SCARBOROUGH – Mary Bishop Ross of Scarborough and Waterford succumbed to pneumonia on July 7, in Holbrook House at Piper Shores. She was surrounded by her loving family.

She was born on March 14, 1920, in Brooklyn, N.Y., to Pearl and Eliot Bishop. She and two older brothers, Tom and Warren, were raised in “the Hill” section of Brooklyn and during summers in Waterford. She cherished her family and her community in Waterford above all the many things about which she was passionate.

For primary and secondary schooling, she attended Adelphi Academy, Brooklyn. At 16, she entered Smith College, graduating with a degree in sociology in 1940.

On Aug. 3, of the same year, she married Robert H. Ross Jr., at the Congregational Church in Waterford. The couple began married life in Cambridge, Mass., where Bob pursued graduate studies at Harvard and she volunteered as a nurse’s aide in Boston hospitals. Their first child, Susan, was born in 1941. He joined the U.S. Army Air Force in 1942, and while he was overseas, she and young Susan returned to her parents’ home in Brooklyn.

After her husband’s discharge in 1945, the family moved to Delaware, Ohio, where he joined the English faculty at Ohio Wesleyan University. In 1947, Susan was joined by brother Robert, and in 1951 by sister Carolyn. The family lived in England for two years in 1954 to 1955 and 1961. Throughout the years, she, Bob, and the children continued the Bishop tradition of summering in Waterford.

In the mid-1950s she began a long career in journalism, working for many years at the Delaware Gazette as reporter, writer, photographer and editor whose special “beat” was local school issues. Always a champion of liberalism, she was socially and politically active, engaging the fight against McCarthyism, volunteering for the Red Cross, and taking up work with the League of Women Voters.

She continued her 30-year career through the 1960s in educational publishing at Washington State University during the family’s four-year residence in the West. In 1972, she became associate editor of the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine in Hanover, N.H., and was elected an officer of Dartmouth College.

She and Bob took up full-time residence at the family home in Waterford in 1982, spending many happy years of retirement there, sitting on the porch and traveling widely, including to Greece, England, Italy, Scotland, Costa Rica, and Alaska. After her and Bob’s move to Scarborough in 2002, they continued to spend weekends and summers in her beloved Waterford.

She is survived by her husband, Robert, of Scarborough; daughter; Susan and her husband; William Nelson; of Madison, Wisc.; son, Robert of Waterford; daughter, Carolyn of San Geronimo, Calif.; five grandchildren, Brook Steingass and his wife, Linda, of Madison, Wisc., Kayvon Ross of Cambridge, Mass., Caitlin Bailey of Emeryville, Calif., Ruffin Bailey of San Geronimo, Calif., and Eli Ross of Waterford; nephews, Jim Bishop and his partner, Steve Ryan, of Bar Mills and Stanley Bishop and his wife, Ann, of Falmouth; and two great-grandchildren, Oak and June Steingass, of Madison, Wisc.