Lucy B. Henson

On January 17, 2011 Lucy B. Henson, attorney and Vice President, Maryland National bank, died peacefully surrounded by her family at the age of 84. A well respected and well known estate planning professional, Henson was one of the first women to break through the glass ceiling at some of the city’s most prominent banking institutions.

Born Lusitania Benedetto in Wilmington, DE , Henson began college at 17. She was accepted at the University of Pennsylvania where they asked her to defer for a year because she was “too young”. Instead, she phoned George Washington University and was accepted “on the spot”. She attended GW and then received her BA from Wilson Teachers College. She returned to George Washington Law School and graduated in 1953, along with her husband, Edwin N. Henson. In recognition of the fact that they were the first married couple to graduate from the law school, they proudly led the commencement procession there just a few years ago.

When “Henson and Henson” passed the June 1954 DC Bar Exam, the Evening Star led with the headline…A woman named for a ship and her husband were among 298 passing the June Bar Examination. ( Henson’s full name was Lusitania, after the great Cunard liner sunk just before the United States entered World War I. ) Immediately following graduation, she opened a three-woman law firm in Washington, DC.

A few years later, she moved to Delaware where she was admitted to the Delaware Bar in 1958, the eighth woman to achieve this status and the first in an eight-year gap between 1950 and 1958. In recognition of this achivement, she was recognized by the Honorable Sandra day O’Connor at an event in 1998. In 1959, she obtained a position in the trust department of the Bank of Delaware where she remained for the next five years. Henson then spent the next thirty-two years in trust and estate work in Maryland, rising to become Maryland National Bank’s first woman Vice President in 1971, and the first woman manager in the trust department in 1975. In addition to her tenure at Maryland National, she served as Vice President of Trust New Business at Carroll County Bank and Trust, retiring from that position in 1991. She also taught business law for 18 years in the Weekend College of Notre Dame of Maryland.

Henson was active in the community and was President of the Baltimore Chapter, National Association of Bank Women. She had been a trustee of Good Samaritan Hospital, the President’s Council of the College of Notre Dame, the Advisory Boards of the Salvation Army and Community College of Baltimore, St. Joseph’s Church, the Maryland Province of the Jesuits, and many others. Her professional involvement included the Baltimore Association of Tax Lawyers, the Baltimore Estate Planning Council, and others. She particularly enjoyed being one of a handful of charter women members at the Center Club, joining as soon as women were officially invited to become full members. And she was equally proud of declining membership to the Maryland Club when women could finally join, citing her reason as her memory of “too many times when her colleagues and clients had to eat downstairs because a woman was with them.”

She had recently celebrated 61 years of marriage to her beloved husband Edwin Henson, a retired tax attorney. She had one loving daughter, Tracey H. Ford, Towson University’s Director of Development, Dear sister of Mary Palese of Wilmington, DE and Dr. Leo J. Benedetto of Wilmington, DE and two cherished grandchildren, Henson and Molly Ford.

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The family will receive friends in the Lemmon Funeral Home of Dulaney Valley, Inc. 10 W. Padonia Road (at York Road) Timonium, Maryland 21093 on Friday, January 21 from 2 to 4 and 7 to 9PM. A Funeral Mass will be celebrated in the St. Joseph Church, 101 Church Lane, Cockeysville, MD on Saturday, January 22 at 10AM. Interment Dulaney Valley Memorial Gardens. Expressions of sympathy may be directed in Lucy’s name to St. Joseph Church at the above address