Our founder: Doe Sprogis

The quality of life in the South End can be attributed in great part to Doe Sprogis who with her husband, David, advocated not only for the preservation of the neighborhood but also for the arts.

In 1963 Doe and her husband moved to the South End to a Victorian bow front on West Brookline Street and put down their roots. She told the Boston Globe a year later they had bought the house “for a song – $7,500.”

The Globe interview was a notice of a house tour to benefit the League of Women Voters. The Sprogises and seven other families opened their homes to show that the South End was “the new Boston” and an attractive place to live.

In another Globe story she said she and her husband had enrolled in a real estate institute course for themselves as new homeowners, but as friends inquired about the South End, she began to sell houses part time from her kitchen.

Shortly afterwards she opened Sprogis Real Estate at 679 Tremont St. Today the firm is Sprogis & Neale Real Estate, whose principals are her son, Bradford Sprogis of Needham, and John Neale of Boston.

Well-respected, she was very proud of the fact that she preceded Betty Gibson and Al Rondeau, two other brokers, in opening South End offices, said her son.

“She was like a second mother to me,” said Neale who began working with Doe Sprogis in 1991. After she retired and the firm became Sprogis & Neale Real Estate, she still kept a desk in the office, he said.

Said Blair’s father, Rusty Aertsen: “Doe was exceptional, truly one of a kind. She sold an entire generation of South Enders their houses and, in so doing, she and her family became their lifelong friend. She was the grandest of ladies and a shining star to everyone lucky enough to know her.”