WALLINGFORD - Elizabeth M. Mitchell, who was a face of Choate Rosemary Hall for two decades and a founding director of the Wallingford Symphony Orchestra, died Friday, January 30, at the Connecticut Hospice in Branford, Ct. She was 78. Mitchell, the wife of Alphonsus J. Mitchell, was a Wallingford native and the seventh child of Mary Yencsick Mushinsky and Stephen Mushinsky, a local tailor and merchant. She attended Holy Trinity School and graduated from Lyman Hall High School in 1954 as class salutatorian. After receiving her B.A. four years later from Brown University, she returned to Wallingford, where she worked as a reporter for the Meriden Record, covering local government and writing business and cultural features. She met her future husband shortly after he arrived in Wallingford to cover the town for the rival New Haven Register. They married in 1960 and began a family. Liz Mitchell was an active volunteer, serving as president of the parent-teacher associations at both Whittelsey Avenue elementary school and Robert H. Earley Middle School. She also served on the committees that organized Wallingford's celebrations of its tercentenary and, six years later, the nation's bicentennial. She had begun writing features again, for the Record-Journal, when she profiled local conductor Philip T. Ventre and became a passionate supporter of Ventre's quest to build a local symphony that would perform regularly at Choate's new Paul Mellon Arts Center. She served on the Wallingford Symphony Orchestra's board of directors from the board's inception, and during multiple terms as president was instrumental in establishing its children's concert series, which for three decades has given a taste of classical music to 1,400 grade-school children each year. She helped create such events as the symphony's Johann Strauss Ball and big-band dinners, and assisted in extending the symphony's reach through concerts staged in several neighboring towns. In recent years, she played a behind-the-scenes role in helping Choate students establish a program of free music instruction for local children through the Spanish Community of Wallingford, another nonprofit. She began working at Choate in 1979, spending most of the next decade in the alumni and parent relations department. After a brief hiatus, during which she did volunteer work for the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven, she accepted a role in Choate's admissions office that in 1991 put her at the school's front threshold. For the next 22 years, she greeted virtually every one of the 2,000 families who visit the school each year and coordinated the campus tours provided by some 200 student volunteers. A generation of talented, service-minded students from all over the world were drawn to the school by her deep faith in Choate's educators and boundless enthusiasm for young people's dreams. She supported the Choate Chamber Orchestra by joining the student musicians during recent summer performance tours in France, Italy, Greece, and Spain. Each summer for many years, she also returned for a week or more to Mt. Desert Island, Me., her favorite place in the world, hosting her children and grandchildren and renewing her love of the island's gardens, blueberries, and pounding ocean surf. Elizabeth Mitchell is survived by her husband of 54 years, Alphonsus J. Mitchell; her son Edward Mitchell and his wife, Lisa Govan, of New Haven; her son Stephen A. (SAM) Mitchell, and his wife, Suzanne, of Hamden; her son Christopher Mitchell and his wife, Ann McGuire, of Buck Hill Falls, Pa.; her daughter, Elizabeth (Biz) Mitchell, of Brooklyn, N.Y.,; 10 beloved grandchildren; many nieces and nephews; and her siblings Mary Theresa Grant, Annemarie Mushinsky, both of Wallingford, and Robert Mushinsky of Mystic. She was predeceased by her siblings Edward Mushinsky, Rosemary Mushinsky, and George Mushinsky. The family expresses appreciation for the care she received over the last several weeks at Connecticut Hospice and at Yale-New Haven Hospital's Smilow Cancer Center. The family will receive callers from 4 to 7 p.m. Tuesday at the B.C. Bailey Funeral Home in Wallingford. A funeral mass will be celebrated at 10 a.m. on Wednesday at Most Holy Trinity Church in Wallingford. The family asks that in lieu of flowers donations be made to the Wallingford Symphony Orchestra, which will be dedicating its next concert, on March 1, to Elizabeth Mitchell's memory and will be establishing a chair for the concertmaster in her name, the first such endowed chair in the symphony's 40-year history. Donations for the Elizabeth Mushinsky Mitchell Chair can be made online at wallingfordsymphony.org or mailed to the symphony at P.O. Box 6023, Wallingford, CT 06492.