Lois Watson

Treasure Coast

Lois was born March 30, 1929, in New York City, the daughter of Emanuel and Miriam (Adelson) Behrman. She graduated from Riverdale Country Day School for Girls and Middlebury College in Vermont in 1951 with a BA in French. She was fluent in English, French, Italian, and Spanish.

Lois co-founded and operated an international importing business in Miami, Florida, with her first husband, Saul Eig. She married J. Harvey Watson in Miami in 1984, and they traveled the world, golfing and dancing, for 36 years. She fell in love with flying in 1948 when she flew from Paris to Cannes, France, with her mother and brother. She was a lifetime member of The Ninety Nines, the international organization of women pilots. She flew all over the world, was certified in single and multi-engine aircraft, and had 20 hours of helicopter training.

She founded the Eig-Watson School of Aviation at Miami-Dade College. The school offers a dozen FAA-approved college degrees in aviation and provides scholarships for flying hours to help commercial pilots achieve certification.

Her keen interest in education led her to fund scholarships at Miami-Dade College and Middlebury College (Vermont and Monterrey, California). She was a generous benefactor of the Norman Williams Public Library, the Thompson Senior Center, Change the World Kids in Woodstock, Vermont, and the cardiac and audiology departments at Dartmouth Hitchcock Hospital.