Photo: Frank Wojciechowski

By: centraljersey.com
Virginia was born on Sept. 15, 1910, in Portland, Maine, the daughter of Philip F. Chapman, a prominent local lawyer and banker, and Gladys Doten, a leading figure in Maine’s women’s suffrage movement .While she missed seeing Halley’s Comet in 1910 by six months, she did see it in 1986.
Virginia attended the Waynflete School in Portland, Class of ’27, playing both basketball and leading roles in dramatic productions, and today remains the school’s oldest living graduate. Following graduation from Wellesley College in 1931, she returned to Portland to teach at Waynflete, during which time she met and subsequently married William W. Lockwood, a young economics instructor at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine.
The couple eventually moved to New York City, where Mrs. Lockwood began what was to be come a lifelong dedication to teaching children in the primary grades, starting with her first job at the famed Dalton School . She and her husband moved to Princeton in l941, and while he served abroad in the Army during World War II, she raised two boys – William Jr., of Princeton, and Stephen, of McLean, Va. – and became active locally in the League of Women Voters, the YWCA, and the Princeton Group Arts, and even found time to act with the Princeton Community Players.
After the war, when her husband joined the faculty of Princeton University, Mrs. Lockwood added a daughter – Julia Lockwood Miller of South Freeport, Maine – to the family, and took up teaching third and fourth grades again, starting in 1946, first at Miss Fine’s School and subsequently at the Princeton Day School, following the merger between Miss Fine’s and Princeton Country Day School. She retired in 1969 after 23 consecutive years, having taught more than a generation of Princeton children, many of whom still reside locally and remember her classroom fondly.
During this time, Mrs. Lockwood continued to be active in the affairs of the Wellesley Club of Central New Jersey and the League of Women Voters (often as moderator of the LWV’s annual Candidates’ Meeting), while traveling frequently abroad with her husband , especially to the Far East, and annually to their summer home in Maine on the shores of Casco Bay.
Following her husband’s death in 1978, Mrs. Lockwood became an active docent at the Princeton University Art Museum for many years, and took up writing poetry with a passion, becoming a fixture of the U.S. 1 Poets’ Cooperative, which frequently held its monthly meeting at her Jefferson Road residence, where she has lived since 1953. Mrs. Lockwood’s verse has appeared in several publications, and she has frequently participated in poetry readings at the Arts Council of Princeton, Barnes & Noble, and other locations. Her family privately published a selection of her work on the occasions of her 80th and 90th birthdays, excerpted here.