Longtime Fox Chapel Area teacher
She was born in Lawrenceville amid the 1918 influenza pandemic that killed nearly a million Americans as World War I finished killing millions more. Her father was serving with the U.S. Army in France and he didn’t know she had been born until he returned the following year. The girl caught the flu and almost died. And then she went on to have a full and long life as an exceptionally loved student, wife, mother, teacher and friend.
When Doris C. Riethmiller died — possibly of heart failure — Tuesday, she was 48 days from her 100th birthday, which last year she was much looking forward to celebrating. The longtime O’Hara resident was residing at Lighthouse Pointe Village at Chapel Harbor.
“I’m a relic,” she quipped there during an interview for a story for this past winter’s 100th-anniversary edition of Western Pennsylvania History Magazine. She looked back at her life with great detail and an as-sharp sense of humor that served her well over the arc of it.
She was visibly tickled telling the slightly scandalous story of how her mother had been a divorcee with another daughter who had to work as a “Pullman girl” cleaning railroad sleeper cars. Her dad, a Pennsylvania Railroad airbrake inspector, liked the way she walked.
Doris was doted on by her German-immigrant grandparents on both sides, with whom the family lived, first in the city and next in O’Hara, where one grandpap ran a dairy, with no electricity or running water.
She walked across Kittanning Pike to the newly built Kerr School and walked and took a streetcar to high school in Aspinwall, where the family moved. She still could remember the numbers of the three street cars she took to go to and from the University of Pittsburgh, where — using money she’d made selling encyclopedias door-to-door and a scholarship — she pursued her dream of becoming a teacher.
As it turned out, her 1940 English and Latin degree was no good for getting a job at schools that were dropping Latin, so she worked in the children’s department at the Downtown Kaufmann’s department store and the directory department of Bell Telephone.
She met Troy Hill’s Bob Riethmiller, whom she married in 1941 in neighboring Westmoreland County so there would be no paper trail in Allegheny County — some employers wouldn’t hire married women.
Their son, William, was born while Mr. Riethmiller was off serving in the Pacific during World War II. After he returned, the family, with daughter Roberta, settled in O’Hara, very near her old Kerr School.
In 1955, the principal there talked Mrs. Riethmiller into serving as the school’s secretary for a “temporary” stint that stretched to four years, and then she became a social studies teacher there and loved it. She would go on to teach English for more than 20 years, also at Aspinwall High School and Dorseyville Middle School. She much enjoyed running into and joking with her former seventhgraders.
Friendship was important to her. In 1990, she still was lunching monthly with “the girls,” a half dozen of her Pitt friends, which became the subject of a story in the Post-Gazette. “If there’s someone who isn’t here,” she said, “nobody talks about them.”
She helped her husband in his extraordinary volunteer service for fellow veterans, which was part of a Post-Gazette story in 1994 and the focus of his PG obituary when he died in 2013. She recounted how the original plan had been to fix him up with her cousin. “A week later, who did he call for a date? Me.”
She wound up outliving her son and her friends, which made her sad, but she was good at making new ones. At UPMC’s Lighthouse Pointe, where she lived for 11 years, she was new resident greeter and messenger of care, sending cards for others’ life events.
“Her caregivers loved her,” said her daughter, “Bobby” Egelston, who lives in Oakmont. She shared the news of her mom’s death in an email in which she noted, “She, herself, said she had lived a good and blessed life.”
In addition to her daughter, Mrs. Riethmiller is survived by four grandchildren, seven great-grandchildren and four great-great grandchildren.
Visitation is from 2 to 4 and 6 to 8 p.m. Friday at Weddell-Ajak Funeral Home, 100 Center Ave., Aspinwall. The funeral is at 10 a.m. Saturday at Good Shepherd Lutheran Church, 1610 Powers Run Road, Fox Chapel. Interment will follow at Allegheny Cemetery. In lieu of flowers, donations can be made to VFW National Home in Eaton Rapids, Mich.