Linda Stallman Gibson, a devoted educator, professor, writer, environmentalist, mother, mother-in-law, grandmother, sister, aunt, mentor and friend died on July 1, 2026. She was born on July 24, 1938, in York Pennsylvania, to George L Stallman Jr and Lucy B McLean.

Linda spent her life paying attention: to children and the worlds they created, to the stories families carried, to the connections between generations, and to the meaning hidden within ordinary moments.

Her professional life was rooted in a deep respect for children and their emotional and intellectual lives. After graduating from Connecticut College in 1960, she began her career as an early childhood teacher and later became a professor of education at Queens College, City University of New York. As an educator, researcher, and mentor, she encouraged teachers to look beyond methods and lesson plans to consider how their own histories, values, and beliefs shaped the classrooms they created.

Linda’s scholarship explored early childhood education, emotional development, teaching practice, and the complex relationship between educators and the children in their care. Her work reflected a conviction that children deserved to be observed carefully, listened to seriously, and understood as whole human beings.

Education was not merely Linda’s profession. It was part of how she moved through the world. She was curious, observant, and committed to understanding why people behaved, learned, loved, and told stories as they did. She brought that same attentiveness to her students, her writing, and her family.

Following her retirement from a 45-year career as an educator, Linda began another important chapter of her life. She devoted herself more fully to writing and earned a Master of Fine Arts from Vermont College of Fine Arts in 2016. Her creative nonfiction short stories received a Pushcart Prize nomination and appeared in Creative Nonfiction, Literary Mama, Halfway Down the Stairs, and other publications.

Linda wrote about childhood, aging, family, play, mortality, and grandmotherhood. She understood that imagination was not separate from serious life. A game between a child and a grandmother could become a way of confronting fear. A conversation after dinner could reveal how one generation teaches and learns from another. A book read aloud could open a discussion about how older women are seen, underestimated, or remembered.

She was working on a memoir drawn from recordings of games, stories, and conversations with her grandson Matthew during his second-grade year. The project reflected something central to Linda’s life and work: her belief that children’s words mattered and that the seemingly small exchanges within a family were worthy of being preserved.

In her essay “A Grandmother’s Tale,” Linda considered the place grandmothers hold in children’s stories and in family life. She challenged the idea that an older woman should be treated as a secondary character. Linda understood grandmotherhood as an active role, one filled with teaching, guiding, listening, protecting, playing, questioning, and continuing to grow.

That was the kind of grandmother she sought to be.

To her family, Linda was more than her degrees, publications, research, and professional accomplishments. She was a principled woman who always managed to give room to new ideas and perspectives. Forward thinking would be her mode of operation from her late teenage years until the day she passed.

Linda was known for her staunch perspective on human influenced climate change. Often outspoken about the human impact on the deterioration of earth’s natural landscape, she held the view that there was an important link between early development and exploring nature that would cultivate a consciousness about the environment in adulthood.

She loved animals of all shapes and sizes, especially birds. Her backyard became a haven for the animals of her neighborhood. Feeding them daily, she enjoyed being able to observe and interact with them. But most of all, she enjoyed their presence.

Her elegance in writing translated well to her orality, never failing to give thoughtful advice. Those who knew her will remember the deep conversations as well as the lighthearted banter.

Linda’s relationship with her family was expressed through attention. She watched, listened, remembered, and recorded. She recognized stories to be told before others could see their importance. She understood that the things families do every day, reading together, sharing meals, playing games, disagreeing, laughing, and telling the same memories again, eventually become the history of a life.

She was the beloved mother of Hans Gibson and mother-in-law of Sandra Gibson, and the grandmother of Angela Gibson and Matthew Gibson. In addition to those named, she is also survived by her brother George L Stallman III, and his three children. 

Each member of Linda’s family knew her differently. Each carries a different version of her voice, her wisdom, her humor, and the ways she made herself present in their lives.

Linda’s influence lives in the desire to remember carefully, to search for the larger meaning, and to tell the truth about the people we love.

Her grandchildren now inherit a responsibility she understood well: to preserve what matters, to notice what others overlook, and to continue writing and telling the stories that matter to them most.

Linda’s legacy lives in the generations of students and teachers influenced by her work, in the readers who encountered her essays, and in the family whose lives she observed with such care. It lives in the questions she asked, the stories she saved, and the belief that childhood, aging, family, and memory were all worthy of serious attention.

Now, those who loved her will look closely at the life she lived. They will remember the professor and the writer, but also the mother and grandmother behind those titles.

Linda will be laid to rest in York, Pennsylvania, alongside her parents….

In lieu of flowers, the family asks that donations be made to https://www.worldwildlife.org/, or that those wishing to honor Linda read to a child, listen carefully to a family story, support an educator or writer, and take the time to preserve a memory that might otherwise be lost.

Linda spent her life preserving stories.

Her family will now preserve hers.