In 1962, M. Mellanay Delhom was a retired Chicago businesswoman wondering what to do with her vast ceramics collection containing works from China to England.

Enter Daisy Wade Bridges, a ceramics lover from Charlotte visiting Chicago for a Wedgwood seminar. After hearing Delhom speak, Bridges made a note in her program: "Get to know her."

She did, and the 2,000-piece Delhom Collection, valued in the mid-1960s at $500,000, came to Charlotte's Mint Museum of Art. Delhom died Wednesday at age 94 after a short illness, at a time when Charlotte raises millions annually for the arts.

But the importance of what she gave the city still resonates.

It was the first major collection for a museum that opened with a building but virtually no art, and so put it on the cultural map. It led to the Mint's first expansion. And it brought to live in Charlotte a small woman with bright blue eyes whose passion and commitment never failed.

"She did things that women never did," said Barbara Perry, curator of decorative arts at the Mint. "She traveled extensively, went places where hardly anybody went, let alone a woman by herself.

"You keep using superlatives, but there's no other way to describe her."

In 1968, a year after an expanded Mint offered the Delhom Collection to the public, the International Wedgwood Seminar was held in Charlotte, bringing experts and collectors. Delhom was one of them, comfortable on an archeological dig in North Carolina, surveying a collection in China, or haunting the back rooms of dealers in London.

The ceramics bug bit when she was a 17-year-old in her native Fort Worth, Texas, and realized studying objects made for everything from the table to religious ceremonies could teach her about life.

She moved to Chicago where her business career included owning a well-known restaurant, the Shangri-La. At night, she'd read and review the objects she'd begun to collect.

Primarily interested in English ceramics, she collected in all major areas. Her holdings went back to the Tang Dynasty of seventh-century China and included French, German, Italian, Austrian, Japanese and Persian pieces.

Among them: serving plates with the personal mark of Augustus the Strong, the 18th-century elector of Saxony and king of Poland who established the famous Meissen porcelain factory.

Daisy Bridges remembers sitting in Delhom's Chicago living room, with two cats crawling on her, and hearing her wonder aloud about what she would do with her collection.

"I really perked up," recalled Bridges. "I thought we had a chance to get it down here."

The collection was given to the Mint with the understanding that Delhom would move to Charlotte and be employed as a curator, her salary covered by the Women's Auxiliary, according to Bridges.

Over the years, Delhom gave other gifts to expand the collection and founded the Delhom Service League to study it.

She was feisty, unafraid to speak her mind. She resigned from the Mint in 1985 after a dispute with then-director Milton Bloch, returning after he left.

She also had an enlarged vision for ceramics.