David Deck

Born November 6, 1930, David (who never used his given first name) grew up in East Point, GA, the son of Lucius Linton Deck, an Army intelligence officer and a high school principal and teacher, and Rosalie Wootten Deck, a homemaker and choir director. As a youngster during the Depression and WWII, David enjoyed raising rabbits, delivering a newspaper route, reading voluminously, singing in the church choir, and listening to his grandmother’s family stories.

David graduated from East Point’s Russell High School and entered Davidson College in the fall of 1947 when he was 16 years old. He majored in biology, toured with the college chorus, and graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1951. After Davidson, he attended Princeton University on a Rockefeller Foundation scholarship and studied biology in the lab of Dr. Elmer G. Butler. His research at Princeton focused on the behavior of innervated cells associated with limb regeneration in amphibians. He received his PhD from Princeton in 1954 and was selected to the Sigma Xi scientific research honor society.

In the fall of 1954, Dr. Deck began a 46-year teaching career in the Department of Anatomy (later Cell Biology) at the University of Virginia School of Medicine. In late October of that year, Dr. Deck was encouraged by a former Davidson classmate to take a blind date, Pauline “Polly” Phelps of Abingdon, VA, to the UVa-UNC football game. One of the weekly letters that he wrote home to his parents establishes that he did not really want to go on this blind date, but it changed the course of his life. After a whirlwind romance and engagement, David and Polly were married in August 1955. For many years afterward, they attended the UVa-UNC football game in fond remembrance of their first date. They were married for 69 years before her death in August 2024.

David’s long association with the University of Virginia was briefly paused for one year in the mid-1960s while he attended Harvard University for a postdoctoral fellowship in cell biology with Dr. Betty Hay.

In his years at UVa, he taught anatomy and histology to over 6,000 first-year UVa medical school students. He also hauled scores of buckets of salamander eggs into his home’s basement and garage for his research projects, sometimes enlisting his children to collect these eggs from the creek near their house. He worked with and advised numbers of graduate students and also studied and published research with Mano Thubrikar and Stanton Nolan on structures of the aortic valve and heart tissues. At UVa, Dr. Deck received several Excellence in Teaching awards from the students and faculty and, in recognition of his scholastic work and service to the University, he was selected to become a member of UVa’s Raven Society.

David and Polly were members of Westminster Presbyterian Church in Charlottesville for over 65 years. He found purposeful meaning through his involvement in the life of Westminster, participating in church life as a leader and guiding voice. He sang in the choir for over 60 years and served at every level of leadership, including several minister search committees. Along with other church leaders, David and Polly established the church's Westminster Lectureship series in 2007, a seminar series addressing topics in contemporary theology.

Making music was one of the joys of David’s life. This began in youth church choirs and continued through his travels with the men’s chorus at Davidson College. He not only was a cornerstone of the tenor section of the Westminster Church choir, but he also sang in the then-nascent Charlottesville Oratorio Society. He served as President of the Oratorio Society in the late 1970s and was one of the founders of the Charlottesville Youth Orchestra (now the seven-county Youth Orchestras of Central Virginia) in 1978.

David’s friends and family remember his skills at word games (with his cryptic handwritten game notes), his amazing ability to fix anything mechanical, and his thoughtful and steady care of his friends and neighbors in times of crisis and illness.

His children fondly remember car trips ranging from weekend outings to month-long car camping adventures across the United States and Canada. He and Polly continued tent camping with friends into their 50s and 60s, and even decided to take a small tent and trunk of supplies to camp in Europe when their kids were in college.

David’s greatest joy was being a father. He and Polly worked tirelessly to ensure their children and grandchildren encountered the world with inquisitive minds and loving and empathetic hearts. For this, his children are boundlessly grateful.

J. David Deck is survived by sons J. David Deck, Jr. (Patricia) of Richmond, VA, and Stewart L. Deck (Elizabeth) of Arlington, MA, and his daughter, Emily Deck Harrill of Columbia, SC. He was preceded in death by his wife, Polly Deck, his daughter Sarah Deck Stevens of Santa Fe, NM, his brother Lucius Linton Deck, Jr., and his parents.

He had eight grandchildren and two great grandsons.

The family would particularly like to thank David’s caregivers, Joan and Diana Woodfolk, Wanda Jones, Tarah Washington, Pat Anderson, and Jackie Jackson. This remarkable group of women worked to ensure David and his family have been cared for with loving kindness in the two years since Polly’s death. For this exceptional care, David’s family is extremely thankful.

A memorial service will be held at 11:00am on August 15, 2026 at Westminster Presbyterian Church, 400 Rugby Road, Charlottesville. Memorials may be made to Westminster Church’s Lectureship series, the Youth Orchestras of Central Virginia or a charity of one’s choice.