Norfolk City Virginia USGenWeb Archives Obituaries.....Dickson, William Petty, Jr. September 17, 1989
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Robert Woolfitt http://www.genrecords.net/emailregistry/vols/00034.html#0008401 June 11, 2025, 3:07 pm

Virginian--Pilot September 18, 1989
NORFOLK — William Petty Dickson Jr., 73, active in civic endeavors, military 
service in World War II and local, state and national jurisprudence, died Sept. 
17, 1989, in a local hospital.
A friend, Old Dominion University President William B. Spong Jr., observed 
Sunday that Dickson was “a great citizen” in running a United Fund Campaign; 
overseeing the merger of the Norfolk General Hospital and Leigh Memorial 
Hospital into Sentara; and serving as president of the board of directors of 
Blue Cross-Blue Shield.
“He was intensely loyal to almost everything of which he had been a part and to 
his friends, of whom there were many,” Spong said.
In Spong’s campaigns for the Virginia Senate and U.S. Senate, Dickson was 
manager-at-large. “Where do you need some help?” Dickson would ask the 
candidate.
“And then," Spong said, “without any direction, the Coach would go there and do 
something, back ’em against the wall. He could get along with kings and bums.”
Until illness forced his retirement in 1986, Dickson, a native of Norfolk, was a 
senior partner of the Norfolk law firm of Willcox and Savage. “Physically, he 
was a bear of a man,” Toy Savage Jr. said Sunday. “Most of the time he was a 
teddy bear, but, when pressed, he could be a grizzly bear.”
“He was active in the American Bar Association, and he was our front man,” said 
Thomas H. Willcox Jr. “He knew lawyers throughout the country, and he was well-
known and well-liked wherever he went.”
Savage recalled getting into a cab with a lawyer during a meeting of the ABA in 
Philadelphia, while his companion was remarking, “We got to go somewhere and 
find Coach.”
“I know where he is,” said the cabbie — and delivered them into Dickson’s 
company. Another colleague told an inquisitive cab driver in Chicago that he was 
from Norfolk, whereupon the driver asked, “Do you know a man down there named 
Dickson?’’
A younger member recalled Dickson taking him around an ABA meeting in Dallas and 
introducing him to individuals, “And every one of them stood out with a 
distinguishing trait, wearing a white suit or having a nick-name such as 
‘Judge,’ the image of old school lawyers.” Dickson, he said, lent flow to a 
legal document, a touch of elegance to an offer in a large real estate 
transaction.
He was president of the Norfolk-Portsmouth Bar Association from 1955 to 1956, 
and of the Virginia Bar Association from 1959 to 1960. He was a member of the 
American Bar Association’s House of Delegates from 1960 to 1976, and of its 
board of governors from 1968 to 1972. He was a director of the American 
Judicature Society from 1961 to 1965, and chairman of the Fellows of the 
American Bar Foundation from 1980 to 1981. He was among Virginia lawyers who 
worked for the release of U-2 Pilot Gary Francis Powers after his plane crashed 
in the Soviet Union in 1960.
As a student at the University of Virginia, managing the football team, Dickson 
was nicknamed “Coach” because, he once said, he was the only one, during the 
team’s long, losing spell, who would sit with the coach at the end of the bench. 
He was president of the university’s alumni association from 1970 to 1971.
In World War II, he was in several Pacific campaigns, and during an assault on a 
Japanese-held island, won the Bronze Star as a Beachmaster, attached to the 
Sheridan, while maintaining, though wounded and under enemy fire, a flow of 
critical materiel to the assault troops.
Dickson served as president of the board of Medical Center Hospitals from 1972 
to 1974; secretary of the Jackson Field and Episcopal Home for Girls; secretary-
treasurer of the Mary F. Ballentine Home for the Aged; president of the Hampton 
Roads Council Navy League, and chairman of the Norfolk Advisory Board of Sovran 
Bank. He was a founder and first president of the Harbor Club and a member of 
Christ and St. Luke’s Episcopal Church.
Survivors include his wife, Daisy Kempton Dickson; two daughters, Tate Dickson 
Snyder of Menlo Park, Calif., and Mary Petty Dickson Edwards of Virginia Beach; 
a stepson, Albert Kempton D’Ossche of Los Angeles; a sister, Anne Dickson Jordan 
of Virginia Beach; a brother, C. Talbott Dickson of Virginia Beach; and three 
grandchildren.
The funeral will be conducted at 11 a.m. Tuesday in Christ and St. Luke’s 
Episcopal Church, Norfolk. Burial will be private. H.D. Oliver Funeral 
Apartments, Norfolk, is handling arrangements.
Memorial donations may be made to favorite charities.



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