Case for Support > Honor Roll > WilliamsonHancock

Donor Profile:  Cici Williamson and Emily Hancock

During the nine months leading to the 2005 Huntington Ball, Cici Williamson and Emily Hancock forged a special relationship. As Ball co-chairs, the two women worked closely, negotiating all the details that made the Ball the spectacular event that it was – from food to flowers, music, and décor – carefully crafting the ambience that dazzled the hundreds of guests in the Dorothy Collins Brown Garden.

The Huntington Ball is an annual event sponsored by the Society of Fellows, a group of individuals who maintain a special interest in the intellectual and educational activities of The Huntington.

Cici and Emily share a warm relationship that’s evidenced within moments of meeting the pair and clearly transcends their Ball duties.

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Cici and Emily are the first mother and daughter team ever to co-chair the Huntington Ball and this inter-generational partnership reverberates with a particular significance as The Huntington launches “For Generations to Come - The Campaign for
The Huntington.”
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What Cici and Emily, both of whom live in Pasadena, share beyond family ties and Ball duties is a great love and enthusiasm for The Huntington that they have both parlayed into countless hours of volunteer leadership.

For Cici, the enthusiasm began early. Originally from the Chicago area, she remembers participating in the institution’s first-ever docent class with Dr. Robert Wark when she was newly married. “You get drawn in with all the interesting and vibrant lectures and activities that are always going on,” she says.

Cici is married to Norman B. Williamson, a private investor and grandson of former Times Publisher Harry Chandler, and great-grandson of Gen. Harrison Gray Otis, founder of the Times Mirror Company. Williamson (also known as Tad) has served as a Huntington Overseer since 1994. Williamson was a co-chair of the Botanical Complex Committee of the Gardens Initiative from 1995 to 2000. He and Cici have been Huntington Fellows since 1984; the couple has also served for several years as Ball benefactors.

But Cici has also found solace at The Huntington outside of any specific activity. She remembers bringing her youngest son here as a teenager when the family had just moved back to Southern California after living away for some time. Sensitive to the fact that her son was the new kid in school and hadn’t yet developed new friendships, Cici wanted to make sure he had an activity planned after school. Together they walked the grounds, keeping one another company as Cici gleaned landscaping ideas in the Gardens for the garden of their new home.

Throughout the years the Williamsons have introduced all of their four children to The Huntington in a number of ways, bringing them to institution events, and even to the Ball as their guests. Cici remembers attending a board meeting wherein the idea was introduced that Fellows could give to their children a Junior Fellows membership to encourage participation -- that is what the Williamsons did. “There comes a point when the next generation must fully move in and take the initiative,” says Cici.

Emily did this by serving on the membership committee and advocating to her friends and peers that they become involved in The Huntington, thus bringing in the next generation. By all accounts she has been an inspirational motivator in this way.

Support for The Huntington by the Williamson family, however, stretches further back than two generations.

“My grandmother helped to fund the Shakespeare Garden,” says Emily, fondly remembering her father’s mother who passed away in 1987. Ruth Chandler Von Platen had been a Life Fellow and a Successor Donor and she had indeed donated funds and an endowment for development of this new area.

And now Emily is passing on her love for the institution and all it offers to her own three children. It started when they were small and, as Junior Fellows, the playgroup mothers could arrange for the group to arrive early and walk the grounds while it was still closed to the general public.

Emily’s children are now 13, 11, and 10 years old and she has been introducing them to new aspects of The Huntington. “I brought them over to see [the exhibition] “Eye for Beauty,” which they loved, and I had been through it already with the curator so I could tell them all the fun facts and details,” Emily says. “Afterward I took them to see the Children’s Garden, which I thought they were a little old for, but they loved it and we were there for at least an hour. They even had me climbing through the prism tunnel.”

Perhaps Emily’s children will tell the story of mother climbing through the tunnel when their own children find their way to the Children’s Garden. For those keeping count, that will make five generations of the same family who have enjoy The Huntington.