Rita-Ann Christine Lindstrom

Rita Ann Lindstrom, a woman whose radiant smile and lifetime of volunteering and leadership helped hundreds of people, died on Monday, July 1, 2024, following a short illness.
The youngest child and only daughter of John Caspar Koch VII and Ida Olson Koch, she was born in suburban Cleveland, Ohio, and grew up in the community during the Great Depression and World War II. Her parents were both immigrants, her father from Germany and her mother from Sweden. She grew up in a household of music and books – something she passed on to her four children – where her father, who worked for an industrial company, played violin for a community orchestra and turned the radio volume up on the Saturday opera so loudly it could be heard around the neighborhood.
She learned piano and her children remembered hearing her play Beethoven's "Fur Elise" sometimes when they came home from school.
Both her older brothers enlisted during World War II. She was the only one at her home the day a soldier came to tell the family her oldest brother, Jack, (John Caspar Koch VIII) had died on a troopship in the Pacific.
During high school and summers off from college, she worked as a waitress at a variety of restaurants, including at the world-renowned Thousand Islands Inn in New York.
After graduating Lakewood High School in Ohio, she attended Tufts College in Medford, Massachusetts, then briefly switched to the University of Michigan, but then changed her enrollment back to Tufts. Asked years later why she went to Tufts when she was already at Michigan and there were excellent universities in Ohio, she said she had always wanted to go to an eastern college and Tufts was cheap. At Tufts she joined the Chi Omega Sorority and played on the women's tennis team.
It was also at Tufts she met her future husband, John Lindstrom. They met when she asked if he had a car and could help at a sorority party.
After graduating, she was hired for her first teaching post in the tiny school system on Fishers Island, New York, off Long Island. Asked why she had elected to teach there, she said it was relatively close to Massachusetts and her future husband.
After the couple married, they settled outside Cincinnati, Ohio, and she taught in nearby Hamilton. It was a time when many school districts refused to hire married women, particularly if they had children. Expecting her first child, she tried to keep her pregnancy secret from her principal. But he found out when the junior high girls in her class held an impromptu baby shower for her. He immediately fired her, calling her a bad example to her students. The next morning the Hamilton school system superintendent called her, said the principal was an idiot, and asked her to come back to work. She did not feel comfortable, however, returning to the district. Soon after her first son was born.
When her husband was hired as a buyer for Chrysler Corporation, the family relocated to Detroit. There she had a second son and her first daughter. She also became active in a variety of organizations, working with the PTA at her sons' school, serving as the Cub Scouts Den Mother for her oldest son's Pack, and playing an active role in the League for Women Voters. One year, when the league was conducting neighborhood surveys identifying who was registered to vote and how they identified politically, she dispatched her elementary school son to the task, assuming homeowners would not slam their doors on a kid. She was wrong in that assumption.
She was also a woman of strong opinions, and while a fiscal conservative she supported women and minority rights. She passed on her beliefs in community activism and public commitment to her children.
All her life she loved gardening, keeping rows of flower beds at her Royal Oak home. She continued gardening when they moved to Cleveland as her husband was transferred, and when they returned to the Detroit area where he started his own business.
In fact, their house in Bloomfield Township became a showplace for its flowering azaleas and rhododendrons.
In Cleveland, their youngest daughter was born, and she continued her volunteer work with the local parent teachers organization.
She extended her gardening efforts from the family home to the Cranbrook Gardens, where for 46 years she was a volunteer for the Cranbrook House and Gardens Auxiliary. She was chair of the gardens' auxiliary for several years, and could be seen all through the year working the gardens, or planting the house's outdoor urns. She worked volunteer sales events, and greeted visitors with her glowing smile at the gardens' entrance. She had been working at the gardens in the weeks before her death.
For her work, Cranbrook awarded her the President's Award for Excellence in 2021.
Over the years, Mrs. Lindstrom also volunteered at the Detroit's Children's Hospital, where she would cuddle newborns.
Knowing the importance of education, especially reading skills, for decades Mrs. Lindstrom was active with the Oakland Literacy Council. She played a major role in the organization's fundraising efforts. She herself was a voracious reader, reading several newspapers a day as well as consuming endless mysteries.
In 2017, she was named a Distinguished Volunteer by the Association Fundraising Professionals of Greater Detroit.
Along with gardening, Mrs. Lindstrom over the years played golf, enjoyed bowling and played bridge. In later years, less able to engage in physical sports, she loved going to her grandsons' baseball and basketball games and school performances. She also loved travel, especially to any place with a renowned garden.
She also adored movies, and would interrupt a Saturday trip to the grocery store to take in a matinee -- kids in tow. Thanks to her, going to the movies was a birthday treat and Christmas highlight for the family.
And all the time she was rarely without a smile. In her last days, even in the hospital, she was smiling to her visitors and hospital staff.
She was preceded in death by her parents; her brothers, Jack and Walter Koch; her husband of 59 years, John R. Lindstrom; and her first grandson Evan Matthew Kyle Lindstrom. She is survived by her children: John (Cynthia Kyle), Peter (Boleka), Judy, and Pamela Grand (Tim). She is also survived by her grandsons Oskar and Charles Grand, and several nephews and nieces.
A private memorial is planned. Donations in her memory may be made to the Best Friends Animal Society, Cranbrook House and Garden Auxiliary and the Oakland Literacy Council.