Steve McAllister once met Carla Hinrichsen at a pizza restaurant in London.

The tall, gray-haired woman, who had been one of two female graduates in Kansas University’s 1947 law school class, carried the KU alumni newsletter.

“She had all sorts of things underlined and notes in the margins,” said McAllister, former dean of the law school. “She proceeded to quiz me on anything and everything that had happened in the law school.”

That sounds fitting, according to Hinrichsen’s cousin, Victor Eddy.

“She wanted to know everything about everything,” the Hays physician recalled. “She was a professional student.”

The Lawrence-born Hinrichsen, who attended KU before moving to Europe to live a life immersed in music and the music-publishing business, died last month. She was 83.

“She’s just one of those individuals that you meet and they’re absolutely unique,” said Jeff Weinberg, assistant to the chancellor at KU who visited Hinrichsen often over the years. “She had a fascinating life and a full life and she’s going to be missed.”

Hinrichsen worked closely with her husband, Max Hinrichsen, at his music-publishing company, today called Peters Edition Ltd.

According to a recent report in The (London) Independent, Carla Hinrichsen was managing director when the company published a complete edition of Claude Debussy’s piano music and made a licensing deal involving the works of Richard Strauss and Gyorgy Ligeti, used by Stanley Kubrick in “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

Hinrichsen was born in 1922 in Lawrence. Her father, Carl Eddy, had been a reporter for the Liberal Times, the Kansas City Star and the Omaha World-Herald in his younger years, and was later postmaster in Colby, according to a report in the Colby Free Press.

Hinrichsen received a Bachelor of Arts degree at Mills College in Oakland, Calif. She graduated from KU’s law school in 1947.

“She was sharp,” said Glee Smith, a Lawrence lawyer who graduated with Hinrichsen.

She worked for the American War Department in Germany for a time, according to The Independent.

She married Max Hinrichsen in 1956 and co-directed the company, then Hinrichsen Edition, until her husband’s death in 1965. From 1966 to 1976, she was managing director of the company. In 1976, she founded the Hinrichsen Foundation, a charity devoted to the promotion of music.

Weinberg fondly recalled his meetings with Hinrichsen.

“She was a wonderful conversationalist,” he said. “She really didn’t want to talk about herself. She wanted to talk about the rest of the world.”

She was tall and distinguished, imposing, but warm and caring, Weinberg said.

“She occasionally talked about how it was important for her to encourage other people to be creative and to enhance the world that they were going to inherit from her generation,” he said.