Shirley Williams Gibson

Shirley Williams Gibson, 104, traveled peacefully to heaven on February 21, 2025. She is remembered as a lovely, charming, spirited woman who for the better part of a century maintained a keen intellect, a sharp wit, and a busy social calendar. A lifelong resident of the Cleveland area, she was a champion of the city’s civic institutions. She treasured the values of education, nature, travel, and human connection, which she imparted to her children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and countless other colleagues, visitors, and friends.

She is survived by her children, Linda Paine (Eliot), Martha Marsh (Richard), and Birkett Gibson (Gloria), her grandchildren, Emily Felderman (Jim), Phebe Knorr (Jeff), Timothy Paine (Sabine), Amelia Lindberg (Russ), Sam Rogers (Marcia), Dan Gibson (Stacey), and Will Gibson (Anna), and her great-grandchildren, Julia and Ellie Felderman, Gretchen Faus, Cabot Knorr, Campbell and Taylor Lindberg, and Chase Gibson. She was preceded in death by her husband, 2nd Lt. Hugh Robert Gibson, her brother, 1st Lt. William “Bill” Birkett Williams, and her parents, Edna Campbell Williams and Birkett Livers Williams.

Shirley Jane Williams was born on June 11, 1920, at St. Ann’s Hospital in Cleveland. The Williams family lived in Shaker Heights. Shirley was active from a young age, enjoying swimming, tennis, and field hockey, and she adored her older brother, Bill. As a Girl Scout she once had the honor of escorting Amelia Earhart into the auditorium before the famed aviator gave a speech. Shirley went to Coventry School and Malvern School before attending Hathaway Brown, where she was voted president of the student council and named to the All-Cleveland field hockey team. In 1938, she won HB’s prestigious Honor Girl award, given to the graduating senior who best embodies the school’s ideal of character. 

That commendation, however, belies Shirley’s sense of mischief, as she was a known prankster. She and her best friend, Jeanne Norweb, herself a standout student at HB, once conspired to smuggle live chickens into school under their coats. That morning they ran immediately into their headmistress, who stopped them to chat. Luckily for Shirley and Jeanne, the birds kept quiet—until, that is, the girls released them into the halls, where they clucked away just as exams began.

Shirley’s father and his auto dealership, Birkett Williams Ford on Euclid Avenue, were the axle around which family life revolved. While the Williamses fared better than many during the Great Depression, Shirley nonetheless took lessons from her father and the era in which she came of age. She forever remembered the value of a dollar, always mindful of reducing waste and saving anything that might be of use later, such as a “perfectly good” bit of wrapping paper. She also developed a talent for investment, which she honed by reading the Wall Street Journal regularly into her nineties.

After graduating from Hathaway Brown, Shirley went on to Smith College, where she double-majored in English and art history and met the man she would marry. Though she loved parties and had had her share of suitors, it took a blind date for her to meet her eventual husband. Before he deployed for World War II, Bill Williams set his sister up with a good friend of his, Hugh Gibson, who had recently dropped out of Brown University to enlist in the Army Air Corps. The pair hit it off. Two weeks after Shirley graduated from Smith, she and Hugh were married.

Shirley then became a so-called camp follower, driving down to Texas where Hugh was stationed as a flight instructor. During the war she volunteered with the Red Cross as a member of its Motor Corps, transporting volunteers and supplies, and as a Gray Lady, offering non-medical aid and services like rolling bandages and knitting clothes. Hugh was later deployed to the Pacific, where he flew several missions in his B-24 bomber, primarily across the islands of Oceania and East Asia.

That it was Bill who introduced Shirley and Hugh soon took on added gravity: On January 11, 1943, his single-seater P-40 fighter was shot down over Libya, where he had been attached to the British Eighth Army working to maintain control of the Suez Canal. He was reported missing in action. The family was devastated by the loss, and founded in his honor the William Birkett Williams Lecture Series at Fairmount Presbyterian Church, which Shirley shepherded for years. A portrait of Bill hung prominently in her home ever afterwards.

After the war Shirley and Hugh returned to Shaker Heights, and he went to work for his father-in-law. In time he worked his way up such that he bought Birkett Williams out of Birkett Williams Ford and built the company into the largest Ford dealership in Ohio. Hugh’s leadership of the National and International Automotive Dealers Associations offered the couple many opportunities to travel; Shirley thought they must have circled the globe three times over and had visited all but one of the “-stan” countries. At each stop Shirley was responsible for planning events for dealers’ families by day and hosting formal dinner parties by night, tasks which she, an accomplished entertainer, handled with aplomb.

Just as Shirley delighted in travel, she was committed to her community back home. She was a member of the Cleveland Museum of Art, where she was a member of the Director’s Circle and the Womens Council, as well as the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. She also was a member of the Junior League, served as Chair of the Benjamin Rose Institute on Aging, and volunteered at St. Luke’s Hospital.

Shirley enjoyed few things as much as nature. She was a longtime member of the Cleveland Botanical Garden and the Holden Arboretum, serving in advisory roles at each, and a pillar of the Shaker Lakes Garden Club, where she co-founded the Busy Bees Garden Club in collaboration with Emmanuel Episcopal Church. She was a horticulture judge for Shaker Lakes Garden Club, which established in her honor the Shirley Williams Gibson Award for Horticulture, as well as the Garden Club of America. Her home gardens always seemed to be in bloom, and photos of them are preserved in the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Gardens.

Faith was an essential element of Shirley’s life. For decades she was a parishioner at Fairmount Presbyterian, serving as a member of session, the memorial committee, and the garden ministry, as well as trustee and chair of the finance committee. When she and Hugh moved to their home in Chardon in 1981, she became a fixture at St. Hubert’s Episcopal Church in Kirtland Hills, where she regularly attended services, classes, and Bible study.

Cooking was a passion of Shirley’s, whether stretching wartime rations or preparing a holiday feast. Meals in the Gibson home improved considerably thanks to the teachings of Julia Child, of whom Shirley was an early disciple. Shirley would watch Julia’s PBS show with cookbook in hand, jotting notes in her neat, looping handwriting. When she moved to Breckenridge Village in Willoughby in 2001, after Hugh had passed away, a wall of bookshelves was installed to house her cookbook collection. She was pleased to later donate that collection to Edwins Leadership & Restaurant Institute, where it is used in the culinary education of former inmates.

A favorite saying of Shirley’s mother’s was, “You will never dislike anyone if you get to know them enough.” Shirley abided by that maxim and, indeed, could often be found rapt in conversation, whether with an old friend or a new acquaintance. Once on Nantucket, where she and Hugh had docked while sailing with friends, they put on the finest clothes they had and crashed a fundraiser for George H.W. Bush ahead of his first presidential campaign. The interlopers were never found out. Instead, Shirley spent much of the night charming future First Lady Barbara Bush, the pair bonding over their shared experiences at Smith.

Over the years Shirley added to her mother’s favorite saying a few of her own, including “Keep learning,” “Keep an open mind,” and “Do everything you can while you can.” She passed these ideals down to her family, but more than that, she exemplified them. All her life she was a voracious reader, an observer of local and international news, and a learner who sought to know more about the world she lived in. She kept an active social life and always had something new to discuss. From her youngest days until the very end, she maintained a twinkle in her eye. While such a sentiment fails to capture all of her: Shirley Gibson lived a good, full life. She will be missed.

Donations in her honor may be made to the Shaker Lakes Garden Club or St. Hubert’s Episcopal Church.  A service will be held in the spring.