Norwich — During the course of decades as a Norwich political and business development icon, Stanley Israelite received a local Citizen of the Year Award, a Citizen of the Decade Award, a Distinguished Citizen Award, a Service beyond Self Award and a Liberty Bell Award, and even was named one of 12 “Indispensable Americans” by U.S. News and World Report in 1995.

But to Israelite, getting a letter from a thankful constituent during his 20 years as Connecticut office director for Democratic U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd was the best prize of them all. Those letters would get posted on the office refrigerator.

“That’s our glory,” Israelite told a Day reporter in November 1995 after being named the U.S. News and World Report designation as one of a dozen “indispensable” ordinary citizens. “If you’re on the refrigerator, then you’ve done a good job.”

Israelite, 89, the man most credited for creating the Norwich business park that now bears his name and the agency that oversees it, died Monday night at his home here after a lengthy battle with heart disease. His illness left him progressively weakened in body — but never of mind, family members and close friends said. Almost to the end, Israelite greeted his many visitors with questions about their families, their jobs, their well-being, and of course, the city of Norwich.

“Every week I would go see him,” said Jack Djonbli, owner of Jack’s Brick Oven Pizzeria on West Main Street in Norwich and a close friend. “He would say, ‘How’s Norwich?’”

“He’s a wonderful, incredible, good, kind person,” his wife, Linda Hershman, said. “He never was interested in anything for himself, just what he could do for someone else.”

Hershman and Israelite were married in February 2002. The two had known each other for years through political circles, Israelite with Dodd and Norwich politics and Hershman working in the planning and development office for late Gov. Ella Grasso.

Israelite’s first wife of 53 years, Pauline Israelite, who owned Norwichtown Mall Bookstore, died in 1999. The couple’s four children, Michael Israelite, Abby Dolliver, Mindy Wilkie and Jon Israelite, remain in the region. All are successful, their father boasted in a retirement video commissioned by Norwich Public Utilities in 2009, “because I tell them ‘you gotta care about people.’”

After her mother died, Dolliver, Norwich’s public school superintendent, started a new daily tradition of meeting her father for morning coffee at Dixie Donuts on West Town Street as he headed to Dodd’s office and she to work in various school positions.

Israelite always worried that local critics would think Dolliver got her position as superintendent in 2010 because she is his daughter. He would ask her, “Are they giving you a hard time?” Dolliver said “no”—well, except maybe at budget time.

Israelite, a 1943 Norwich Free Academy graduate, grew up on Joseph Perkins Road, a close-knit neighborhood near the high school. He became a prominent downtown presence in Norwich during the 1950s, working with his father, who succeeded his grandfather, William Israelite, at the family jewelry store, Modern Jewelers. Although he made beautiful jewelry in high school at NFA, he hated the business, Dolliver and others said.

In the NPU retirement video, family members told a tale that defined Israelite’s approach. A part-time employee at the jewelry store wanted to open a restaurant but had no money. Israelite walked across Main Street to talk to the owner of a lunch counter and other businesses. The man wanted to sell the lunch shop, but Israelite didn’t ask about that.

Instead, he told the man he was in a bind and needed to borrow about $500. He would pay it back as soon as possible. The man obliged. Israelite gave the money to his employee, and she bought the sandwich shop. Soon enough, she was successful and paid Israelite back, and he paid back the original owner, who didn’t learn the full story until years later.

Another incident convinced Israelite to get out of the jewelry business. Someone had asked him to volunteer at Norwich Hospital, helping the patients there who needed to get out in the community or just needed a friend.

One December day, a woman came to the store very confused and disoriented. She had two young daughters in the car. Israelite talked to her calmly and accompanied her to visit his friend, a psychiatrist who had an office upstairs. The woman needed to go to the hospital immediately, and Israelite promised he would take care of the children and also take care of the entire family’s Christmas needs.

Israelite, who was Jewish, made calls and visits. He soon arranged for someone to stay with the family. He knew the ailing woman hung out at a facility nearby, so he called staff there and sternly said he needed volunteers to get her a Christmas tree, presents for the kids, and people to clean her house for the holidays.

“Yes sir,” came the response. When the woman returned home after a week in the hospital, Christmas greeted her.

“I realized I didn’t want to be in the store,” Israelite said. Helping people buy a ring or a watch wasn’t the way he wanted to help people. So he closed the store and worked different jobs while volunteering and maintaining business contacts.

Israelite met Norwich attorney Milton Jacobson — forming an alliance that would last for decades — and shared his dream of creating an industrial park in Norwich. Israelite helped sell development bonds to local businesses and business leaders to provide seed money for the fledgling Norwich Community Development Corp. to create an industrial park out of a hillside of farmland, woods and wetlands at the western edge of the city. The effort raised $720,000.

Israelite and Jacobson worked the political and business deals, enlisting city leaders, state officials and U.S. Sen. Thomas J. Dodd. Israelite lobbied the state for a low-interest loan to buy the first 100 acres from owner Herman Sharpe. He then got the loan converted to a grant. He met at length with Norwich Public Utilities to convince them to run utility services to the remote land.

When Dolliver was a kid, she and her brother Michael enjoyed riding with their father to see the land.

“My brother was thrilled because we got to be close to the cows,” Dolliver said. “My father would say, ‘There’s going to be a building there.’”

That spot was to become the home of landmark clothing maker John Meyer of Norwich.

Israelite loved to tell the story of how he visited the property when NCDC first acquired it to find a man riding a horse-drawn haying machine. The man jumped off the wagon and calmly told the city businessman, “I thought it looked better hayed.”

In 2005, Israelite sprung for his own 80th birthday party at Djonbli’s La Stella restaurant, a half block from the NCDC office, Israelite’s favorite lunch spot. Djonbli had hoped to host Israelite’s 90th birthday party at his new restaurant.

NCDC, Dodd and city leaders surprised Israelite with a large foam board depicting the new sign that would mark the entrance to what would now be called the Stanley Israelite Norwich Business Park.

“To have them do something like this is nice, really nice,” he said that night.

The understated attitude and genuine, humble approach to his accomplishments defined the man some called “Mr. Norwich.”

Dodd’s official affiliation with Israelite lasted 25 years, starting as soon as he was elected as 2nd District congressman in 1974. Israelite became his special assistant while still working as executive director of the Chamber of Commerce and serving on the NCDC board.

In 1980, after Dodd’s election to the U.S. Senate, close friend and political adviser Al Goodin brought Dodd to what was supposed to be a lunch meeting with Israelite to discuss possible Senate staff selections.

No sooner did the group get settled at the former Chelsea Landing Pub on Water Street in Norwich than Goodin surprised both Dodd and Israelite by asking him to serve as Connecticut office director.

Dodd was taken aback. How could he ask this man he admired greatly, who had been Citizen of the Year and even Citizen of the Decade (named so by the Norwich chamber in 1969), headed the chamber and founded the Norwich Industrial Park to come work for him?

“And the greatest surprise was, Stanley said: ‘Give me 24 hours and I’ll let you know,’” Dodd recalled of that momentous afternoon.

“Hardly a day has gone by when I haven’t talked or been with him,” Dodd said recently. “He’s just a remarkable individual. There were 800-plus people over 36 years who came through my office. Stanley was the anchor, the constant, the one everyone knew and dealt with and loved. The great mantra of the office was Stanley saying, ‘Don’t forget the people.’”

NPU used that motto as a subtitle of “The Stanley Israelite Story,” the 2009 tribute upon his retirement after 26 years of serving on the utility board.

“I remember saying to (Dodd), ‘I want to do case work,’” Israelite said in the video. “I said, ‘Case work is where you really try to have to deal with people.’ And we did case work.”

Constituent services became the top priority for “the Dodd Squad” in the state office, whether it was fixing a Social Security glitch or obtaining hard-earned military medals for veterans or solving immigration problems. The letters on the refrigerator told of their success.

“There would be times in Washington when I was having a terrible day, when nothing was going right,” Dodd, who retired in 2010, said. “Then at 5 o’clock, I would get a call from Stanley and he would say, ‘Hey, we got that woman in Putnam her Medicare.’ That helped ease everything. To know you helped that person and that family that day.”

Dodd said one of the biggest state issues of his tenure was the bitter strike at Electric Boat in Groton in 1979-80. To Israelite, the lingering strike wasn’t about management and labor, wages and benefits. It was families facing financial hardship and businesses suffering because people were out of work. After one frustrating, unproductive meeting with the parties, Dodd said Israelite told him so in the car.

They turned the car around and went back and pressured both sides to work it out. The strike was settled a few days later, Dodd said.

Israelite officially retired from Dodd’s office in 2000, returning to his roots as an economic development specialist for NCDC at a time when the agency was without a full-time director. But he never lost touch with Dodd or the people who needed senatorial intervention.

From the Main Street NCDC office, Israelite would walk a block to La Stella’s Restaurant to have his favorite beef barley soup. He and Djonbli would talk and became friends. Djonbli immigrated to the United States with his parents at age 14 from Montenegro in southeastern Europe.

He and other family members ran restaurants in the Norwich area. In 2005, Djonbli was called to the Hartford U.S. immigration office. An official there told him they would not renew his visa, and he had to “go back home” in six months.

“I said, ‘Yes, I have to go back home. To Norwich,’” he said. “That’s my home. I don’t know any other home.”

Djonbli called Israelite, who was recovering from an illness. The elderly man knew immediately something was wrong. Israelite drove them to Hartford and brokered meetings to reopen Djonbli’s case. When Djonbli got the good news that he could stay, he didn’t call Israelite, who was spending the winter in Florida, he got on a plane and visited him.

“I told him, ‘Stanley, I can’t even thank you enough. I can’t even ever return the favor,’” Djonbli, who now is working on becoming a U.S. citizen, said. “Stanley said, ‘You help others. Being part of the community and helping others. That’s how you return favors.’”

NPU General Manager John Bilda nodded when hearing some of the stories about Israelite helping others. He said when he embarked on the retirement video, it was supposed to be about Israelite’s involvement in NPU’s growth over the years, infrastructure improvements, sewer system expansions that helped businesses grow, the hydropower plants and fish ladders that reduced electricity costs and improved the Shetucket River fish habitat.

But very quickly, the stories told by family members, friends, political associates and co-workers focused on Israelite’s character and hands-on intervention to help countless people. Bilda counts himself among them.

Three years before longtime NPU General Manager Richard DesRoches retired, Israelite, then the board chairman, told Bilda he should be in line to succeed DesRoches. But he wasn’t ready yet. He had some things to work on first.

“And it wasn’t about electricity or infrastructure or laying gas lines,” Bilda said. “It was all about dealing with people, that they were heard and were treated fairly.”

c.bessette@theday.com

Twitter: @Bessettetheday

Israelite Services

The public is invited to a family visitation hour Friday at 11 a.m at Beth Jacob Synagogue , 400 New London Turnpike, Norwich. Funeral services will follow at noon.