Lois Howes loves Freeport

Lois Howes of Freeport is someone who believes in the goodness of people and in an individual’s ability to make the world a better place. She is dedicated to her family, friends and community and is someone who lives by the axiom: actions speak louder than words. Howes is the president of the Freeport Chamber of Commerce, president of Friends of Freeport and president of the Long Island Arts Council in Freeport. She is someone who “never says no when asked to volunteer or help out,” Angela Taormina, a friend and member of the Long Island Arts Council said. Howes works diligently to make her hometown of Freeport a special place, and for all her efforts the Freeport Leader is proud to name her the 2015 Person of the Year.

    Howes is a Freeporter to the bone. Although born in Brooklyn, at the ripe old age of one week she and her parents moved to Freeport. It seems the family already had roots in town. Her paternal grandparents met in Freeport and her father, Bernard Kalban, was born in Freeport in 1916. Howes and her three younger brothers were the second generation of Kalbans to graduate from Freeport High School and Howes’s daughters, Sarah and Heidi, also attended Freeport High School, where her grandson, Jesse, is currently a student.

    She graduated from New York Phoenix School of Design (now part of Pratt Institute) with a degree in Fashion Illustration and Design, and worked as an illustrator and as a designer of paper dresses sold at Bergdorf Goodman. Years later, Howes learned that one of those dresses was on display at Paris’s Musee d’Orsay.

    Wanderlust was in Howes’s eyes and she took her sketchbook west to California. Her life took another turn when she moved to Alaska and got married in Ketchikan. This may have been where Howes first learned to be versatile, something which continues to this day in her many public roles here in Freeport.