Married for Life
After 56 years of marriage, Walter Paul Gibson Jr. and Mary Jane Knowles Gibson died just three weeks apart last summer. The Huntsville, Ala., couple is survived by their only daughter, Suzanne Gibson Naumann, BS’82, and two grandsons.
Mary Jane, who died July 17, 2013, just a few hours short of her 83rd birthday, was employed by the Huntsville City Schools and spent the majority of her career teaching first grade at Jones Valley Elementary School from its opening in 1963 until her retirement. Born July 18, 1930, in Madison County, Ala., she received her undergraduate degree from Florence State Teachers College in 1951 and her master’s in education from George Peabody College for Teachers. She took great joy in her students throughout the years and believed that if you can read, you can do anything.
Walter, who died Aug. 4, 2013, at the age of 86, majored in math and physics at Vanderbilt. He was a veteran who served during the postwar occupation in Europe. He moved to Huntsville in 1954 to work for Redstone Arsenal in the new field of electronic computers.
An old-school Huntsville rocket-era man, he loved numbers, wore two pocket protectors, and used punch cards for scratch paper. In addition to his work in computer science, he was a jazz saxophone player and longtime member of the Karl Garvin Band of Nashville.