Lois Noreen Gibson Whitehead passed away peacefully at the Lodge at Old Trail on August 19, 2024. She was born in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada on May 31, 1938 as the only child of Clarence Calvin and Emma Nordine Gibson, second- and first-generation immigrants from Scotland and Sweden, respectively. Her family moved to Texas when she was nine, then to Norfolk, VA, and finally to Charlottesville, where her father served as Chief Operating Officer of Martha Jefferson Hospital.
Lois graduated from Lane High School in 1956 and the University of Virginia Education School in 1960. She then moved to Toronto to study at the Royal Conservatory of Music, from which she earned a certificate of music in 1965. She taught piano to young students for many years from her home on Rugby Avenue in Charlottesville.
After her parents died in 1983, she worked for ten years as an administrative assistant at UVa’s Center for the Liberal Arts, where she met the love of her life, physics professor, dean, and artist Walter Dexter Whitehead, Jr. His paintings hang in the Garden Room and elsewhere at the University of Virginia. They were married in Tenants Harbor, Maine in 1994, where Lois was given away by her sister friends of over 70 years, Julie Fowler Hamilton, Charlotte King Sanner, and Yen Hsu Fine.
Together Lois and Dexter moved to Crozet, where they lived happily until Dexter’s death in 2008. Crozet neighbors and friends remember Lois as unfailingly sweet, kind, generous, and wise. After she sold her house to a young family in 2021, the neighbors named the fine sledding hill behind her house—which is enjoyed each winter by many neighborhood children—“Lois’s Run” as a tribute.
Lois is survived by her stepsons Thomas Kenyon and Oliver Day Whitehead, her cousin Jaci Winship of St. Louis, MO, her cousin Bel Nordine of Toronto, Canada, her lifelong friend Yen Hsu Fine, and her dear friend and caregiver, Clover Carroll.
She will be interred at the UVa cemetery columbarium beside her husband Dexter. A memorial service will be held at Tabor Presbyterian Church, 5804 Tabor Street in Crozet, on Sunday, Sept. 15 at 2 p.m. with a reception to follow in the parish hall.
In lieu of flowers, donations may be made in Lois’s memory to the Alzheimer’s Association or Hospice of the Piedmont.
