Avis was born in Bonne Terre, Missouri-the first of three girls born to Paul Higdon, a civil engineer, and Barbara Jean Kelly Higdon. In 1950, she moved with her family to San Diego, California, close to her mother's extended family with historical roots in ranches of the Carlsbad area. Avis attended Brooklyn Elementary School, Theodore Roosevelt Junior High School, and graduated from San Diego High School. She attended Stephens College for one year and graduated in 1968 from the University of Redlands, where she majored in history. With her sisters, Elizabeth and Connie, she was an avid reader and was an active participant in youth and mission ventures of Brooklyn Heights Presbyterian Church.
Two years of graduate work led to a Master of Education Degree in Elementary Education, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, which she completed in 1970. While at Illinois, Avis met and married Donald G. Davis, Jr., who was studying for his doctorate in library history. She and Don married on December 6, 1969 and lived in Champaign until moving to Austin, Texas, in August 1971, with their six-month old daughter Lucinda.
As a young professor's wife and mother of an infant, Avis quickly assumed a hospitable role that she had cultivated in graduate school. She hosted coffees and open houses for Don' s students at the University for nearly four decades, as well as for students of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship--and participated in small home groups from Covenant Presbyterian Church. Though caring for two more children-Samuel (1973) and Caroline (1977)-and managing an extended household, she was always excited about getting neighbors together, especially at Christmas time-in her homes near Northwest Park, the Victorian house in Hyde Park, or the bungalow on Harris Avenue in the Hancock neighborhood. Her community and reading interests came together when she led the Hyde Park Neighborhood Association and the Friends of the Austin Public Library during the 1980s and 1990s through some turbulent times.
Avis enjoyed immensely her engagement with books, ideas, and customers at the Logos Bookstore for several years, a gratifying experience that ended with her serious cancer surgery in the fall of 1995. Though dealing thereafter with chronic lymphocytic leukemia and recurring ovarian cancer, she continued to travel widely with Don to international professional meetings and in the past decade to Oxbridge 2005 and 2008, seminars of the C.S. Lewis Foundation. At her church, she served two terms as elder. Her abiding joy in promoting reading was fulfilled in recent years by being church librarian. In addition to organizing various adult education programs, she was also a leader for several years of Lamplighters, the women's Bible study program of Covenant Presbyterian Church. As a cancer survivor for many years, Avis encouraged other people in their illnesses by her calm, genuine concern-and grew in her confidence that prayer, and the God to whom we pray, is essential for spiritual vitality.
She leaves her husband Don and their three children, Lucinda of Baltimore, Sam and his wife Brenda of Fort Worth, and Caroline and her husband Chris McGlade and their daughter Charlotte of Belton; her mother Barbara Nichols and her husband Jackie of Ukiah, California; and her sisters Elizabeth and her husband John Brigden of Alexandria, Virginia; and Connie and her husband Pat Gannon of Santa Fe, New Mexico.
A Service in Witness of the Resurrection will be held on Sunday, October 16, 2:00 p.m. at Covenant Presbyterian Church, 3003 Northland Drive. Memorial gifts may be made to Covenant Presbyterian Church for the church library and Hospice Austin.
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