Edith Watson Schipper Lathrop

LATHROP EDITH WATSON SCHIPPER, died peacefully in her 93rd year on October 19, 2002. She was Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Miami where she taught from 1947 to 1975. She retired then, along with her husband of nearly 50 years, Professor Emeritus Gerrit Schipper, who founded the department in 1946. For the next seventeen years she led a life of active retirement in Hawthorne at Leesburg, FL where Gerrit died in 1986. In 1993 she returned to Miami, where she took up residence at East Ridge Retirement Village. There she met and married Gordon Lathrop, her beloved husband of the past seven years, who survives her, along with a daughter, Greta Schipper Reed, also of Miami, and a grandson, Jonathan Watson Reed, of Northampton, Massachusetts. Dr. Watson, as she was called by her students, was the oldest and last surviving daughter of Percy T. and Clara Watson, who served as medical missionaries in Fenchow, Shansi Province in China. There she and her four younger siblings were born. She returned to the States at the age of fourteen. After finishing high school, she entered Carleton College at the age of 16, receiving her BA in 1930. In 1934 she received her MA and in 1937 her Ph.D. in Philosophy from Radcliffe College, the women's college of Harvard University. She is the co-author of A First Course in Modern Logic; and author of Forms in Plato's Later Dialogues and of several academic articles. Beyond being a professor, she was a person of wide ranging interests, from literature, art, painting and politics, to taking walks and hikes, seeing birds and spending summers in their cottage in the woods in Highlands, North Carolina. We will miss her stubborn spirit, her generosity, and her appetite for life and ideas. Services will be held in the chapel at East Ridge Retirement Village, 19301 S.W. 87th Avenue, at 2 p.m. on Sat., Nov. 2. Those wishing to honor her memory are invited, in lieu of flowers, to make a donation to her favorite charity, the Southern Poverty Law Center, 400 Washington Avenue, Montgomery, Alabama 36104 (or to VITAS Hospice, 12515 N. Kendall Dr., Ste. 210, Miami, FL 33186).