June 4, 1929 â Nov. 12, 2020
Dorothy was born on June 4, 1929, in Bloomington, Indiana, to Thelman Eugene Lewis, a civil engineer and Flora Margaret Bradford Lewis, a nurse. After high school in Indianapolis, Dorothy studied at Butler University in Indianapolis where she received a Bachelorâs of Science in 1951 and was a member of Pi Beta Phi sorority.
During her senior year at Butler she met a young man from Kentucky named Thomas Graves Reed, Jr. who was studying chemical engineering at Purdue University in West Lafayette. For their second date, Tom took Dorothy across the Wabash River to see a local opera, and that night she was intrigued by the engineer and his artistic interests. For him, an association formed between opera and her that left him with a lifelong love for both.