she would hand out wrapped toffees to concert-goers seated around her.

During the 1940s, Schoff was president of the Minneapolis chapter of Hadassah, a Jewish women's service group.

Eddie Cantor, once a big star on radio and in movies, was a guest at her Minneapolis home in 1943, greeting fans in an effort to raise funds to take Jewish children from Russia to Israel.

Five years later, on the day Israel became a state, Schoff and her first husband staged an open house for the entire city.

In addition to her daughter, she is survived by her son, Myron Kunin of Minneapolis; eight grandchildren, and 20 great-grandchildren.

A memorial service is being planned.