Dorothy Riesdorph, longtime teacher, master community gardener, and award-winning gourmet cook, has died at 95
A tireless and inspiring educator for decades, "she was always a giving and caring woman who would push through what was expected or normal for what should be or could be," her grandson said.
Dorothy Riesdorph, 95, of Philadelphia, longtime teacher at Smedley Elementary School, master community gardener, and award-winning gourmet cook, died Sunday, Feb. 5, of complications after a stroke at Holy Redeemer St. Joseph Manor in Meadowbrook.
A fourth-grade teacher for more than three decades at Smedley in the Frankford section of the city, Mrs. Riesdorph not only taught reading, writing, math, geography, history, and science, she used her skills at gardening, cooking, and organizing to infuse those subjects into the everyday lives of her students.
In 1984, she created and supervised the celebrated Smedley Summer Gardening School, won awards for the recipes she concocted with the vegetables she grew, and introduced her young farmers to the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, the city’s Anti-Graffiti Task Force, and older students at Walter B. Saul High School of Agricultural Sciences.
“It has been quite an undertaking,” Mrs. Riesdorph told The Inquirer in 1984, referring to the 32,000-square-foot garden on the corner of Pratt and Charles Streets, just across from the school. “But now that we have done it, we’re going to start doing it all over again next spring.”
Indeed they did. For a decade, Mrs. Riesdorph and about 30 fourth, fifth, and sixth graders planted beans, zucchini, rhubarb, strawberries, beets, okra, raspberries, pumpkins, gourds, tomatoes, eggplant, and broccoli. Then they tended the plot, using math to measure fertilizer and weigh vegetables, science to monitor the weather, and reading and writing to create recipes and record harvesting updates in journals.
They fenced off a large community plot and 10-by-10-foot individual sections, and, to make the area even more appealing, painted a mural on a nearby warehouse wall.
The project that first summer was so bountiful that each student carted home about $50 worth of vegetables in September. It was so impressive that it won several blue ribbons at the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society’s 1984 Harvest Show and so educationally comprehensive that James Martin, then the principal at Smedley, said it utilized “every subject in our curriculum.”
Inquirer writer Edgar Williams called Mrs. Riesdorph “a natural for the old Mission: Impossible television show” for the ingenious efforts she expended to create the garden.
“The main trouble we had was with weeds,” she told Inquirer writer Jim Quinn. “It was a very wet summer, and those weeds just seemed to spring up. I didn’t think the children would keep at the weeding, but they did. They came every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, all through the summer, from 9 to 12.”
Mrs. Riesdorph also organized a free seed swap program and arranged for Smedley students to care for the school grounds during the summer. In her own kitchen, she made zucchini bread, vegetable appetizer puffs, mixed-vegetable cookies, and other delectables that won prizes in local and national recipe contests.
She told Quinn one year that she was disappointed she didn’t finish higher in a cookie contest because “my family eats them all every time I make them.” Her grandson David Hampton said it was Mrs. Riesdorph’s philosophy to always set her sights on the blue ribbon. “Why settle for normal when she could offer heartfelt gifts of time and effort that went far beyond what most people would do?” he said.
Born March 30, 1927, on a farm in Huntingdon Valley, Dorothy Ernestine Weisser grew up in Feasterville, graduated from Lower Moreland High School in 1945, and earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in elementary education from the University of Pennsylvania. She met Henry Riesdorph at Penn, and they attended Reformed Episcopal Seminary together.
They married in 1952, had daughters Cheryl, Heidi, Holli, and Wendi, and settled in the Somerton section of Northeast Philadelphia in 1967. Her husband and daughter Cheryl died earlier.
Mrs. Riesdorph was the first female graduate at Reformed Episcopal Seminary and certified through the Master Gardener Program at Pennsylvania State University. She cared for the gardens at the Edgar Allan Poe National Historic Site in Spring Garden for several years and nurtured her own garden at home.
She started at Smedley in 1967, retired from full-time teaching in 1997, but continued working for another decade as a reading specialist. “She never wanted to see anyone without food or clothing and often supplied children in her classes with whatever they needed,” said her daughter Heidi Gibbons. “By the time she fully retired, she was teaching grandchildren of the original children.”
Mrs. Riesdorph enjoyed traveling and camping, especially at national parks. She was a talented crafter and sewed many of her daughters’ clothes when they were young.
“She was an original feminist, but she did not like the term,” her daughter said. “She believed women should and could do anything. And she did.”
In addition to her daughters and grandson, Mrs. Riesdorph is survived by six other grandchildren, six great-grandchildren, a sister, and other relatives. Two brothers and two sisters died earlier.
Services were private.
Donations in her name may be made to the Fund for the School District of Philadelphia, c/o Duane Morris, 30 S. 17th St., Philadelphia, Pa. 19103, and Philabundance, 3616 S. Galloway St., Philadelphia, Pa. 19148.