Louise Knauft Allen

“I know I am blessed when I am able to help a neighbor.”

Best known as Weezie around Glendale, she moved to the Village in 1957. Two years earlier she left the University of Colorado to marry Sam Allen, the great great grandson of a Glendale founder Samuel B. Allen. She’s famous for her animated opinions on almost all topics worth discussing. Weezie is also an accomplished artist with a quirky and amusing style that’s carried out through bright colors.

But it’s her quiet philanthropy that has established her as a “Woman of Glendale.” For more than four decades, Louise Allen has been one of the single largest private benefactors of Glendale residents. Without acknowledgement, she has helped countless families who couldn’t manage the cost of an emergency house repair, women with staggering medical bills, students struggling to pay tuition and a family that needed help to bury a child.

With few exceptions, her gifts have always been anonymous and made their way to neighbors and friends through Christ Church Glendale, the Glendale Police Department and the Village administration.