Lucy Dawson

Lucy Dawson of Owensboro passed away Monday, April 16 at her home. She was 85.

Lucy, a daughter of the late Jim and Lucy Green Buford, was born on July 24, 1932 in Nashville's Vanderbilt Hospital. They treated her to a sunlit and carefree childhood, allowing her to ride and roam on their working farm near Franklin, TN. Home was a big old historic house with family made up of four generations living in harmony. She was wonderfully educated at Franklin Elementary School, Ward Belmont Prep School, and Vanderbilt University. Although she majored in the sciences, English was always her first love. After that her working years were spent in laboratories at Vanderbilt Hospital where she met and married Dr. Royce Dawson, a young surgeon in training. Training completed and two children later, the family moved to Owensboro where a third child was born. Here began her life as an unconventional doctor's wife.

She learned to cook, had a hand in the creation of the Junior League cookbook "To Market, To Market", and subsequently published her own cook book. She loved to sew, creating baby clothes, bowties, and ball gowns; to garden, digging random holes and planting her mother's favorite flowers; continued to play bridge, a life-long interest; played tennis with vigor, deep into old age; and gloried in yard sales, clothing the bodies and furnishing the houses of family members. Into all this activity she gladly welcomed neighborhood children, one of whom in adulthood commented that "Your door was always open." Suspecting that this was not an ordinary life, she busily documented it on scraps of paper, wanting to remember that she hatched peacocks in the playroom and raised them in the yard along with her bee hives.

Also important to her was club work including the Medical Auxiliary, Tri Delta Alumni, the Junior League which honored her as the first Outstanding Sustainer, assorted book clubs, and the Daughters of the American Revolution. She held board positions with the Family Y, as well as various positions at the First Presbyterian Church where she found her late life's calling. Thousands of 7-inch squares flew off her knitting needles to be joined into blankets for women in a fistful of hospitals in Addis Abba, Ethiopia. She was never there but traveled over a lot of the world, learning and enjoying.

Caretaking always seemed to be with her. Children, of course, a succession of family members, and lastly her husband for many of his last 20 years after retiring. But she had three golden years in her mid-sixties when she enjoyed herself mentally and physically. Nobody was needy, and she could still play a pretty good game of tennis.

Inevitably her life became slowed by chronic lung disease, but she still had a store of interests to call upon: books, bridge, puzzles, letter writing, selective TV programs, and best of all, children and great grandchildren to whom she was an adored "Ma-da-da". The adoration was mutual. In the words of those grandchildren, "She loves everything you could possibly think of."

All in all, this life was a good one.

She was also preceded in death by her husband, Dr. Royce Dawson and her son-in-law John Davis who passed away April 6, 2018.

She is survived by her children, John Dawson and his wife Beverly, Lucy Davis, and Mary Dawson; her grandchildren Rachel Schardein and her husband Steve, Leslie Dawson, Fields Davis and his wife Emily, and Lucy Davis; her great grandchildren Emily Schardein and James Schardein; her sister Evelyn Fay: an assortment of nieces and nephews and greats and great-greats of these; and the cornerstone of her life, Kitty Board.

The funeral service for Mrs. Dawson will be 12:00 noon Friday at Glenn Funeral Home and Crematory, where visitation will be from 5:00 until 7:00 p.m. Thursday and after 10:00 a.m. Friday. Burial will follow in Rosehill Cemetery. Expressions of sympathy may take the form of contributions to Standing with Hope, P.O. Box 159115, Nashville, TN 37215 or Hospice of Western Kentucky.