Obituaries - April 23, 1999

Thomas Davis; Piedmont Airlines Founder

Thomas H. Davis, 81, founder of Piedmont Airlines. Davis got his start in the aviation business in 1939 when he joined Camel City Flying Service, a distributor of Piper and Stinson aircraft in Winston-Salem, N.C. By 1943, he had risen to company president, opened 17 dealerships throughout the state and changed the firm’s name to Piedmont Aviation. During World War II, he expanded Piedmont to include flight schools, which trained military pilots. When the war was over, Davis’ concern about keeping his large staff employed led him to apply to the Civil Aeronautics Board for several local service airline routes. Piedmont won the routes and, in 1947, Piedmont Airlines was born. Its first commercial flight took off Feb. 20, 1948, making stops in Pinehurst, Charlotte, Asheville and Lexington before terminating in Cincinnati. Davis became Piedmont’s chairman and CEO in 1981, then retired in 1983 and took the title of chairman of the executive committee. In 1989, when it merged with USAir (now US Airways), it had 21,500 employees and annual revenues of $2.5 billion. Davis, who learned to fly when he was 16, was a recipient of the Guggenheim Medal for outstanding achievement in aeronautics in 1984. He continued to fly until last year, piloting a variety of aircraft, including a restored Taylor E-2 and sail planes. He was a benefactor of Wake Forest University, the Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center and other organizations. On Thursday in Winston-Salem after a lengthy illness.

Mary Rockefeller; Former N.Y. 1st Lady

Mary Clark Rockefeller, 91, former first lady of New York state and supporter of nursing education when married to New York Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller. Mary Todhunter Clark was born to wealth as the heiress of a Pennsylvania family that built its fortune on the railroad. The second of eight children, she met her future husband when she was a girl spending the summer with her family in Northeast Harbor, Maine, and Nelson Rockefeller was a boy vacationing on nearby Seal Island. They married barely a week after his graduation from Dartmouth. Their legal separation in 1961 after 31 years of marriage rocked the political and social worlds. Their divorce in Nevada the next year and the then-governor’s quick remarriage--to Margaretta Fitler “Happy” Murphy--was thought by many political experts to have undermined his chances of winning the Republican presidential nomination in 1964. He lost two other bids for the nomination, in 1960 and 1968, but served as Gerald Ford’s vice president from 1974 to 1977. He died in 1979. A tall, trim woman, Rockefeller had a special interest in nursing education and promoted the nursing profession as a volunteer on several boards. She was honored for her service by the New York County Registered Nurses and the National League of Nursing. On Wednesday at her home on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

Baroness B. de Rothschild; Dance Patron

Baroness Batsheva de Rothschild, 84, modern dance patron in New York and Israel and granddaughter of Baron James de Rothschild, who founded the French branch of the Rothschild banking empire. At the outbreak of World War II, Rothschild fled France with her family for the United States, where she studied chemistry and biology at Columbia University and worked at an industrial laboratory. She later joined Charles de Gaulle’s Free French Army and was a liaison between French and American forces in Paris after the Normandy invasion. Returning to New York after the war, she became a student of modern dance innovator Martha Graham, beginning a lifelong friendship. She supported Graham’s fledgling dance company, housing it in a building she owned, traveled with the dancers worldwide and served as their wardrobe mistress. She established the Batsheva de Rothschild Foundation for Arts and Sciences, which supported Graham’s dance company and other artists and composers. The baroness became involved with Israel on a 1956 trip with Graham and moved there permanently in 1962. Her philanthropy in Israel encompassed a chamber music association, a science foundation and a group to promote Israeli handicrafts. Israel had no tradition of dance theater, which Rothschild set about to change after meeting the South African ballerina Jeannette Ordman, who had opened a studio in Tel Aviv in 1967. She scolded Ordman for training dancers and sending them abroad. In 1968 she and Ordman founded the Bat-Dor Dance Company, which trains its members in classical and modern dance and performs worldwide. On Tuesday at her home in Tel Aviv.

Su Shueh-lin; Chinese Writer, Intellectual

Su Shueh-lin, 104, Chinese author and veteran of China’s 1919 May Fourth movement for free expression. Su influenced generations of Chinese leaders and political reformers in her writing and often criticized communism and leftist writers for politicizing literature. She was the last survivor of the group of writers who took part in the 1919 intellectual revolution. Over 70 years she produced 50 published works, including poetry, literary criticism and novels. She was best known for the novel “Thorn Heart” and a collection of essays, “Green Sky.” The prolific author was born in China’s Anhui province at the end of the Ching dynasty. While a student at Beijing’s Women’s Normal College, she was swept up in the movement for political, social and cultural freedom in May 1919. That intellectual movement, led by academics such as Hu Shih, resulted in Chinese being written for the first time in the vernacular instead of the classical style. Su taught at universities in China until 1949, when she fled to Taiwan with Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists before the Communist takeover of the mainland. She returned to China for the first time since the Communist takeover last year to meet relatives and visit Anhui University, where she once taught. On Wednesday of complications from a lung infection at National Cheng Kung University in Tainan, Taiwan.