News

By Ron Hayes
SOUTH PALM BEACH — Penny was a sorority pledge at Newark State Teachers College. Sol was in the Navy.
    “I’ve got a nice brother,” his sister said. “Would you like to meet him?”It was 1947. They went dancing at Meadowbrook.
Two years later, she graduated on a Friday, and they were married that Saturday night.
    When Sol Davidson died on Sept. 19, he and Penny had been married for 64 years.
    Mr. Davidson was 88, and a resident of Horizon West since 1990.
    “I tell everybody I was hanging onto his coattails every minute of our marriage,” Penny Davidson said recently. “He took care of so many things I didn’t want to take care of, and he urged me to do the things I loved.”
    Born in Newark, Mr. Davidson earned a Ph.D. from New York University, where his doctoral thesis, “The Culture of Comic Books,” is recognized as one of the first scholarly works to take popular culture seriously.
    Mr. Davidson spent his professional life in personnel management, first for Dial Finance in Des Moines, Iowa, and later as an independent management consultant.
    In 1982, he suggested they buy a trailer and go in search of a place to retire.
    Penny said no. “We’ve got to do something different.”
    They rented a houseboat and embarked on a five-month, 5,000-mile odyssey, up the Ohio River to visit a son in Pittsburgh, then down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico. And finally docked in Delray Beach.
    During the next eight winters, the Davidsons lived aboard their boat and Mr. Davidson traveled to West Palm Beach to lead a writers group at the Howard Park Community Center.
    In 1990, they moved permanently to Horizon West.
    “We didn’t like South Palm Beach,” Mrs. Davidson said. “We loved South Palm Beach.”
    While she pursued her love of the visual arts, Mr. Davidson organized the “South Palm Beach University,” bringing area professionals to Town Hall for lectures and demonstrations.
    And then, in 2000, he imagined an even bigger adventure. “He wanted to go around the world in 80 days,” Mrs. Davidson recalled. “But not anyplace you could go by plane.”
    The grand plan had to be modified — they flew to Beijing and home from Amsterdam — but in between the couple visited China and the Czech Republic, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Romania, by trains, ferries and rickshaws.
    They flew home from Amsterdam when bad weather prevented a stop in Belgium.
    “So I’m going to live without Belgium,” Mrs. Davidson said. “But I cannot imagine having had any other life.”   
    In addition to his widow, Mr. Davidson is survived by three sons, Cliff Davidson, Ron Flax-Davidson and Osha G. Davidson; seven grandchildren, Ian, Jacob, Skylar, Devorah, Sienna, Sarah and Liam; and a great-grandchild, Ezra.
    Contributions in his memory may be made to either Hadassah, 5341 W. Atlantic Ave., Delray Beach, FL 333484, or the Southern Poverty Law Center, 400 Washington Ave., Montgomery, AL 36104.