Her family remembers her as the beautiful woman who marched through jails across Missouri. She braved cat-calls to talk to hundreds - maybe thousands - of prisoners. She listened to their complaints, brought them to the public officials when she felt it was warranted and urged wardens to listen.
"I never met a really evil person in all my visits to prisons," Ann Carter Stith told the Ethical Society of St. Louis in 2000, upon being named Humanist of the Year. "There was always a humanity there."
Mrs. Stith, 85, died early Thanksgiving morning at her home in St. Louis of cancer, her family said.
She was a fearless advocate for education, for prison reform, for clean government. She was appointed to local task forces, to community agency boards, even to federal commissions.
Nevertheless, she had dinner on the table for her family at 6:30 every evening. Those who loved her stretch beyond family.
"She was a wonderful, wonderful citizen," said former U.S. Sen. Thomas F. Eagleton. "I never knew a man or woman who could devote their time to the public interest like she could."
Ann Carter See was born in Nashville, Tenn., on Nov. 21, 1920. She attended John Burroughs School here, Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., and graduated from Washington University in St. Louis.
Family and friends remember her most for her work as an adult.
She was on a St. Louis County grand jury that probed allegations of government corruption. The jury found that citizens seeking zoning changes would buy or make bids on insurance, law services, or real estate tied to the councilmen. Then the zoning changes would be approved.
They remembered her work on the Board of Jail Visitors, which published a series of scathing reports on conditions at the County Jail, which was then in the courthouse in Clayton. When a different committee recommended a new jail for juvenile offenders, Mrs. Stith was again tapped to win voter approval for the $2 million bond issue that would pay for it, according to family notes. The bond issue passed.
Mrs. Stith fought for alternatives to imprisonment, for victims of crime and for criminal court reform. She was appointed to the committee that oversaw the desegregation of St. Louis public schools, to the commission that recommended U.S. court appointments, and to the Democratic National Convention of 1976. "The list of her endeavors to make St. Louis a better place in which to live and work is almost endless," Eagleton said. "She was a friend of the poor, of the elderly and the forgotten. We will not forget her."
On Thursday, her family looked to more intimate moments.
Daughter Kate Stith-Cabranes, a Yale law professor, remembered the unlocked doors of their childhood home in Clayton. Her friends, she said, would come by to talk to her parents as much as to her.
One time, her mother came down to the kitchen to find one of Kate's friends there, toasting some of the raisin bread the Stiths kept in the breadbox on the counter.
But none of the siblings was home, Stith-Cabranes said. The girl had let herself in.
"Why Mary," her mother said to the girl, "do you need some butter with that?"
Family and friends said Ann Carter Stith died without enemies.
She would not back down from something she believed, but remained respectful, even in anger, and eventually won over most critics, they said.
This summer, doctors told her she had cancer. She chose not to be treated.
"She said she'd had a wonderful life and had given a great deal to home and community, and didn't want to die a lingering death," said daughter Rebecca Stith, a lawyer. Instead, she stayed in her home and was cared for by family.
The day before she died, she looked up at them, and smiled weakly. "You all are so good to take care of me like this," she told them.
And that, the family said, was her last full sentence.
In addition to daughters Stith-Cabranes of New Haven, Conn., and Rebecca Stith of St. Louis, among the survivors are her husband, Richard T. Stith Jr. of St. Louis; a son, Richard Stith of Valparaiso, Ind., a professor at Valparaiso University; daughter Laura Denvir Stith of Kansas City, a Missouri Supreme Court judge; ten grandchildren, two step-grandchildren and one great-grandchild. A daughter, Carter Stith, who was a reporter for the Post-Dispatch, died in 1979.
A memorial service will be at 2:30 p.m. Dec. 17 at Graham Chapel at Washington University.
In lieu of flowers, memorial contributions may be made to the Family Support Network, Independence Center or Springboard to Learning.