Lillian Grace Wilson Ross Pippitt of Middlebury, Vt. Died Sunday, Nov. 19, at the Helen Porter Nursing Home following a brief illness. She was 91 and had been a resident of Middlebury since 1994.
She was born Oct. 18, 1909 in Waverly, Mass., the only child of Janet Conchie Ross and Donald J. Ross, noted golf course architect. Both Lillian’s parents had emigrated from Scotland and the Scottish heritage they passed on to their daughter remained with her throughout her lifetime. As a young girl, she returned often to visit relatives in Scotland.
She grew up in the Boston area and in Pinehurst. From her teenage years until the year of her death, she spent much of every summer at her home in Little Compton, R.I. Following the death of her mother in 1922, Lillian attended and graduated from the Emma Willard School in Troy, N.Y. and in 1932, she graduated from Mount Holyoke College.
Lillian Ross originally met Richard Branch Pippitt of Port Jarvis, N.Y. at age four at the home of his aunt. They married in 1936 while he was a student at the Harvard Medical School.
The couple spent their first years in Boston, Andover, Mass., Washington, D.C. and Philadelphia where Dr. Pippitt did medical residencies and served in the Navy during World War II.
After the war, they returned to the Boston area where he maintained an ophthalmology practice in Wellesley and Boston. During her Wellesley years, Lillian served as a Deaconess of the Wellesley Hills Congregational Church.
In 1965, the couple semi-retired to Freedom, N.H. After Dr. Pippitt’s death in 1982, she remained there before moving to Middlebury where she was a member of the Middlebury Congregational Church.
A golfer in her youth, Mrs. Pippitt was the oldest surviving member of the Silver Foils Club ladies’ golfing association in Pinehurst. Besides golf, her interests included music and cooking for a wide range of family and friends from all over the world. She was an accomplished needleworker and an enthusiastic curler.
She was devoted to books and reading and kept detailed journals that chronicled daily life. Those diaries from over three decades contain innumerably wry comments on the passing scene — both public and personal.
Known in her later years as “DAKA,” Mrs. Pippitt was loved not just by her own family but by their many friends who came to know her. Young people who originally met her as the mother or grandmother of their contemporaries adopted her as their own and would travel across continents or oceans to visit her.
She had an extraordinary ability to share experiences with young people across distant generations, from deep feelings to occasionally ribald good humor.
She leaves three daughters, Janet Beers Winkler of Middlebury, Vt., Susan Veguez of Cornwall, Vt., and Elizabeth Shapiro of Chagrin Falls, Ohio, and six grandchildren.
A memorial service in celebration of her life will be held at the Middlebury Congregational Church on Saturday, Nov. 25, at 2 pm.
The family requests in lieu of flowers that contributions in her memory be made to the Congregational Church of Middlebury, the Middlebury Volunteer Ambulance Association or to a charity of choice.
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