Dorothy (Dot) Thrush passed away on November 8, 2025 at the Health Center at Westminster Suncoast. 

 

While born in Tampa, Dorothy moved to St. Petersburg with her mother and sister at a very early age. Growing up in St. Petersburg, Dorothy attended local grammar and secondary schools prior to attending and graduating from St. Petersburg High School and St. Petersburg Junior College.  

 

Dorothy was raised in a very happy, busy, close knit family with her mother Thelma, her stepfather Joe, and her sister Margaret. During their childhood years Dorothy and Margaret often spent summer days and after school hours with Thelma and Joe helping to staff Joe’s Radio and TV store. Doing so helped to keep the family close and gave the sisters time together to extensively plan the many game and theme-related parties they often held at their family’s home for their friends from church.

 

Throughout her youth and high school years Dorothy was a very active member of First Methodist Church where she sang in the choir and was involved in planning and attending a great many of the church-related social activities and charitable events.

 

Following high school Dot became a member of First Avenue Methodist Church. It was there that she met and married her lifelong partner and soulmate, Robert (Bob) Thrush. In the following years they had two daughters, Linda and Roberta.  

 

Dot and Bob had been happily married for 67 years when Bob passed away in 2016.  

 

While raising their two daughters, Dot was a very dedicated, devoted and dynamic hands-on parent. She was an active participant in the local PTA where she held several board positions and was a co-creator of the singing phenomenon, the Mt Vernon-aires. In addition she supported the school’s Girl Scout troop, serving as their cookie-chairperson each year and providing a house and an outdoor yard for many of the troop’s get-togethers and overnight camping events. She also spent a great deal of time driving her daughters (and often their friends) to school field-day events, music lessons, swimming practice, roller skating rinks and other activities.  

 

Concurrent with those activities, Dot was also in charge of planning, preparing, and organizing all the family outings and vacations that her husband, Bob, envisioned. From time to time his ideas involved some rather extensive bicycle travel which Dot readily took in stride. On many occasions family adventures were relatively spur of the moment trips to nearby Florida locales so, unless it was a major event involving airline travel, Dot was famous for packing each person’s clothes into individually labelled Publix shopping bags which could then be expeditiously tossed into the car.  

 

All during those years, Dot and Bob were instrumental in formulating and fostering the growth of Leete Fellowship, a class that Christ Methodist Church had created for newlywed couples. In that capacity Dot was the primary organizing force and social activity planner. Especially during the early formative years, it was Dot’s creative vision that imagined most of the class’s monthly social events, designed and created the invitations, and fashioned all of the colorful, theme-related decor.  

 

During that entire period the Thrushes’ home was the setting for a near-constant stream of social events and activities attended by family members and friends, teachers, neighborhood children, and many members of Christ Methodist Church.  

 

In 1968 Dot’s husband, Bob, had the idea to build St. Petersburg's first privately owned dormitory to provide housing for the young men enrolled as freshmen and sophomores in St. Petersburg Junior College. Beginning that year both Dot and Bob focused almost all their time and attention on planning and building the College Inn.

 

The majority of the 184 students who shared rooms at the College Inn over a span of 3 ½ years were Floridians, however a number of them were from other states and some were even international residents from Kuwait, San Salvador, Puerto Rico, Nicaragua and Thailand. As the owners and operators of the C.I., Bob and Dot (Mr. and Mrs. 'T') were 'hands on' managers who assumed the responsibility for resident supervision while also maintaining the physical premises. The C.I. venture turned out to be a very unique, interesting and all consuming family business.  

 

After the C.I. was sold, while Bob operated the Audio-Visual Department at USF’s St Petersburg/Bayboro campus, Dot began working at the bookstore on that very same campus. Initially hired as an assistant to the then-serving bookstore manager, Dot learned of all of the many challenging, behind-the-scenes job responsibilities and record-keeping activities involved in running a campus bookstore.  As a result, Dot was later promoted to serve as the manager of the bookstore when the previous manager retired.

 

For many years Dot and Bob had been active members of Christ United Methodist Church (formerly First Avenue Methodist). Later on during their retirement years, they became active in Trinity United Church of Christ, their neighborhood church.  

 

At Trinity UCC, together they served as the Sunday morning hosts of The CourtYard Coffee Cart with Dot being the greeter and Bob working tirelessly behind the scenes to steadily replenish the supply of coffee and snacks as needed. During this period they made many new friends and thoroughly enjoyed the company of a wonderfully inclusive congregation.

 

During the many years Dot and Bob participated in church activities and worked at the Bayboro campus of USF, they met and formed close friendships with numerous kind, diligent, friendly, caring, and wonderfully committed people, each of whom they cherished.  

 

Once they retired from their jobs at USF, Dot became interested in genealogy. As a result, for a number of years Dot and Bob spent many happy hours visiting most all the library branches in the county. While Bob spent his time reading and selecting movie video cassettes for them to watch at home, Dot was able to use the library’s computers and the many genealogical websites that the library had access to, to research the genealogical history of our family and, upon their request, to help look into the family histories of a number of close friends as well.  

 

During all those years Dot continued to play a key role in the planning and organizing of family vacations and always had a hand in making the necessary arrangements for the family to attend a variety of cultural events to include the theatre, festivals, art shows and musical performances, all of which were shared with her grandchildren.  

 

Dot's friendly, outgoing personality, spontaneous humor, abundant creativity and tireless enthusiasm will be greatly missed but never forgotten by those who knew and loved her. During her lifetime, Dot touched a great many lives and those whose paths she crossed will have memories of sharing lots of cheerful laughter with a fun, diligent, kind, creative, positive, optimistic, generous, caring and helpful friend.  

 

An enduring example and cherished reminder of Dot’s wonderful sense of fun is the fond family memory of her participation as the one and only accordion player selected to join Jocular Jack’s Mediocre Marching Music Makers and Semi-Boogie Woogie Band.  

 

Jocular Jack’s Band was an extremely popular, barely rehearsed ensemble of fun loving amateurs who performed on an array of often zany, home made, parade-inappropriate instruments in the otherwise prestigious Festival of States Parade.   Dot Thrush is survived by her daughters, Linda Thrush and Roberta Ogdie (David); granddaughters, Laura Mosall (Brad), Sarah Ogdie Howlett (John); great grandsons, Tyler Mosall, Alex Mosall, and Blake Mosall, all of St. Petersburg.  

 

In lieu of flowers the family prefers donations be made by clicking on the following link to St. Petersburg’s Suncoast Hospice.