Koch’s Sister to Amplify His Support for Quinn

Brendan McDermid/Reuters Pat Thaler, with white hair, at the funeral for her brother, Edward I. Koch, in February.

Christine C. Quinn’s mayoral campaign will be graced by a touch of Koch after all.

It was a last wish of Edward I. Koch, the iconic and bellicose former mayor, to aid Ms. Quinn, the City Council speaker, in her bid to become mayor. But he died in February before he could lend his unique voice or likeness to any political materials in advance of the campaign.

Now, Mr. Koch’s sister, Pat Thaler, has agreed to be filmed for a Quinn political ad, declaring her full-fledged support for Ms. Quinn and evoking the memory of her famous sibling.

“My brother and I often discussed politics, and we didn’t always agree, but in this case, we did,” Ms. Thaler said in a telephone interview last week. She said of Ms. Quinn, “I’ve admired her for a very long time.”

The details of the ad, Ms. Thaler said, have yet to be worked out, and she said the filming would not take place for a few weeks, after she returns from a vacation in France. But she made it clear that she was happy to help Ms. Quinn’s effort in any way.

“However they use it is O.K. with me,” she said.

Mr. Koch was a long-declared Quinn partisan, officially endorsing her in 2011, two years before the election, with a sly and prescient suggestion that he did not want to waste time before making his preference known.

But her campaign never recorded any video of Mr. Koch speaking about her, although there are audio snippets of him praising Ms. Quinn, with whom he had a warm friendship. Before he died, Mr. Koch told friends in his hospital room that he wanted to help her campaign; one of Ms. Quinn’s strategists was sent to help Mr. Koch formulate a statement, but he died three days later.

The Quinn camp has not decided how to integrate Ms. Thaler or her late brother into the campaign, but there are several options, including television, the Web and pamphlets mailed directly to voters.

“Ed Koch was an incredible leader for the city,” said Josh Isay, Ms. Quinn’s chief strategist. “Having his sister’s support, and his sister talking about how the mayor felt about Chris, is wonderful.”

Ms. Thaler, in the interview, said that “it would be nice to have a woman mayor” and that she admired Ms. Quinn’s track record in city government. She also said she was happy about the speaker’s willingness to be open about her personal life; Ms. Quinn married her longtime partner, Kim M. Catullo, last year.

Besides her political pedigree, there is at least one other thing about Ms. Thaler that makes her an unusual endorser for Ms. Quinn: she does not live in New York City.

“I live in New Jersey, so I can’t vote for her,” Ms. Thaler said. “But they know I am a supporter.”

This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: June 3, 2013

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this post misstated when Pat Thaler was interviewed. It was last week, not this week.