Celia Hill Dentzer, who lived a life of faith, love, devotion, and service to family, friends, and community, died surrounded by family at an assisted living facility in Bethesda, Md., on Jan. 15, 2022. She was 91. The cause was complications of dementia.

A longtime resident of Larchmont, N.Y., Celia was the devoted wife of William T. (Bill) Dentzer, Jr., to whom she was married for 68 years and who predeceased her in January 2021. She was the mother of five children and grandmother to eight; a talented artist, seamstress, and craftsperson; and a community leader active in local organizations, from church and schools to charities. She relocated to Maryland to be close to children after her husband’s death last year.

She was born Celia Caroline Hill on July 6, 1930, in Wai, India, where her parents, the Rev. Lester A. and Celia Parks Hill, served as Christian missionaries and educators at a mission school. She was the second of four children, and while in India, her family also fostered an Indian child, Anand Paul, who became a de facto adopted son and brother. Returning to the United States in 1934, the family lived in various small towns in Ohio and Indiana throughout Celia’s teenage years as her father, a Congregationalist (now United Church of Christ) minister, moved among different parishes.

Celia graduated from Kitchel (Ind.) High School in 1948 as president of her senior class of nine students and enrolled in Muskingum College (now University) in New Concord, Ohio. As a member of Muskingum’s class of 1952, she majored in elementary education and threw herself into student activities. She served as president of the women's activities league, class secretary, academic honor society member, sophomore class queen, May queen, and cheerleader, all while working her way through college as a waitress and dorm resident adviser.

She met her future husband Bill at Muskingum, where he was a member of the class of 1951 and also an active student leader on campus. On their first date in March 1950, Bill and Celia went to see a showing of the movie “All the King’s Men” – an occasion they celebrated annually for the 70 years that followed.

They were married at Celia’s father’s church in Liberty, Ind., on June 15, 1952, one week after she graduated cum laude. Although educated and trained to teach elementary school, Celia followed the path of many women of her generation and allowed her career aspirations to be subsumed by homemaking and child-rearing, a fact that she viewed in her later years with a mix of resignation and regret.

Bill and Celia lived in Europe most of their first year of marriage and subsequently in New Haven, Conn. and Philadelphia, Penn., where Bill attended law school, then in Arlington, Va., where he worked for various government agencies. By 1965, five children had arrived, and in Arlington, Celia became an active member and leader in the American Association of University Women.

The family moved to Lima, Peru, in 1965 when Bill was named director of the mission of the U.S. Agency for International Development. While there, Celia founded an organization of the wives of USAID employees. The group went to work organizing poor women living in Lima’s slums to produce textiles and embroidered linens for sale so that these indigenous women could begin earning money to support their families. The family returned to the U.S. in 1968, living for one year in the Washington, DC area before moving to Larchmont, where Bill and Celia lived for 46 years.

After so many years of frequent moves as a child and an adult, Celia at last was able to put down roots in Larchmont. While her husband held executive roles in state government and on Wall Street, the latter as founding chairman and chief executive officer of the Depository Trust Company (now the Depository Trust and Clearing Corp.), Celia lovingly restored the 1897 Victorian home they purchased in Larchmont Manor and plunged into community life. She took particular interest in working with the Larchmont Avenue Church (Presbyterian USA), where she served as church school superintendent, clerk of session, and president of the church’s Women's Association.

Celia led the Woman's Club of Larchmont as its president from 1986-88, serving as a longtime executive board member as well. Among other activities in that capacity, she relished bringing noted authors and speakers to address the club in its periodic Book and Author luncheons.

She twice served as president of the local chapter of P.E.O., a women's philanthropic and educational organization, credited by her peers with reviving the chapter after a period of declining membership. And she volunteered elsewhere in Larchmont’s civic affairs, serving on PTOs at her children’s schools, as a Brownie and Girl Scout troop leader, and as a member and chairperson of the Larchmont-Mamaroneck Human Rights Commission.

Alongside those community efforts came devotion, with her husband, to their alma mater Muskingum. Both received honorary degrees from the school, among other tributes bestowed on them by Muskingum over the years, and the couple will be interred there together in a columbarium they helped to establish in a favorite corner of campus.

As Bill wrote in an homage celebrating her 70th birthday in 2000, Celia was viewed “as a woman of uncommon intelligence, beauty, and artistic ability.” She had many interests: painting in watercolors; gardening; interior decorating; music (piano, flute, and opera); the needle arts (knitting, crocheting, sewing, quilting, and rug-hooking); reading; some writing; and making her own jams and jellies from fruits of her garden. Her children recall how she threw herself into Christmas preparations: hanging the house with greenery, baking a dozen different varieties of cookies, and staying up until dawn on Christmas Day to wrap packages or put the finishing touches on items she had sewn as gifts. They also recall her frequently impish sense of humor and particular fondness for puns – as well as her willingness to reenact her role as a Muskingum football cheerleader when the occasion arose.

In his birthday homage, Bill also observed that Celia was “a person who takes her Christianity seriously,” embracing a thoughtful and unwavering faith. On their 24th wedding anniversary in 1976, Celia gave Bill her own handmade work of embroidery inscribed with a quotation they treasured from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the anti-fascist German Lutheran theologian. The passage was from a letter Bonhoeffer wrote to his fiancée in 1943 shortly before he was arrested and sent to prison for resisting Nazism. Celia and Bill found inspiration for their own marriage in its words:

“Our marriage shall be a yes to God's earth; it shall strengthen our courage to act and accomplish something on the earth…I fear that Christians who stand with only one leg upon earth also stand with only one leg in heaven.”

As they grew into old age together, Bill and Celia traveled in the U.S. and abroad, taking memorable trips back to India and Peru, among other places. In 2015, after Celia suffered a near-fatal aortic aneurysm rupture, they reluctantly decided to leave their longtime Larchmont home and relocate to smaller and more manageable quarters in a cottage at The Osborn, a senior living community in Rye, N.Y. There, Bill reasoned, he could better care for Celia as her dementia progressed. They remained deeply in love until his death, sitting together on the couch night after night watching Turner Classic Movies and enjoying each other’s company to the end.

Celia is survived by four children, James H. Dentzer, married to Holly Anderson Dentzer, of Herndon, Va.; Susan Dentzer Alston, married to Charles Alston, of Chevy Chase, Md.; William T. Dentzer III, of Reno, NV; and Emily Dentzer, married to Scott Rodi, of Lyme, NH; and eight grandchildren, James Jr. and Peter Dentzer; William, Samuel, and Grace Alston; and Caroline, Elizabeth, and Alice Rodi. Celia’s adopted sister-in-law, Premlata Paul, also survives her, as do numerous nieces and nephews.

Another of Bill and Celia’s daughters, Ardith Campbell Dentzer, died in 2010. Two sisters, Elizabeth Braucher and Winifred Engle, and one brother, Lester A. Hill Jr., also predeceased her, as did her adopted brother, Anand.