On Saturday, Dec. 1, after a long and well-traveled life and a two-year battle with dementia, Ann Louise Terbrueggen Anthony, 94, of Sunrise of McCandless and a half-century resident of Hampton Township. Linguist, University of Pittsburgh educator, intrepid world wanderer, loving and encouraging mother and grandmother, advocate of critical thinking, original World War II "Rosie the Riveter," voracious consumer of newspapers and collector of Asian and pre-Columbian art.

Wife of the late Edward Mason Anthony Jr. for 69 years. Mother of Lynn Anthony Higgins of Hanover, NH, Janice Louise Anthony of Wakefield, RI, and Edward Mason (Ted) Anthony IV of Hampton Township; grandmother of Julian Anthony Higgins, Matthew Anthony Sherry, Edward Mason Anthony V and Wyatt Dylan Kirk Anthony; mother-in-law of Roland L. Higgins, Michael Sherry and Melissa Rayworth-Anthony. Daughter of the late Virgil William and Ethel Lena (Rosenblum) Terbrueggen. Sister of the late Maurice Francis Terbrueggen and Phyllis Audrey Walrad. Mom-in-spirit of Sally Wiggin of Fox Chapel. Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, on Oct. 2, 1924, to a family that was splintered by the marriage of her Jewish mother to her Roman Catholic father, she adopted the spiritual tenets of both — from an abiding belief in education to an unwavering commitment to Samaritanism and charity — while encouraging her children to think beyond the confines of organized religion.

As a college student during World War II, she worked as a riveter at the Ford Motor Co.'s plant in Willow Run, MI, assembling parts for B-24 Liberators, bombers that were nicknamed "flying boxcars." She was a 1945 graduate of the University of Michigan, where she studied and taught linguistics with an emphasis on Spanish and teaching English as a second language. In 1955, she and her husband moved to Bangkok, Thailand, with their two daughters to teach there for most of the remainder of the decade. Her work in language teaching over the years was textured and varied. In 1966, she worked as a consultant for the Pittsburgh Public Schools and produced one of the earliest investigations into African-American dialects of English in the city. The following year, she worked for the U.S. State Department conducting English-teaching seminars across Venezuela. Back at Pitt, she lectured in linguistics and did graduate research in the 1970s into Ladino, the fading language of Sephardic Jews in Spain. In 1979, she and her husband joined the first wave of Pitt educators to teach as "foreign experts" in China months after it re-established relations with the United States. There, in barely a year, she instructed a new generation of Chinese educators in new methods of teaching English, and taught them the works of James Baldwin as a bonus. When she returned to Pittsburgh in the 1980s, she was the founding executive editor of the Journal of Hispanic Linguistics. She also worked for Pitt's University Center for International Studies through the 1980s teaching English to Asian business leaders — first engineers from China and then executives from Japan's Mitsubishi Motors Corp. — using the U.S. Constitution as her primary teaching tool. She was a member of Phi Beta Kappa honor society and president emerita of Martha Cook, a residence and organization of women at the University of Michigan. She was an ardent Pittsburgh Pirates fan; a decades-long committed listener to KDKA radio; a woman who for much of her life left no crossword she spotted uncompleted; and, right up until early last week, a voracious consumer of any newspaper she could find. In one of her final conversations, she said: "I don't know how I got so lucky."

Arrangements by the Eloise B. Kyper Funeral Home. Private burial in Mount Royal Cemetery, Glenshaw. A public memorial service will be held later, date and place to be announced. In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to the National Women's History Museum or the United States Holocaust Museum.