Van Henson

Memorial services for Van Davison Henson, 74, of Bluffton, S.C., will be held at 10:30 a.m. Oct. 20 at St. Luke’s United Methodist Church in Oklahoma City.

Graveside services will be held at 11 a.m. Oct. 21 at Clinton Cemetery with a reception following at Oklahoma Bank & Trust’s Oklahoma Room.

Henson died Sept. 2, 2015, at Bluffton, following a battle with cancer.

He was born Sept. 24, 1940, in Shattuck, the son of Cecil Henson and Elberta Davison Henson.

He attended school in Shattuck until the age of 12 when his family moved to Clinton. After graduating from Clinton High School in 1958, he attended Phillips University before joining the U.S. Marine Corps. After military service he attended the University of Oklahoma, followed by dental school at the University of Missouri in Kansas City.

Upon completion of dental school he moved his family to Clinton and opened a private practice.

After a year, henson joined the U.S. Navy as a Dental Corps officer, and was awarded an Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery residency at the Naval Regional Medical Center in Long Beach, Calif. After nine years in the Navy, he had the opportunity to enter private practice and spent the next 26 years practicing oral surgery in the southern California area.

He would spend the next 10 years at the OU College of Dentistry working with both residents and predoctoral students as a Clinical Associate Professor and Director of Oral & Maxillofacial Predoctoral Education.

After retirement in July of 2014, he and his wife, Ellen, moved to Bluffton.

He was preceded in death by his parents, Cecil and Elberta Henson; sisters, Martha Henson and Sibyl Henson Boyd Robinson; and his son, Mark Henson. 

He is survived by his wife, Ellen of Bluffton; his daughter, Kimberly McConnell, and her mother, Mary Wise Fisher, of California; and his grandsons, Kyle Nicolas of California and Paul Nicolas of Hawaii.