When Mary Dagold began studying Judaism in Baltimore in the late 1960s, her curiosity turned into conviction. Raised Presbyterian in a small Pennsylvania town, she had long been fascinated by faith and history, but it was Judaism’s emphasis on learning, questioning and community that spoke most deeply to her. Before marrying Reuben Dagold, she formally converted under Rabbi Gustave Buchdahl at the Reform Temple Emanuel in Pikesville. “She didn’t take the step lightly,” said her son Marcus Dagold. “She studied; she asked questions; and she lived her beliefs every day after that.”
Mary Suzanne McCarl Dagold of Pikesville died on Sept. 24 at 84. A librarian, educator and lifelong learner, she built her family life around Jewish study, intellectual pursuit and community engagement.
She grew up in Curwensville, Pennsylvania, where her parents were teachers. She lived with them, an aunt who taught French, and a grandfather who was a pharmacist and a graduate of the University of Maryland School of Pharmacy, said her son, Jeremy Dagold. “Her aunt specifically encouraged her to read as a gateway to a larger world than a small town,” he said.
She studied at Grove City College, then completed undergraduate work at Penn State and earned a master’s degree in library science at Indiana University. A longtime friend from graduate school, Fred Carson, remembered her as “one of the brightest people I ever met.
She had an encyclopedic knowledge of books and loved discussing symbolism in literature, as well as history and politics.”
She began her career at the library at University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Later, as library director at Villa Julie College, now Stevenson University, she oversaw the transformation of the library as the school grew from a two-year to a four-year institution.
“She was instrumental in finding resources to build the collection,” Jeremy Dagold said, noting how she learned to write grants and attract philanthropic support. She later worked at the Bryn Mawr School for Girls in Baltimore, at the Gilman School and at the Space Telescope Science Institute at Johns Hopkins University, Marcus Dagold said.
Her professional outlook was straightforward: librarianship meant connecting people to reliable information. “She felt she had to have a base knowledge of almost every subject, so she could direct people to the best resources,” Jeremy Dagold said. At the Bryn Mawr School in the early 2000s, she taught students how to evaluate online sources and recognize credible information — a new and essential skill for that era.
Between UMBC and Villa Julie, she worked for a company that created microfilm archives for libraries. There, she helped organize and photograph collections, including the Watergate papers, returning the originals after filming. Jeremy Dagold said the project appealed to her belief in transparency and learning from history.
Mary Dagold and her husband, Reuben, of 55 years, raised their three sons — Marcus, Raphael and Jeremy — as Jews, active members of Temple Emanuel. “Her Judaism was rooted in learning,” Marcus Dagold said. “It wasn’t something she inherited — it was something she chose and kept studying.”
Those who knew her described a Jewish identity grounded in ethics and community. She took pride in helping young women “find their voice,” Jeremy Dagold said, while working at an all-girls school. She supported civic and civil rights groups, including the League of Women Voters, the NAACP and the ACLU, and backed female electoral candidates. Carson said she believed women should be “honored, valued and paid on the same level as men,” and often made her views known through letters to the editor.
Mary Dagold read widely and debated ideas with a sharp but open mind. Her daily and weekly reading included The New York Times and The Baltimore Sun, along with Time, The Nation, The New Yorker, The Atlantic and Mother Jones. “She was left-of-center,” Jeremy Dagold said, “but she’d also watch Fox News just to see what the other side was saying.”
Even in her later years, she gave talks and stayed engaged in community discussions.
Books remained at the center of her life. She belonged to three book clubs and often prepared background notes to guide conversation. “She almost wrote book reports for the clubs,” Jeremy Dagold said. Carson said that, when she took on something new — conversion study, birdwatching or volunteering with the Boy Scouts — she did so with full effort. “When she began a project, she would read all the background sources and go into it wholeheartedly,” he said.
Family and friends remembered her as both kind and exacting. “Nice and feisty,” is how Jeremy Dagold described her. She corrected errors rather than letting them slide, and believed leadership meant participation, not direction. “She sacrificed personally and professionally for us,” he said, recalling how she worked full-time while still handling the responsibilities expected of mothers of her generation.
In later years, she stayed active at LifeBridge Health’s gym, where she joined water aerobics classes several times a week and made close friends who often went to lunch together afterward. Even during her final illness, Jeremy Dagold said, family members brought her newspapers in the hospital so she could keep reading.
Her thoroughness and sense of purpose impressed colleagues. Marcus Dagold said one of her supervisors later wrote to tell her she was “the best employee she had ever had.”
Her conversion, intellectual life and work all reflected the same discipline and curiosity.
“She loved reading and guiding students and others toward the best sources,” Carson said. “She was curious about everything — and once she cared about something, she poured herself into it.”
Ellen Braunstein is a freelance writer.
