Dorothy Laird Williams

Dorothy Laird Williams, of Atlanta, Georgia, passed away peacefully, on November 11, 2024, of natural causes at her home in Seagrove, Florida, surrounded by family. That transcendent moment occurred ninety-three years, four months and twenty-four days from the date of her birth, on June 19, 1931, to Cody and Dorothy (Dobbs) Laird, of Atlanta, Georgia. Dot lived through the Depression, the Dust Bowl, WWII, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Civil Rights Movement, acid rock, and all five of her children making it safely to the shores of adulthood. 

She was wildly talented. In high school, for example, she wrote essays in cursive using both her right and her left hand, her script slanting right for a while, then left. She was a horse whisperer, learning to ride at the age of five. By age twenty, she was a nationally recognized hunter/jumper champion and was soon training horses for, and a trustee of, the U.S. Olympic team. At age fifteen, she earned her pilot’s license and for most of her adult life she flew a Beechcraft Bonanza single-engine prop plane from the Florida Keys to the Rocky Mountains. She celebrated her sixtieth birthday by parachuting from a plane.

Dot graduated with honors from Washington Seminary High School in Atlanta in 1949, and, at her mother’s urging, matriculated to Sweet Briar College. She didn’t like it. No boys. So, she transferred to the University of Georgia, joined the Kappa Alpha Theta Sorority and eventually became its chapter president. For her academic achievements, she was inducted into the Phi Beta Kappa Honor Society. She was just getting started.

She went on to become an honorary Whip of the Atlanta Hunt Club; she started The Ocean Reef Flying Club; was president of The Racquet Club at Ocean Reef; she was an accomplished marksman; obtained her scuba diving license; became the commodore of The Sailing Club of Ocean Reef and achieved the rank of Coxswain in the United States Coast Guard Auxiliary. And she was a Silver Life Master bridge player. She also happened to be one of the founding owners of the Atlanta Falcons football team. She accomplished all this while raising five children.

She wanted to be a large-animal veterinarian. But, in 1954, at the tender age of twenty-three, she pivoted and married her college sweetheart, George Williams, then took care of that large animal for the next sixty-six years until his passing in 2020. He worshipped her. 

In 1960, twenty miles north of Atlanta, she and George carved seventy acres from a dense forest bordering the Chattahoochee River and created a paradise. With George, she designed their home, drove a tractor, built a barn, cleared land for pastures, fenced those pastures, raised and trained horses, and tied a million shoes and cooked a million meals for her beehive of a family—every morning and every evening—until the very last one of us headed off to college. Now, if you want to celebrate her culinary wizardry, just pour a can of kidney beans into your next spaghetti sauce. Or add some Fritos to your chili. A Michelin-starred chef she was not. She couldn’t carry a tune, either. At all. Not even a little. Like, seriously, Mom, stop trying to sing! That is NOT how “Happy Birthday” goes!

Dot was preceded in death by her glorious sister, Nancy Croswell, of Atlanta, and survived by her fabulous brother, Cody Laird, Jr., and his wife, Linda, of Atlanta; her son Laird Williams of Little Rock, Arkansas, along with his two children, Katie and Shann; her daughter, Cary, and her husband, Bob Hogue, of Phillipsburg, Montana, together with their four children (Coty Hogue, Breanne Hogue Riordan and her husband Matt, Elly Hogue Kunz and her husband, Jackson, and Ladd Hogue and his wife, Katie); her son Stuart Williams of Whitefish, Montana; her son Howard and his wife, Lee, of Seagrove, Florida; and her son Doug Williams of Bozeman, Montana, along with his daughters, Helen and Caitlin. She is also survived by six great-grandchildren: Kason, Hunter, Emory, Hayes, Stella and Navy. Each of us is healthy and thriving and know that having Dot as our matriarch was and remains a blessing. We would also like to mention her priceless and beloved end-of-life caregivers, Mrs. Von Young, Mrs. Betty Thomas and Mrs. Irish Walker, and certainly not least, our wonderful cousin, Marie Lyon Carney. Mom was so blessed to have you all enter her life. Thank you so very much.

For all the people who were lucky enough to know Dot, a feature of hers they will likely remember was her impossibly calm, deeply perceptive, most often reticent, occasionally piercing, sapphire-blue eyes. When they regarded you steadily, it was like looking into the eyes of the Mona Lisa.

Thank you, Mom, for all the PB&J’s and Chips Ahoy! cookies; for that downstairs freezer dedicated solely to boxloads of Omaha steaks; for the decades of help with spelling (it didn’t help!); for that cage-free trampoline which bounced all of us simultaneously, without any of us ever breaking our necks; for teaching us all to swim (via the sink-or-swim method); for all the rides and all the counsel; but perhaps thank you most of all for that low, slow, three-beat laugh of yours—huh, huh, huhhh—which you reserved for the oh-so rare times when someone said something almost as witty as you always were. You were amazing, Mom, truly. Now go become that astronaut you wanted to be in your next life. 

There will be a family-centric beach-side celebration of her life at her home in Seagrove, Florida, on December 7th. In lieu of flowers, she would graciously accept your contribution in her honor to The Morgan-Oliver School (https://www.morganoliverschool.org/donations), a small, alternative school in Atlanta dedicated to serving disadvantaged families, a school Dot enthusiastically supported annually as a long-tenured trustee of the Atlanta-based Dobbs Foundation (http://www.dobbsfoundation.org).