Athens women to serve Bowling Green board

by Lauren McDowell
••City Editor••

A picture of snowy College Green at Ohio University hangs on one wall, bricks of dedication from Ohio State University line a bookshelf and Bowling Green State University pamphlets are tucked away in different nooks of the living room. Suzanne Dirmeyer Thompson is a university woman.

After years of dedication and contribution to universities throughout Ohio, Thompson has been awarded a position on the Bowling Green Foundation Board. The board was established to give leadership and direction to university contributions.

A nominating committee of her peers selected Thompson. The board looks for many different types of graduates, said Marcia Sloan Latta, associate vice president for advancement at BGSU. The university did not have anyone on the board from Southeast Ohio.

Thompson said the offer surprised her.

"I received a phone call right out of the blue one day," she said.

The position requires substantial financial knowledge, something Thompson said she learned solely from her father, Leo.

"I never realized how much I learned from my father," she said. "(Finance) was just dinner-table conversation."

After Thompson's mother died of breast cancer when she was a child, her father raised both her and her younger sister. It was her father's persuasion that led Thompson to BGSU for her bachelor's degree in home economics in 1957.

After graduation, Thompson taught home economics in the school where she met her husband, James. He was the principal at the time, she said. The couple then moved to Columbus while James finished his doctorate in curriculum and instruction. After he graduated, they settled in Athens, where they have lived for 35 years.

While in Athens, Thompson completed her master's degree, served on the College of Education's Alumni Board and volunteered at the First United Methodist Church, 2 S. Congress St.

Although Thompson's career focused on teaching and education, finance became a larger part of her life when she took over the family's finances after her father died in 1983. He was 93 years old.

Since giving her life to finance, Thompson has served on her church's board of trustees, became church treasurer and handled the finances for the church endowments, said Bob Sharp, friend and treasurer of the board of trustees for the Methodist church.

Although every university she has been a part of is special in its own right, her connections to Bowling Green run deep, she said. Both her father and her sister have scholarships in the College of Business, and her father is honored on the President's Club Plaque in the alumni center.

The last trip her father took in the January before his death was to visit the alumni center to see his name. He walked up to touch is bronze inscribed name, which most people do the first time they see their name on something, she said.

"It was a very cold January day, but we had a very warm experience," Thompson said.