Edith Elbogen Durand, 88; mentored women in finance

Each morning after breakfast in their Lexington home, David Durand would make espresso and play one game of solitaire with his wife, Edith Elbogen Durand. Having shared caffeine and cards, the two would then move to their office to share life in the world of economics.

"Each one of them had a large desk and a manual typewriter," said their daughter, Marie of Pittsburgh. "They'd sit there companionably and he'd work on his stuff and she'd work on her stuff, and they'd read each other's manuscripts. It was a very nice professional marriage. Periodically, somebody would say, 'What do you think about the Fed changing interest rates?' "

Mrs. Durand, who was a teacher and mentor to women in finance and the business community, died at home on April 27. She was 88 and had helped found The Women's Lunch Group in Boston three decades ago.

"She was an inspiration to those of us who were younger, who had already made our ways in our careers," said Gladys Chang Hardy Brazil, a former undersecretary of educational affairs for Massachusetts who was part of the lunch group. "It was wonderful to have her participate and provide her insights."

"She was courageous. She had an inexhaustible curiosity about everything," her daughter said. "And she had a sense of fun."

Edith Elbogen was born in Prague into a family of affluent industrialists. A cook made sandwiches for the children before they departed for school and a chauffeur fetched them in the afternoon.

Mrs. Durand graduated from Lycee Francais de Prague and was studying at Charles University in the city when she began to warn relatives about the dangers posed by Hitler's rising prominence.

"She had read 'Mein Kampf' as a teenager and kept telling her family, 'We really should leave,' " her daughter said.

Instead, the family sent her to study philosophy, politics, and economics at Oxford University in England. When the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia, her mother bribed a German officer to obtain exit visas for family members and joined her in England. As Germany began bombing England, Mrs. Durand, her mother, and a sister took a ship to Mexico, escaping when other ships in the convoy were torpedoed.

Briefly detained when the ship stopped in Cuba, they arrived in September 1940 in Veracruz, Mexico, where Mrs. Durand and her sister Emmy set up a multilingual secretarial service to support the family. Six months later, Mrs. Durand immigrated to the United States and attended Wellesley College, graduating in 1942 with a master's in economics.

She married David Yalden-Thomson in Beaumaris, Ontario, the following year and learned a different lesson in economics while driving a milk delivery truck, work that paid little and was arduous. Moving from Canada to New York City, she worked at the National Bureau of Economic Research and began doctoral studies in political science at Columbia University. Still, finances were far removed from the privilege of her youth.

"She said that when she was living in New York she would walk an extra block if she could get string beans for a penny less a pound," her daughter said.

Mrs. Durand's marriage to Yalden-Thomson ended, and in 1946 she joined the faculty at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y., where she was chairwoman of the social science department. She taught there until 1953 and began a romance with David Durand, who become a groundbreaking economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

"She was the most patient, thoughtful, and clear explainer of complicated things to someone who is not inclined mathematically," said Brazil, who took her statistics course. "And she was a person who, I think, helped her students look beyond their immediate interests, and their world. I regarded her as somebody who opened the door to me to the social sciences."

Having received a Rockefeller Foundation grant, Mrs. Durand moved to Europe, where she researched the sugar industry. Durand "flew to Paris and asked her to marry him," their daughter said. "She said yes and he returned to the United States to teach while she did her research."

A year later, in 1954, they married in Bad Gastein, Austria, and moved to Boston. Over the next few years Mrs. Durand taught as an adjunct professor at Wellesley College and Wheaton College while raising their daughter. The family moved to Lexington in 1963.

She helped her husband prepare lectures in German on finance during a sabbatical year in Germany, and occasionally they coauthored a paper. In 1973, she returned to teaching full time and served as chairwoman of the economics department at Newton College of the Sacred Heart until the school closed two years later.

Mrs. Durand joined The Boston Company in 1975 as a vice president for international economics, investment research, and technology, and four years later became a vice president for international treasury at First National Bank of Boston, where she worked until 1985.

For several years after that she was an economic consultant. Her husband died in 1996.

"She was an excellent mentor, and that was very important to her," said her daughter, who is an associate professor in the departments of biological sciences and computer science at Carnegie Mellon University. "She taught me how to balance a checkbook. She taught me how to write a resume. She taught me how to write a research paper."

"In subsequent years when we knew each other when we were both professionally involved in life in the Boston area, she was always someone who one could pick up the phone call for advice," Brazil said. "She was just a wonderful human being, a lovely lady, and an inspirational woman for those of us who had the fortune to have had her as a teacher."

A memorial service will be held at 2 p.m. Saturday in the MIT Chapel.