CMU librarian was history buff, opera stalwart

If opera really is food for the soul, Dorothea Thompson was someone who always was ready to sit at the banquet.

The longtime librarian at Carnegie Mellon University’s Hunt Library and local history buff had an overriding love for the opera and volunteered for many years on the board of the Pittsburgh Opera.

“My mother was an ardent bibliophile, but probably her greatest passion was music,” said her daughter, Allison Thompson, of Squirrel Hill. “As a teenager, she scrubbed her neighbors’ steps to get money so she could take the train to the Metropolitan Opera in New York.”

Dorothea Thompson, 90, of Fox Chapel, died April 22 of complications from a stroke.

Growing up in Trenton, N.J., she spent several summers at the von Trapp family music camp in New Hampshire and slipped away as often as she could to the Met to see operas.

She especially loved “The Ring” cycle by Richard Wagner, her daughter said.

“As a young woman, she developed a very strong love of all classical music and opera in particular,” Allison Thompson said.

Her love of the opera inspired Mrs. Thompson to seek an undergraduate degree in French and Italian from what was then Douglass College, an all-female school at Rutgers University. She also spoke German, her daughter said.

In 1954, the then-Dorothea Mosley married mathematical scientist Gerald L. Thompson. They had met in a folk dancing group at Princeton University. Mr. Thompson died in 2009.

In 1959, the couple moved to Fox Chapel when Mr. Thompson accepted a job as professor at the CMU Tepper School of Business.

While she was raising three daughters, Mrs. Thompson began taking classes at the University of Pittsburgh, where she earned a master’s degree in French literature, followed by another master’s in library science.

“She was very much ahead of her time,” her daughter said. “She was getting both of those master’s degrees while I was still in elementary school.”

She went to work at the oncampus Hunt Library in the early 1970s in the reference department, where she specialized in business issues.

Gloriana St. Clair, inaugural dean emerita of libraries for the university, remembered Mrs. Thompson for her unparalleled skill. Her role was especially important in the days before the internet.

“She knew how to use books and indexes and business journals and periodicals and their indices in the most effective way,” Ms. St. Clair said. “Finding information through books for business problems was tricky and time intensive.”

Mrs. Thompson retired from the library in 1997 and began the next phase of her life with gusto, her daughter said.

“She planned her retirement very carefully,” she said. “She knew she wanted to do volunteering and had an interest in history.”

Mrs. Thompson had long since adopted Pittsburgh as her hometown, and she used her free time to intensely study the history of the region and to train as a docent with the Heinz History Center and the Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Society.

She led school tours at the history center until 2006 and conducted guided street tours for the landmarks society until 2009.

Mrs. Thompson also expanded her massive collection of 600 cookbooks and focused on her favorite pastimes, including cooking gourmet food.

One of Allison Thompson’s favorite childhood memories of her mother was during a yearlong sabbatical the family spent in Paris in 1963. “My mother attended the ladies school at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris, and that was part of what honed her cooking skills.”

Mrs. Thompson met Christopher Hahn as a volunteer with the Pittsburgh Opera Association in the early 2000s, and he quickly recognized that she had more than just a passing interest in the opera.

“Dorothea was a very seminal part of the volunteer group,” said Mr. Hahn, the organization’s general director. “I remember having very deep and engaged conversations with her, and it seemed clear that she was someone who felt strongly about the opera, so we invited her to become a board member.”

Mrs. Thompson served on the opera board from 2007 to 2012, when she joined the advisory board.

In a community with passionate opinions, Mrs. Thompson was someone who Mr. Hahn could rely on for sage advice, and the organization will feel her loss, he said.

“She was very humble and discreet, and she would always ask perceptive questions,” he said. “She was someone whom I could go to for quiet, considered advice. Dorothea had a great love for the opera, and she was a lovely person. It’s a great loss.”

Allison Thompson called her mother a “very warm and caring kind of person,” who saw the value in teaching her daughters the importance of being independent. “She lost her own father when she was 11, so I think that helped shape her to have something women in her generation often didn’t have — she was self-reliant, she had a job, and she taught us to be able to take care of ourselves.”

In addition to her daughter, Mrs. Thompson is survived by her two other daughters, Emily Thompson, of Ann Arbor, Mich., and Abigail Thompson, of O’Hara, and seven grandchildren.

A memorial celebration is planned for 2-4 p.m. June 17 at Beechwood Farms Nature Reserve, 614 Dorseyville Road, Fox Chapel.

In lieu of flowers, memorial donations may be made to the Pittsburgh Opera at https://www.pittsburghopera.org or the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra at https://pittsburghsymphony.org.