Diane Gibbons Dodds, longtime Radnor Township School District archivist, library aide, and teacher, has died at 87
Her archives in Radnor included thousands of donated report cards, documents, photos, newspaper clippings, trophies, and a sports victory bell.

Diane Gibbons Dodds, 87, formerly of Radnor, retired longtime Radnor Township School District archivist, high school library aide, French and elementary school teacher, mentor, and volunteer, died Sunday, April 20, of heart failure at Naamans Creek Country Manor in Garnet Valley.
A lifelong reader, ardent grammarian, and history enthusiast, Mrs. Dodds became the Radnor schools archivist in 1993 and spent the next 13 years, until her retirement in 2006, organizing, displaying, and sharing the thousands of report cards, documents, photos, newspaper clippings, and other memorabilia donated to the collection by the school district’s students, staff, and faculty, and the wider public.
Her collection included tattered textbooks, the cornerstone of the old high school, academic and sports trophies, and the Radnor-Lower Merion sports victory bell. She even had a paperback copy of Rudyard Kipling’s novel Kim that cost $1.04 in 1957.
She created displays of the collection for the high school library and elsewhere in the district, and was especially busy in 1997 during the yearlong 100th anniversary celebration of Radnor’s first graduating class. The district published the 224-page A Century of Spirit: Radnor High School 1897–1997, and Mrs. Dodds supervised the student volunteers who helped organize the text and photos that were used.
The 1999 school year was eventful, too, as stacks of outdated material of all kinds flowed to her desk during the high school’s extensive renovation.
For more than a decade, she helped teachers and students dig into the archives for class projects. She also worked with residents to recover old personal information and research family history.
One teacher unexpectedly noticed her husband in an old photo of a junior high school wrestling team that Mrs. Dodds had on display. Another teacher saw his grandfather in a faded picture of the 1928 Radnor swim team.
“There was a bus driver from Lower Merion who wanted to find the picture of a Radnor High School cheerleader he had once dated,” Mrs. Dodds told Mainline Media News in a 2001 story about the archives. The writer of that story said that the collection “spills and overflows everywhere” in its 20-by-40-foot storage room and that “there would be no discernible order had not Dodds made inroads, boxing and cataloging the artifacts.”
She joined the Radnor High School library in 1986 as supervisor of periodicals. She was on the board of the Radnor Scholarship Fund and wrote an article for the Bulletin of the Radnor Historical Society in 1997 about the 100th anniversary of the first graduating class.
Those first graduates, she said in the Bulletin, “would not have dreamed that their legacy was to be a century of remarkable growth and achievement.”
In the early 1960s, she taught French and elementary school students in Albany, N.Y., and then Lower Merion. She became what her children called a “stay-at-home mom extraordinaire” when her son Graham was born in 1966. Twins Melissa and Parker arrived in 1968.
She went on to serve as president of the Parent Teacher Association and Cub Scout den mother. She volunteered for classroom projects, went on school field trips, and helped out with her children’s baseball, swim, track, soccer, field hockey, lacrosse, and softball teams.
She was interested in architecture and art, especially Monet, and active with the Art Goes to School program. “Diane lived a life marked by dedication to education, family, and community,” her family said in a tribute.
Geraldine Diane Gibbons was born Feb. 11, 1938, in Rapid City, S.D. Her family moved to Havertown when she was young, and she graduated from Haverford High School in 1956.
She was featured in a 1991 story in The Inquirer about the old Mooo milkshake shops, and she said: “I just remember going with carloads of kids. It was neat.” She earned a bachelor’s degree at Smith College in Massachusetts in 1960 and teaching credentials at Hunter College in New York.
She met Tom Dodds in college, and they married in 1961. They lived in Albany, Germantown, and North Carolina for a few years before settling in Havertown and then Radnor.
They divorced later, and she moved to Wilmington with her daughter a few years ago. Her former husband and son Parker died earlier.
Mrs. Dodds was known by family and friends to mark up incorrect supermarket signs with a red pen and call Channel 6 when a reporter, in her view, phrased something wrong. She doted on her children and grandchildren, traveled the world with them, gave “the best hugs,” and spent memorable vacations in Ocean City, N.J.
“Family was very important to her and a big part of her identity,” said her son Graham. Her daughter said: “She was very nurturing. She was cool, calm, and collected. She was the smartest person I ever knew.”
In addition to her children, Mrs. Dodds is survived by four grandchildren and other relatives. A brother died earlier.
A celebration of her life was held June 29.
Donations in her name may be made to the Radnor Educational Foundation, 135 S. Wayne Ave., Wayne, Pa. 19087; and Reach Out and Read, 308 Congress St., Sixth Floor, Boston, Mass. 02210.