Ruth Donnell, 89, librarian

Ruth Carpenter Donnell spent half of the 1950s in the Far East, where her husband was in State Department postings in Malaya, Taiwan and Vietnam.

Though that was an adventurous time of her life, she might be better known for being a librarian at Germantown Friends School, where she worked from 1969 into 1976.

On Dec. 26, Mrs. Donnell, 89, died of pneumonia at Roxborough Memorial Hospital. She lived in Roxborough.

A memorial service is set for 2 p.m. tomorrow at the Unitarian Society of Germantown, 6511 Lincoln Dr.

A 1937 graduate of White Plains (N.Y.) High School, she earned a bachelor's degree from Middlebury College in 1941, a master's degree in English from Syracuse University in 1943, and a master's in library services from Columbia University in 1950.

After working in the library at Columbia during her studies there, her son Richard said, Mrs. Donnell was a librarian at Cornell University from 1950 to 1953.

After marrying John Donnell, whom she met while he was studying Mandarin at Cornell, her son said, she accompanied him to Southeast Asia, where he was a State Department information officer from 1953 to 1958.

From 1960 to 1962, she was a librarian in Richmond, Calif., while her husband worked on a doctorate in political science.

And when he began teaching at Temple University in 1965, Mrs. Donnell worked in the Wadsworth Avenue branch of the Free Library in Northwest Philadelphia.

She was a member of the League of Women Voters in the late 1960s and early 1970s, edited the monthly newsletter of the Unitarian Society of Germantown in the 1980s, and tutored at the Shawmont School in Roxborough in the 1990s.

From 1982 to 1998, she was a shareholder and trustee of the Wilderness Corp., a nonprofit land trust in Mount Holly, Vt., where her family vacationed.

She was a member of the Cheltenham Camera Club and the Wyncote Audubon Society Photography Group.

Mrs. Donnell leaves no survivors besides her son. Her husband died in 2007. Their daughter, Joyce, died in 1982.