Former School Administrator Dorothy Bajak Armistead Passes Away at 89

A petroleum geologist's daughter and former Scarsdale schools administrator, Dorothy Bajak Armistead's passed away at the Longwood Retirement Community in Pittsburgh at age 89 on May 10, 2017 from complications from breast cancer. The illness forced her to resign as president of the resident council.

After raising four children as a stay-at-home mother, Armistead parlayed part-time public relations work for Thomas Sobol, the superintendent of the Scarsdale Schools into a full-time job as his administrative assistant. At age 50, she earned a masters degree in education administration from Columbia University. Sobol would go on to become New York state schools chancellor.

Born Dorothy Mae Mershon in the Texas town of Coleman on Oct. 12, 1927, she and her family homesteaded during the Great Depression in a cabin in Roswell, New Mexico after her father Milton, who was a geologist was furloughed from Shell Oil Co. A little over two years later Shell resumed exploration and the family moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma.

At age 16, Dorothy was accepted to Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio, where she became passionate about theater and was coached to lose her southern accent after getting the role of Jo in "Little Women."

She met her future husband, then-Miami University student Sigmund Bajak, in 1947 while working as assistant to the director for "The Trojan Women." Bajak, the son of Polish immigrants from Buffalo, N.Y., had been a Navy carrier pilot in World War II and was acting in the play.

In 1953, Dorothy began a two-year stint as a civilian entertainment director for the U.S. Army in Japan and Korea. Returning to the U.S. two years later, she reunited with Bajak, who had graduated from Yale Drama School and taken a job with NBC, where he eventually worked his way up in the company's news division.

The couple settled in Scarsdale, where Dorothy's activities included children's theater. She frequently helped organize assemblies at Edgewood school.

Bajak attained the rank of rear admiral in the Naval Reserve and the New York State readiness command. He died of prostate cancer in 1996. Armistead moved to Pittsburgh four years later to be near her oldest child, religious educator Jennifer Halperin.

In 2003, she was recognized by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette as a Jefferson Award nominee for her work as a cultural ambassador teaching English as a second language at the Greater Pittsburgh Literary Council.

About that time, Reginald Armistead, an Alabama-born recently widowed close friend of her late husband, came courting. Retired Capt. Armistead and. Bajak had been Navy buddies.

The two married in 2004 and lived in Sperryville, Va., until Reginald Armistead's 2012 death, when Dorothy moved back to Pittsburgh and settled at Longwood.
At the retirement community, Armistead became involved in the "Tuesday Table Ladies" literary group, which decided to jointly pen a mystery set in their mileu. Entitled "Where's Laura," it was published in 2016. The ladies were working on a second novel when Dorothy died.

In additional to Halperin and her husband Alan, of Murrysville, Pa., she is survived by sons Frank Bajak, an Associated Press journalist, and wife, Cecilia Malachowski of Lima, Peru, Benjamin Bajak of Irvine, CA, an entrepreneur, and John Bajak, a poet, of White Plains, N.Y., seven grandchildren and one great grandchild.

A memorial service will be held in the ballroom at Longwood on Saturday, May 27 at 2 p.m.