University of California: In Memoriam, [1957]A publication of the University of California |
Robert Grant Aitken: Lick Observatory
| 1864-1951 | |
| Astronomer, Emeritus | |
| Director of the Lick Observatory, Emeritus |
Robert Grant Aitken, Astronomer, Emeritus, and Director of the Lick Observatory, Emeritus, died in Berkeley on October 29, 1951, from complications resulting from a fall. He was a native of California, born in Jackson, Amador County, December 31, 1864. He graduated from Williams College in 1887. After an instructorship in mathematics at Livermore in the years 1888-1891, he became, until 1895, Professor of Mathematics at the College of the Pacific, then located in San Jose.
Dr. Aitken first came to the Lick Observatory as a special student on June 1, 1895, and he was appointed Assistant Astronomer just two months later. Greatly interested in the study of double stars, he immediately started working on these objects, beginning by observing lists of known pairs that were in need of accurate measures. In 1899, as a result of careful thought and planning, he commenced the systematic examination for duplicity of all stars brighter than 9.0 magnitude on the BD scale that were north of -22 degrees declination. For a few years he had the coöperation of W. J. Hussey, but when the latter left the Lick Observatory to become Director of the University of Michigan Observatory, Dr. Aitken continued the work alone. By the time the survey was completed, in 1915, about 4,400 new pairs had been discovered, 3,100 by Aitken and the rest by Hussey. Of these, nearly all were close, and many were of great interest. While the measurement of double stars was Dr. Aitken's principal
Dr. Aitken's ability, energy, and enthusiasm were such that advancement soon came. He was named Astronomer in 1907.
Dr. Aitken's publications include two books, The Binary Stars, which appeared in 1918, with a second edition in 1935, and the monumental New General Catalogue of Double Stars Within 120° of the North Pole, published by the Carnegie Institution in 1932. Besides these major works he was the author of a long series of papers published mostly in the Lick Observatory bulletins and in the publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. He was also, as might be expected, an able and interesting lecturer on astronomical subjects.
Dr. Aitken was associated with many scientific and other organizations. He was a member of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific for fifty-seven years, and for most of that time was an officer of the Society, and served on one or more of its committees. He received the Society's Gold Medal in 1926, and was elected a Patron of the Society in 1943. He was an Associate of the Royal Astronomical Society, and in 1932 he was awarded that Society's Gold Medal. He received the Lalande Gold Medal of the French Academy in 1906. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1918, and to the American Philosophical Society in 1919. Among several awards of honorary doctorate degrees was an LL.D. from the University of California, on his retirement from active service to the University.
In 1923 Dr. Aitken was appointed to the office of Associate Director of the Lick Observatory, when W. W. Campbell became President of the University of California. In 1930, when Dr. Campbell retired from both the Directorship of the Observatory and the Presidency of the University, Dr. Aitken
In retirement, living in Berkeley, Dr. Aitken kept up many of his activities. He carried on a large correspondence with scientific and other friends. For several years he maintained the card catalogue of double star observations. Particularly did he keep up his activities in connection with the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. Besides all this, he participated in civic and church affairs, and he was a familiar figure on the campus and at the Faculty Club.
Dr. Aitken is survived by three sons, one daughter, and by eight grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren.
In sum, Dr. Aitken was one of the great students of double stars, an active and productive investigator, a useful citizen, and a most congenial and stimulating associate.
Rudolph Altrocchi, Italian: Berkeley
| 1882-1953 | |
| Professor Emeritus |
Rudolph Altrocchi was born in Florence, Italy, on October 31, 1882, the son of Giovanni and Pauline (Zamvos) Altrocchi. His father, a musician and pupil of Donizetti, was an American citizen and the son of a New England mother. His temperament reflected faithfully both these strains in his blood and the European and American elements of his education. After seven years in a French school, he studied at the Istituto Tecnico in Florence, and later at Zürich. He received the degrees of Bachelor of Arts (1908), Master of Arts (1909), and Doctor of Philosophy (1914) from Harvard. During his years there he worked with some of the greatest American scholars of that day: Charles Eliot Norton, C. H. Grandgent, and George Lyman Kittredge. Later, in Italy, he studied with Pio Rajna, Guido Mazzoni, E. G. Parodi, and Pasquale Villari.
After serving as Instructor in Romance Languages at Columbia (1910-1911) and at the University of Pennsylvania (1911-1912), he returned to Harvard as Instructor in Italian (1912-1915). He was appointed Assistant Professor of Italian at the University of Chicago in 1915, Associate Professor in 1922. He went to Brown University as Professor of Italian in 1927; and in 1928 he was called to the University of California as Professor of Italian and Chairman of the Department.
On August 26, 1920, he married Julia Cooley, who, with their two sons, John Cooley and Paul Hemenway Altrocchi, survives him. The singular happiness of his domestic life inestimably enriched his natural warmth and friendliness, which
During World War I, Altrocchi served as member of the American Bureau of Public Information at Rome (1918), and as Director of Oral Propaganda in Italy. He held the rank of Lieutenant of Infantry, Liaison Service, in the American Expeditionary Force, and during 1918-1919 was stationed at Lyon.
In 1923 he participated in the organization of the American Association of Teachers of Italian, and in 1924 became the first editor of its quarterly journal, Italica, to which he was a frequent contributor. In 1929 he became President of the Association. He was active on committees of the Modern Language Association of America. In 1936 he became Vice-President, and in 1937 President, of the Philological Association of the Pacific Coast.
His publications include--besides poems, translations from the Italian, and editions of Italian works of literature--two books (Deceptive Cognates, Italian-English and English-Italian, University of Chicago Press, 1935; and Sleuthing in the Stacks, Harvard University Press, 1944) and numerous articles. These last, published over a period of more than forty years, incorporate the major results of his scholarly research. He was an authority on the various versions of the Life of Saint Alexis; he wrote a series of studies of the work of D'Annunzio, an important paper on “Tasso's Holograph Annotations to Horace's Ars Poetica,” a number of penetrating studies of Dante, and many articles on various Italian writers and aspects of Italian literature. He was deeply interested in the progress of Italian studies in America, and published descriptive and critical studies in this field.
In 1918 he was honored by his selection as Officier d' Academie; and in 1921 he was made Chevalier of the Crown of Italy.
A devoted teacher and able department chairman, he contributed notably to the growth and strength of the Department
As he was a faithful servant of the University of California, so also he cherished a deep loyalty to Harvard; and he worked indefatigably to preserve and strengthen the ties between his Alma Mater and its alumni. He was President of the Harvard Club of San Francisco from 1932 to 1934, and from 1936 to 1938; he was Vice-President of the Associated Harvard Clubs from 1934 to 1941, and President from 1941 to 1946. Much of the support which Harvard has derived from its graduates has been the direct result of his efforts.
In the fall of 1950 he was invited to give the Lowell Institute Lectures in Boston; his subject, “Humor in Italian Literature,” illustrates an endearing aspect of his character. He was a man of keen wit and flashing humor--qualities which contributed to the effectiveness of his teaching and writing. These qualities were never more in evidence than during the period of his last illness, when they concealed from his friends the seriousness of his condition, and made exemplary the fortitude with which he bore it.
He died on May 13, 1953. In him the University has lost a widely versatile scholar and a man of letters, and an enthusiastic and exceptional teacher. Those who knew him will not forget his infinite capacity for warm and firm friendship.
Herman Joseph Baade, Agricultural Extension: Berkeley
| 1887-1953 | |
| Assistant Professor, Emeritus | |
| Agriculturist, Emeritus, Agricultural Extension |
Herman J. Baade joined the staff of the University of California on August 1, 1914, as a member of the Agricultural Extension Service, and took over the position of farm advisor in Napa County. This was pioneer work--a part of the effort of educational institutions to take their teachings and the results of research work in agriculture nearer to rural people. The idea of a representative of the University resident in a county was new; could such a plan succeed? Obviously its success would depend largely on the men selected to initiate it. The work in California was under the guidance of the late Director B. H. Crocheron, who came to the University in September of 1913 to start a state-wide agricultural extension service, and who became Director of Extension in 1919. One of his earlier staff selections, made less than one year after he came to the State, was Herman Baade. The soundness of this choice is evidenced by the fact that Mr. Baade remained in his position in Napa County for a period of thirty-seven years, constantly growing in usefulness, developing this phase of university work, and with increasing appreciation on the part of rural people. The only interruption in his residence in the County was a sabbatical year, 1922-1923, spent in the study of agriculture in Europe. He voluntarily retired on July 31, 1951, because of ill health. This long period of uninterrupted service in one community, in a new area of education for which there were no precedents, where continuation of the
During his long period of activity in adult education in agriculture, Professor Baade dedicated his great energy and extraordinary resources to the welfare of rural people and rural institutions in Napa County. His unswerving and completely unselfish devotion to the solution of pressing problems confronting the agriculture of the County resulted in many improved practices in agriculture, and through his teachings he contributed vastly to the enrichment of the lives of the farm people. His deep and abiding interest in the well-being of his fellow man dominated his life to the exclusion of other forms of endeavor. While he devoted himself without reserve to problems involved in materialistic and wealth-producing practices in farming he had a greater interest in matters relating to the health and happiness of people in the pursuit of their vocation. He gave of his organizing abilities to improvements in the living of people, larger and more encompassing than the giving of personal advice and instruction on expedient and personal matters to individuals.
Through farsighted planning and well organized execution, he introduced domestic sanitation into the rural homes of Napa County. The widespread adoption of sanitary measures proposed and demonstrated by him added to the comfort, health, and living standards of hundreds of rural families. The enduring results of this huge educational campaign will forever remain as a testimonial to his keen analysis of the needs of people and his persistent efforts in behalf of their welfare. He conducted a thoroughly organized campaign of education in soil improvement which resulted in the underground drainage of thousands of acres of land in the Napa Valley by means of tile drains, thereby increasing the productivity of these soils, with consequent greater opportunity
By the processes of education, Professor Baade throughout his life aided great numbers of people in the application of advanced knowledge to the solution of the besetting problems involved in deriving an adequate living from the practice of agriculture. He is enshrined in the memory and in the hearts of thousands of people who have lived more abundantly because of him. The high esteem in which he was held was attested by a gathering of several hundred friends to honor him on the date of his retirement.
Herman Joseph Baade was born of German parentage in Tulare, South Dakota, on September 5, 1887. His family later migrated to Oklahoma, where he completed his undergraduate work at the Oklahoma Agricultural and Mechanical College in June, 1909, receiving his B.S. degree May 31, 1910. He served as principal of Wynneward High School, in Wynneward, Oklahoma, in 1910. In 1911 he was principal of Sweetgrass County High School at Big Timber, Montana. In 1912 he came to California and in 1912-1913 taught mathematics and science and was faculty advisor at the Army and Navy Academy in San Diego. In 1913-1914 he taught agriculture and was head of the department at the Napa Union High School in Napa. During the summers of 1912 through 1914 he attended summer sessions at the University of California. He gave up his high school position to join the staff of the University. He passed away at his home in Napa on March 27,
Ernest Brown Babcock, Genetics: Berkeley
| 1877-1954 | |
| Professor Emeritus | |
| Geneticist Emeritus in the Experiment Station |
On December 8, 1954, death ended the career of Ernest Brown Babcock, a career noteworthy for outstanding scientific achievements as well as for kindliness and good will toward his fellow men.
Professor Babcock was born in Edgerton, Wisconsin, on July 10, 1877, the son of Emilus Welcome and Mary Eliza (Brown) Babcock. He came to California in 1896, graduating from the Los Angeles Normal School in 1898 and from the University of California in 1905. He married Georgia Bowen, who survives him, in 1908.
As a student, he began his lifelong association with the late Harvey Monroe Hall, at that time Instructor in Botany at the University, who later began the research in experimental taxonomy in the Division of Plant Biology, at the Carnegie Institution Laboratory at Stanford. Through trips to the Sierra Nevada with Dr. Hall for plant collecting, and later through joint research on the native tarweeds of California, Professor Babcock gained the interest and background which prepared the way for his evolutionary studies of Crepis.
In 1907 Professor Babcock joined the University faculty as Instructor in Plant Pathology, becoming Assistant Professor in 1908. In 1913 Thomas Forsyth Hunt, shortly after his arrival at the University as Dean of the College of Agriculture, chose Babcock to give one of the four fundamental science courses basic to agriculture; namely, the principles of animal
As Professor of Genetics, Babcock at first devoted all of his energy to teaching, and along with his colleague, Roy E. Clausen, published in 1918 a textbook, Genetics in Relation to Agriculture. This book, one of the first in its field in the English language, enjoyed wide popularity, and for twenty years was regarded as a standard.
Soon after finishing this task, he commenced the research project which he continued until his retirement: an analysis of genetic relationships and evolutionary processes in the genus Crepis. This genus, a relative of the dandelion, was chosen because many species have a low chromosome number and easily recognizable chromosomes, because they are easy to grow in the greenhouse or garden, and because a large number of species exist in Eurasia which at the beginning of Professor Babcock's work were poorly understood. He set himself, his colleagues, and his students a high standard of accuracy, thoroughness, and meticulous attention to detail. At the same time, he never lost sight of his final goal, which was to understand as fully as possible the genetic relationships between the 196 species of Crepis, as well as the evolutionary principles responsible for their origin. For twenty-seven years a series of research papers emanated from his laboratory, dealing with all phases of genetic variation within species, interrelationships between species, and the connection between Crepis and related genera.
As a result of this research, Professor Babcock soon became recognized as one of the pioneers in the newly developing field of biosystematics, a discipline which combines the methods of traditional systematic botany with genetical, cytological,
As expected of an eminent scientist, Professor Babcock was a member of several learned societies, and was elected to high offices in some of them. The most noteworthy of these were membership in the National Academy of Sciences, and President of the California Academy of Sciences as well as the Society for the Study of Evolution. In 1950, the University honored him with the degree of LL.D.
Professor Babcock's scientific career did not end with his retirement in 1947. During the closing years of his life he served as Executive Vice-President of the Forest Genetics Research Foundation. In this capacity, he devoted his energies to drawing the attention of public-spirited citizens to the need for restoring our depleted forest resources by gathering together and breeding the best genetic strains of forest trees which can be found. His unflagging optimism in the future of man led him to believe that preparing for the welfare of future generations was the best way to close his own career.
Professor Babcock's innate and unswerving faith in the goodness of man led him to set an example of scientific achievement, friendliness, and aid to his fellow men. It inspired all who were associated with him, and left its indelible mark not only on the University of California, but on scientific
“I believe that life is everlasting transformation, and that evolution is continuous in the spiritual realm as in the physical.”
Marjorie Harriman Baker, Art: Los Angeles
| 1908-1954 | |
| Lecturer |
Marjorie Harriman Baker was born in Seattle in 1908. From the beginning she was surrounded with an atmosphere of culture and beauty, her mother being a well-known singer with the Metropolitan Opera Company and her father a leading figure in New York. Her early school years were spent in Los Angeles and she was graduated from Los Angeles High School in 1925. In 1929 she was graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles, with the degree of Bachelor of Education and a Special Credential in Art.
Immediately after graduation she was offered the position of Director of Art at the Los Angeles Progressive School; her success in this undertaking resulted in an invitation to return to her Alma Mater as Instructor in Art. In the summer of 1936 she was married to Jackson Baker, whose understanding and influence were to help shape and support her future activities. Marjorie taught in the Department of Art until 1937, when she resigned to go to Honolulu with her husband. During her four years stay in the Islands, she taught in the University of Hawaii and lectured for the Honolulu Academy of Art. Returning to Los Angeles in 1941, Mrs. Baker went into the professional field as an interior designer and color consultant. Many of California's leading architects employed her talents in color coordination for important public buildings.
In 1945 she was persuaded to return to the Los Angeles campus, where she taught until 1954.
Mrs. Baker was deeply interested in all civic affairs, especially
In the Department of Art she was entrusted with the basic courses upon which all others were developed. Students enrolled in Art early came under the spell of her joyous enthusiasm and developed a feeling for beauty which was to change their lives. She had great gifts as a teacher, and she loved teaching. Her spirit of loving kindness was great and generous enough to embrace each one in the huge classes she taught. Her conviction that each student was inherently sensitive to beauty changed the lives of countless young people. Never did her sophistication of taste nor her accumulation of knowledge pertaining to her field dim her childlike trust and joy in the beauty of this world.
Hers was a place of honor in the Department. She was chosen to carry the most difficult load, that of awakening indifferent minds and winning them to the underlying spirit of art. She reserved her technical knowledge and her skills and took as her particular task the arousing of the spirit and of building a fiery and determined loyalty to the beauty which endures. Her research was into the hearts of men.
She moved with high-hearted courage as a spiritual force among more materialistic folk and her influence upon both student and faculty was magnificent.
May we never forget we have known a great teacher.
Donald J. Bear, Art: Santa Barbara
| 1905-1952 | |
| Lecturer |
Donald Jeffries Bear was born in Terre Haute, Indiana, on the 5th of February, 1905. He died at Pacific Palisades, California, on March 16, 1952. He was Director of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art; formerly Director, Denver Art Museum; and Lecturer in Art at Santa Barbara College, University of California.
The Denver in which he grew up as a working boy was still a frontier community. However, he had an excellent musical training, becoming an accomplished pianist; and under the guidance of Denver's distinguished artist and first important teacher, John Thompson, Bear studied painting. Thompson also encouraged him to write, particularly criticism. He attended Denver University for three years. Although he never completed a degree, he was the University's first choice to head the new art department. He did not accept but taught for three years at Denver University, the Chappell School of Art, and was Director of the Denver Museum of Art until 1940.
Donald Bear held a Carnegie Grant in Art Education, 1932-1935, and a grant for European travel from the Oberlaender Trust of the Carl Schurz Foundation. He became Regional Advisor in the Federal Art Project, 1935-1938, and in 1939 a member of the national staff. He was also Assistant Director, “American Art Today,” at the World's Fair, New York, 1938-1939. He had been art critic for three newspapers and contributed to many art periodicals. He was called to
During 1948 and 1949 Donald Bear delivered twenty-four lectures as Special Representative of Encyclopedia Britannica in the various cities where Britannica's collection, “Contemporary American Painting,” was being shown. He was a member of the National Association of Art Museum Directors; President of the Western Association of Art Museum Directors, 1943-1946, and Vice-President, 1946-1952; honorary member, Delta Phi Delta; and member, American Federation of Arts and the American Society for Aesthetics.
Donald Bear's publications in books and periodicals total over thirty. Newspaper criticism and catalogue introductions of significance have never been counted. He published one novel. His contributions to Encyclopedia Britannica are of greatest importance and influence. He averaged two jury services a year on major art exhibitions for more than fifteen years. For the uncounted local and minor shows there is not, and probably can never be, a record. He delivered one or more public lectures a week for many years and, from 1946, taught the course in Modern Painting in the Department of Art.
He had had fifteen one-man shows and was preparing for another at the time of his death. His paintings are owned by twenty-seven important museums, galleries, and private collections. The number of smaller collections in which his paintings are included may never be known. He arranged between six hundred and seven hundred exhibitions in the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, including annual exhibitions of Santa Barbara College student and faculty work during the little more than ten years of his directorship.
He had a brilliant mind, an incredible memory, and insatiable curiosity. He understood and loved creative people. He recognized and encouraged authentic talent. He was practiced in three arts: writing, music, and painting. He could communicate, using with tremendous literary skill rich vocabularies
He is survived by his widow, Mrs. Esther Fish Bear, of Santa Barbara, and two daughters, Mrs. Donald Wyman, Jr., and Mrs. Thomas Durrie.
Alexander Boodberg, Mechanical Engineering: Berkeley
| 1906-1952 | |
| Associate Professor |
The death of Alexander Boodberg on July 19, 1952, deprived the students in Mechanical Engineering of one of their most inspiring teachers, and the staff of one who applied his time and energies freely toward the development of improved facilities and methods of instruction.
Mr. Boodberg received the A.B. degree in mechanical engineering from Stanford University in 1928, and the M.S. and M.E. degrees from the University of California in 1937 and 1940, respectively.
His professional activities began in 1928 as a junior engineer with the Yuba Construction Company. In 1930 he entered upon a business career for himself; but due to labor conditions in 1936, which to him indicated disloyalty to the American traditions, he entered the University of California for graduate study. In 1938 he returned to Stanford University to assist in earthquake research for the County of Los Angeles. Upon completion of the project he returned to the University of California to complete the requirements for the Junior College Credential.
Mr. Boodberg was appointed as Instructor at San Mateo Junior College in August, 1940. He taught the basic engineering courses and organized the curriculum in Aeronautical Technical Training. On the basis of his achievements at the San Mateo Junior College, and as a licensed pilot and aircraft and engine mechanic, he was appointed Coördinator, Flight and Ground Instructor, Civilian Pilot Training Program, at Mills Field, San Francisco, in April, 1941.
In January, 1943, at the request of the officer-in-charge, Naval Training School Diesel Engineering, on the Berkeley campus, he was granted a leave of absence from San Mateo Junior College to assist in the expansion of the Diesel School and the instruction of naval officers for diesel duty afloat. His professional abilities, although recognized, had been underestimated, and when the Diesel School was discontinued in February, 1944, an extension of his leave from San Mateo Junior College was requested to allow him to join members of the University staff investigating, under government contract, stresses in ship structures. In this activity he was instrumental in the development of methods for the rapid determination of stresses in structural assemblies of ships under construction, and bend tests for rapid determination of the weldability of steel samples.
Mr. Boodberg accepted appointment as Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering in July, 1947. In this capacity, with the normal duties as classroom instructor, he was also in charge of the heat power laboratories. His devotion to the latter assignment found him in the laboratory on evenings and week ends, developing and improving equipment and methods of instruction. With failing health in 1949, he made every effort to continue his activities in the laboratory and the classroom. His devotion to teaching was terminated at his home when he passed away while preparing class material for the Fall Semester.
The results of his efforts will long remain in evidence in Mechanical Engineering laboratory facilities and organization. His enthusiasm and eagerness to coöperate will always be a cherished memory of his students and associates.
George Walton Brainerd, Anthropology and Sociology: Los Angeles
| 1909-1956 | |
| Associate Professor of Anthropology |
George Walton Brainerd was born in Blacksburg, Virginia, in 1909. He died suddenly of a heart attack at his home in Pasadena, California, on February 14, 1956. He is survived by his wife, Katharine, and four small children.
George Brainerd received the A.B. degree from Lafayette College in 1930, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Ohio State University in 1935 and 1937, respectively. Before he began his graduate studies he taught for some time at Alburz College, Teheran, Persia, and worked with a University of Pennsylvania archeological expedition in Persia. It was the latter experience that turned his interest from zoölogy, until then his major study, to archaeology.
Few American archaeologists acquired field experience in as many areas as did Brainerd. After his return from Persia he spent several summers excavating in northeastern Arizona, in connection with the program of the Rainbow Bridge-Monument Valley Expedition. In the course of this work and in a year spent in Los Angeles collaborating in the preparation of the major report on the Expedition's archaeological researches, he established his first contacts with the University of California.
The major facets of Brainerd's interests developed in the course of his research in the Southwest. One was a concern with the improvement of techniques of field survey, excavation, and laboratory analysis. Here Brainerd became interested in the quantitative analysis of archaeological materials,
On the technical side, Brainerd worked for a time in the ceramics laboratory at Ohio State University. Here he perfected his knowledge of petrographic, chemical, and physical problems in ceramic analysis. Probably few people equalled Brainerd's skill in tracking down clues in paste, temper, pigments, and firing temperatures. On the stylistic side, he developed methods of analysis and sorting to aid in the objective determination of finely subdivided classifications. At the same time, he was led to an interest in the comparative art of non-literate peoples. His teaching in this field attracted many students, drawn from several departments of the University. Had he lived, he would have contributed importantly to systematization and understanding in this subject.
Brainerd's doctoral dissertation was in yet another area: the study of animal remains from prehistoric Ohio River Valley mounds. This interest he extended, supervising excavations in the Tennessee Valley region until, in 1939, he was appointed Archaeologist to the Division of Historical Studies, Carnegie Institution of Washington. He held this post until the war.
With the Carnegie Institution, Brainerd began the work in southern Mexico which remained his major interest until his death. Through extensive surveys and controlled stratigraphic excavations in Yucatan and adjoining regions, and in the Valley of Mexico, Brainerd worked out an increasingly accurate ceramic chronology, which will remain fundamental to Mexican archaeology for many years to come, and which throws new light on the important role played by the Tula-Toltecs in the Valley of Mexico and in Yucatan. This work, completed just before his death, is titled The Ancient Maya, and was published by the University of California Press in 1956. Also in press, at Stanford University, is Brainerd's extensive revision
The war interrupted Brainerd's Mexican studies for several years. He served as Lieutenant in the United States Navy, first in Washington, D.C., and later in China, Ceylon, and India. At the close of the war, his work was continued in the Civil Service, where he held an important post in the Special Devices Section. Here he developed a number of ingenious technical devices, many of which he put to good use in later archaeological studies.
Brainerd returned to Los Angeles in 1946 as Assistant Professor of Anthropology, University of California, Los Angeles, and as Archaeologist and Consultant to the Southwest Museum. In 1950, he was promoted to Associate Professor of Anthropology, the post he held at the time of his death.
Brainerd's many research interests did not lead him to neglect his teaching. He was indeed an enthusiastic and inspiring teacher who gave generously of his time and talents to both students and laymen who were interested in his field. He played a major role in organization and direction of the Southern California Archaeological Survey Association, where he stimulated and guided much sound research by local, non-professional workers.
To his friends, students, and colleagues, George Brainerd was a warm and friendly person. We shall remember him, not only for his considerable abilities as a scholar and teacher, but as well for his never-failing good humor, his artistry in telling a good story, and his cheerful willingness to assume more than his share in the many tasks of running a University department.
Gerald E. K. Branch, Chemistry and Chemical Engineering: Berkeley
| 1886-1954 | |
| Professor |
Gerald E. K. Branch, was born April 16, 1886, at Basseterre, St. Kitts, British West Indies. In 1904 he entered the University of Edinburgh to study medicine. He passed his First Professional with distinction, winning also the medal in elementary chemistry under Crum Brown. Ultimately, however, he gave up medicine for chemistry. After a brief return home, he entered the Chemistry Department under F. G. Donnan at Liverpool University in 1909. His fellow student and friend, Hugh Taylor, now Professor at Princeton, relates that Branch sustained a brilliant Honours B.Sc. degree examination there in 1911. After a year's research with Titherly he took the M.S. degree in 1912, and became engaged to Esther Hudson, the outstanding woman student at Liverpool, whom he married in 1915. In 1912 Branch left for Berkeley, and Taylor for Sweden and Germany.
Branch may be considered as having established, at the University of California, the first modern school of theoretical organic chemistry. His extensive study of the relationship of the structure of organic acids with acid strength gave rise to many of the basic notions of induction and mesomerism (resonance) stemming from Gilbert N. Lewis's theory of chemical bonds. Branch's views contributed much to the development of this theory.
The most recent of Professor Branch's interests was the relation of absorption spectrum in dyestuffs and similar organic
Branch was one of the editors of the Journal of Organic Chemistry from 1936-1952 and a referee for publications in the Journal of the American Chemical Society for many years.
Even while rigorously confined to bed during his first heart attack, he carried on his work in these and other capacities.
Many of Professor Branch's students extoll the inspiration of his teaching. Dr. Bert Tolbert's remarks are typical.
“... In his office conferences, Professor Branch would cover great realms of theory and inductive reasoning, many times leaving me far behind, but he would patiently and simply repeat and explain until everything was completely clear. Another item that stands out was his method of helping in the laboratory work. I learned that the primary requirement was a tremendous quantity of test tubes and an array of all the common solvents and reagents. With this very limited set of tools, Professor Branch would cover a fantastic multitude of exploratory experiments and derive thereby the optimum pathway for our research. He instituted a series of weekly meetings at his home in the evening to write up a series of papers for publication and to review the material for my thesis. The opportunity to become thoroughly acquainted with my professor and his wife was probably one of the most memorable parts of this instruction period. I learned during these times to appreciate the kindness and sincerity of both of these people and was able to obtain some insight into their philosophical approach to science as a way of life.”
Branch was active in the “History of Science Dinner Club” of this University. Professor A. Pabst has kindly made the following extract from the minutes of March 13, 1951: “... the
This excellent essay on Gilbert Lewis was subsequently amplified by Branch and submitted to the Club on July 13, 1953. It is now in process of publication.
Like his friend Gilbert Lewis, Professor Branch in his leisure hours was a delightful and inspiring companion. His keen analytical mind made him pre-eminent in chess and games of cards. At the Faculty Club, his only rival at chess was the late Arthur Ryder, Professor of Sanskrit. Mr. Fred N. Christensen remarks: “As a student, I remember that nearly every semester he would give a simultaneous exhibition for us in Stephens Union, taking on all comers.” Mr. W.P. Barlow tells that Branch's performance at a simultaneous exhibition, while on sabbatical leave in England, was praised in the Chess Magazine. He also tells that Branch and he once played a simultaneous exhibition with twenty-five children at the Blind School of California in Berkeley.
As in science, so in chess he was untiringly kind and considerate with beginners.
On the morning of the day of his death, April 14, 1954, during a lecture he felt an oncoming attack. He took a dose of nitroglycerine and finished the lecture.
That afternoon he returned to his office and there his wife found him when she came to fetch him home, at rest forever from his labors.
LeRoy H. Briggs, Clinical Medicine: San Francisco
| 1883-1953 | |
| Willian Watt Kerr Professor Emeritus |
LeRoy H. Briggs was a man possessed of great drive and energy. He was impetuous and one quickly to make a decision. Basically shy and modest, he never for a moment spared himself in work or play. He was a dynamic influence on those about him.
Dr. Briggs was an outstanding teacher and true friend of the student. He deplored the present-day trend to “slip diagnosis” and rarely failed when the occasion permitted to make a slight comment on “gadgets and push-button medicine.” His contributions to medical literature were few but worthy. His contributions to medicine were immeasurably great, his teachings and philosophy being carried on by a host of men in medicine today who regard him as one of their great teachers. Dr. Briggs epitomized the distinguished physician whose sound judgment and keen clinical acumen gained for him the respect, admiration, and devotion of students and patients alike.
Dr. Briggs was born in Oakland, California, where he attended public schools and later the University of California at Berkeley. He graduated from the University of California School of Medicine in 1908. He then began both the private practice of medicine and the long career in teaching in the medical school which terminated at the time of his retirement in 1951. In his early years he was active in the San Francisco Medical Society. He was President of the Society in 1925,
In addition to his career in medicine he participated in many civic activities. Years of service with the Community Chest were climaxed in 1939, when he served as Chairman of the General Executive Committee. During World War II he served as technical supervisor of the San Francisco Red Cross Blood Procurement Center. He valued highly his associations and activities at the Bohemian Club in San Francisco and at the “Grove,” where warm friendship and good fellowship prevail.
Dr. Briggs died on June 29, 1953, after two years of relative inactivity. Hundreds of letters were received by his family from near and far, expressing sorrow and sympathy.
To these many expressions, may we now add the sincere sentiments of this Faculty.
Margaret Sprague Carhart, English: Los Angeles
| 1877-1953 | |
| Associate Professor Emeritus |
Professor Margaret Sprague Carhart joined the University in September, 1920, the year after the Southern Branch of the University of California came into existence with an offering of work restricted to the freshman and sophomore levels; she retired as Associate Professor, Emeritus, in June, 1947, when the University at Los Angeles had already reached maturity in its expanding graduate and professional schools. During these years she played a leading part in helping the Los Angeles campus to establish itself in the community. Through her tireless energy she made a very substantial contribution to its general welfare.
Professor Carhart was born in Evanston, Illinois, on June 28, 1877, the daughter of Henry Sprague Carhart, Chairman of the Department of Physics of the University of Michigan, and Ellen M. Soulé, Professor of French and Dean of Women at Northwestern University. She took both her bachelor's and master's degrees at the University of Michigan. In 1921, she received the Ph.D. degree in English from Yale University. After leaving Michigan, she taught for several years at the University of Colorado as head of the work in Engineering English. She then came to California, first as a teacher of English at the Pasadena High School, then as head of the Department of English at the Union High School in Palo Alto. For one year she was Educational Director and Assistant Superintendent at the State School for Girls in Ventura.
Professor Carhart was primarily a teacher. She was in particular
In University affairs, Dr. Carhart was a cheerful and cooperative colleague with a delightful sense of humor and a vivacious personality. She carried a heavy share of departmental advising and committee work. She acted as a judge for the Department in innumerable writing competitions, such as those of the Southern California Poetry Society, and won golden opinions for her patience and fairness. She was very active in the affairs of the Faculty Women's Club, particularly in the creative writing section. She served as President of the Club. She served also as Councilor, Vice-President, and finally President of the local chapter of Phi Beta Kappa, of which she was a charter member.
Beyond the University she took a leading part in the affairs of the Michigan Alumni Association. On the occasion of the Michigan Centennial, she was one of two distinguished alumni called back to speak at that celebration. In Southern California she was in constant demand by community and professional groups as a literary judge, book reviewer, and lecturer, especially on contemporaneous literature. She was
In her own study her chief interest was biography. She published in 1923 a standard life of Joanna Baillie--her doctoral dissertation at Yale. In her later years, long after her retirement, she was working on a life of Oscar Wilde, using the materials in the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library as a basis. Just before her death she had been offered access to an important private collection of Wilde papers in England, and had applied for a Fulbright Fellowship in order that she might take advantage of the opportunity.
As a result of her subsidiary interest in modern drama, she was for many years a regular contributor to Burns Mantle's annual review of the year's best plays.
Professor Carhart died on December 19, 1953, after an illness that lasted only two days. She had lived a vigorous, full, and useful life, within the University and without, up to the very end. She gave unstintingly of herself to others. She made an indelible impression on her many students and friends, who will regard her passing with a deep sense of both personal and professional loss.
Eugene R. Chapman, Obstetrics and Gynecology: Los Angeles
| 1905-1954 | |
| Associate Clinical Professor and Assistant Dean, School of Medicine |
Dr. Eugene Chapman was born in Bennett, Iowa, July 16, 1905, and received most of his education in his native State. After obtaining his B.S. degree from the University of Iowa in 1926 he attended law school for one year, then switched to medicine. He did an internship at Mercy Hospital in Davenport, Iowa, after which he went to Chicago for special training in obstetrics. In 1934 Dr. Chapman entered the U. S. Army Medical Corps, where he remained for twelve years. During this time he held many positions of great responsibility, especially during World War II. He was in charge of one of the Army's two 750-bed evacuation hospitals for a period of six months. He was also Chief of Plans and Operations of the Chief Surgeon's Office in the Southwest Pacific area for approximately one and one-half years. In this capacity he was responsible for the medical planning of the various separate invasions.
In 1946 Dr. Chapman was discharged from the Army a full Colonel and entered the private practice of obstetrics in San Antonio, Texas. He was very successful. He soon became Chief of Obstetrics at three of San Antonio's leading hospitals. In addition, he organized and ran the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology in the San Antonio, Texas, Division of the University of Texas Post Graduate School of Medicine. Here he held a clinical professorship. He was also Associate Clinical Professor at Baylor's Graduate School of Medicine.
Dr. Chapman was very handsome and of serious mien. His appearance was always immaculate. He possessed both a considerable professional talent and exceptional organizational and executive ability. His untimely death at age 48 was a great loss to the community and to the University.
Beatrice Quijada Cornish, Spanish and Portuguese: Berkeley
| 1878-1952 | |
| Assistant Professor Emeritus |
Mrs. Beatrice Quijada Cornish was born Beatriz Quijada y Aza on July 8, 1878, in Hermosillo, Sonora, Mexico. She received early schooling at the College of Notre Dame in San Jose, California, and graduated from Mission High School in San Francisco in 1898. In 1914 she obtained the degree B.L. from the University of California, and was elected to the honor society, Phi Beta Kappa, on graduation. She took the master's degree in history in 1915, and the Ph.D. in Spanish in 1925.
She taught in the University of California at Berkeley without interruption or sabbatical from 1916 until her retirement as Assistant Professor of Spanish, Emeritus, on January 1, 1945, passing through the various grades of Associate (1920-1925) and Instructor (1925-1935). She died April 28, 1952.
Her master's thesis was entitled “The Preliminaries to the Oñate Expedition in New Mexico,” and the results of this investigation appeared in part as “The Ancestry and Family of Juan de Oñate” in The Pacific Coast in History, edited by H. Morse Stephens and Herbert E. Bolton, New York, Macmillan, 1917, pages 452-464.
Her doctoral thesis dealt with the life and works of Francisco Navarro Villoslada, a minor Spanish novelist of the nineteenth century. A portion appeared in the University of California Publications in Modern Philology, VII, 1918, pages 1-85, under the title “Francisco Navarro Villoslada.” Later she
She was married January 14, 1906, to Harry Louis Cornish, a mining engineer who had played on some great University of California football teams in 1898, 1899, and 1900. It is said, we do not know if on sound authority, that he was a model for the football statue by Douglas Tilden which is a landmark on the Berkeley campus. He died on April 1, 1928; they had no children. Mrs. Cornish's strong motherly nature expressed itself with warm generosity toward all her friends. She gave freely of her goods and of her spirit, and took little thought for her own advantage. For example, she was a skilled stenographer in English and Spanish, and spent many unpaid hours training students in Spanish shorthand, so that they might qualify for commercial positions. She was a popular teacher and a harmonizing force in the Department. Students and professors alike brought their troubles to her and met unfailing sympathy and understanding. When flagging health compelled her to retire she was followed by the affection of all her colleagues.
Frederick Warren Cozens, Physical Education: Berkeley and Los Angeles
| 1890-1954 | |
| Professor | |
| Director |
Frederick Warren Cozens died on January 2, 1954, in Berkeley, California, following a heart attack. Thus terminated a distinguished career which included nearly forty years of service to the University. He is survived by two sons, Frederick, Jr., of Los Angeles, and James B., of Danville, California, and three grandchildren.
His death came at the end of a rich and happy personal life; it followed a long and productive professional career. His genial disposition and courageous spirit endeared him to all his associates; his devotion and loyalty to family, to friends, and to the University well merited the respect and affection accorded him.
Born in Portland, Oregon, November 19, 1890, he was married in 1916 to Helen Kerron, who died on December 8, 1953, after an illness of two years.
He earned the A.B. and M.A. degrees at the University of California, and the Ph.D. at the University of Oregon. As an undergraduate, he was active in athletics. His service to the University was long and varied: Teaching Fellow and later Instructor in Physical Education on the Berkeley campus (1915-1919); Director of Physical Education and Athletics and Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, and Professor of Physical Education (1919-1942) at the University of California, Los Angeles; Dean of the College of Applied Arts at Los Angeles (1939-1942); Professor and Director of Physical Education on the Berkeley campus (1942-1954). His administrative
His service to professional organizations was extensive and diverse. He became Associate Editor of the Journal of Health and Physical Education in 1929, and in a similar capacity helped to establish the Research Quarterly of the American Physical Education Association in 1930. In that Association he was elected chairman of the Research Section in 1935, member of the Governing Board in 1936, chairman of the Physical Education Division in 1937, and President in 1938. He had been elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Physical Education in 1931, and served as its President in 1950.
His scholarly contributions to the literature of physical education reveal the breadth of his interests and abilities. He was a pioneer in the area of tests and measurements, and his contributions to historical and experimental research in this field brought distinction to him and to his profession. The first edition of the book (with John F. Bovard) which is still the standard text in this area, appeared in 1930. His test battery for Athletic Ability of College Men has served as a model in test construction. The Classification Index developed from extensive studies of the relationship of age, height, and weight to physical performances of boys and girls from elementary school through high school has been adopted in California as the standard method of classifying high school boys for competitive athletics. A series of five Achievement Scales which he coauthored have been published by the California State Department of Education.
The profound interest of Professor Cozens in the philosophy and principles of physical education as a profession found early expression in joint authorship (with Eugene W.
His life of fellowship, service, and leadership is reflected in the record of his affiliations and official recognitions. He was a member of the Masonic order, the Acacia fraternity, and Rotary International; of the Big C Society; of Phi Epsilon Kappa, Phi Delta Kappa, and Sigma Xi. He received the Ling Medal for Distinguished Service for Health Progress of Children in 1932, the Honor Award of the American Association for Health, Physical Education and Recreation in 1936, and the Medal of Merit from the Ministry of Social Welfare and Public Health of Czechoslovakia in 1939. In 1953, he was presented with the Gulick Award for Distinctive Service in Physical Education, the highest honor in his profession.
His sudden death brought sorrow and shock to his many friends and professional associates. His dedication to family and professional welfare will be remembered with profound appreciation. He has left a rich heritage in his contribution to professional scholarship. His leadership was inspiring and his influence widely felt, but he will be missed most of all as a friend of the hundreds of students and colleagues who had the privilege of working with him as a teacher, administrator, author, editor, and tireless worker in his professional field.
G. Dundas Craig, English: Berkeley
| 1874-1952 | |
| Assistant Professor Emeritus |
By the death of George Dundas Craig on October 27, 1952, his colleagues lost a valued fellow worker, and many of them a very dear friend.
Dr. Craig was born in Arbroath, Scotland, January 6, 1874. His formal education was at Harris Academy in Dundee, and at the University of Edinburgh, from which he won his bachelor's degree, with First Class Honours in English Language, Literature, and History, and subsequently an M.A. He was George Saintsbury's first honors student at that institution. He taught for more than a quarter of a century in the secondary schools of Scotland: in Glasgow, Stanraer, Dundee, in his native town of Arbroath (where he was English Master and head of his department), and last at Dollar Academy, near Edinburgh, where he remained from 1910 to 1924. During these earlier years, he traveled widely in Europe, especially Spain, and in northern Africa. When in Madrid he studied for a time under Tomás. In 1924 reasons of family health caused him to move, first to Switzerland for a brief period, and then to California. For a year he was tutor to the sons of William Randolph Hearst. In the summer of 1925 he became a member of the Department of English at the University of California, in Berkeley, where his family joined him and where he spent the rest of his career. He became a citizen of the United States on June 6, 1930.
In 1934 the degree of D.Litt. was conferred upon him by his old university, Edinburgh, in recognition of his book, The Modernist Trend in Spanish-American Poetry,
Professor Craig was deeply attached to music throughout his life, both as an ardent concert-goer and as a performer. His interest in the musical activities of the communities in which he lived was matched only by his love of playing himself. As a young man (and before he came to the United States), his chief enthusiasm was the piano and the organ, and to a lesser extent the violin. But it was the latter instrument and especially the viola with which musicians in Berkeley associated him. His joy in playing string quartets can be appreciated best by those who have shared similar experiences. For about fifteen years Mr. Craig was one of the most faithful members of the University Symphony Orchestra, playing first under Professor Modeste Alloo and later under Professor Albert Elkus. Late in the 1940's, however, the onset of arthritis compelled him to lay aside his instruments. Modest and unassuming, Professor Craig had an infectious enthusiasm for music that transmitted itself to those about him. He was a musical amateur in the true sense of the word.
His relations with students, as with colleagues, were marked with a special, very personal, and very endearing benevolence that was the distillation of his highly individual blend of good will, simplicity, and fortitude. He had principles, and deep-lying convictions, and exacting standards of excellence. But these he did not parade; and his charity for individual shortcomings always seasoned his judgments and generally spoke first. He was, by ordinary human standards, quite incapable of malice or willingness to cause pain; and in him mercy so tempered justice that he was the inevitable
Dr. Craig is survived by his wife, Mary Elizabeth Dundas Craig, who was in her girlhood his student at Glasgow, and was his loyal and devoted companion through the many years of their married life; and by their four children, Arthur G. D. Craig, Frank D. D. Craig, Isobel M. B., now Mrs. Ralph Hamilton, and Kathleen H. D., now Mrs. William Watson Fell.
Stuart Daggett, Transportation Engineering: Berkeley
| 1881-1954 | |
| Flood Professor of Transportation, Emeritus |
Stuart Daggett was born on March 2, 1881, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His career ended on December 22, 1954, at his home in Berkeley. It was characteristic of him that on the same day on which his final illness struck him, he had been at the University collecting materials dealing with the St. Lawrence Seaway. Although he had just sent to his publisher the revised manuscript of the fourth edition of his monumental Principles of Inland Transportation, first published in 1928, he was already beginning another major investigation. His physician has remarked that it would have been mental and physical bondage for Stuart Daggett to have given up systematic scholarly pursuits.
Stuart Daggett received all three of his degrees, the A.B. in 1903, the A.M. in 1904, and the Ph.D in 1906, from Harvard University. During 1906 to 1909 he was Instructor at Harvard, but in 1909 accepted appointment to the University of California as Assistant Professor of Railway Economics on the Flood Foundation. From that day until his death he was a faculty member at Berkeley. When he came to the campus he joined that small, distinguished pioneering company of scholars in economics, which then included Adolph C. Miller, Wesley Clair Mitchell, Carl Copping Plehn, Lincoln Hutchinson, Jessica B. Peixotto, A. W. Whitney, and Henry Rand Hatfield. Professor Daggett was the last surviving member of this group. His notable contributions to teaching, research, scholarly writing, and University and public service over the
Professor Daggett was the author of numerous books, contributions to scholarly publications, and reviews. Among his most significant publications were Railroad Reorganization, Chapters on the History of the Southern Pacific, Principles of Inland Transportation (four editions), Railroad Consolidation West of the Mississippi River, and Structure of Transcontinental Railroad Rates.
Professor Daggett was often called upon to render federal, state, and local public service. In 1912 he served as expert for a committee to advise the governor of California on the equalization of taxes. During World War I, he was with the War Industries Board, Division of Planning and Statistics. In 1924 he was expert for the Presidential Committee on Coördination of Rail and Water Facilities. During World War II, he was public member of various War Labor Board panels. He also made important contributions to private industry in various ways, including publication in trade papers, participation in business conferences, and acting as private arbitrator.
Professor Daggett's greatest influence, however, was through his services as a teacher, administrator, and colleague on the faculty of the University of California. In the classroom his lectures were marked by extraordinary care in preparation and presentation. Running through the orderly discussion were numerous evidences of subtle humor, much to the delight of those students whose thirst for knowledge included also an appreciation of the lighter touch. His judicious temperament and ability in carrying heavy responsibilities brought him many demands in University government and administration. From 1920 to 1927 he was Dean of the College of Commerce (replaced by the School of Business Administration
Stuart Daggett was truly one of the great statesmen of the University of California. In a sense, too, he may be characterized as a “professor's professor,” for he possessed to a high degree so many of the talents and qualities characteristic of the academic scholar--objectivity, meticulous precision, unyielding integrity, high standards of performance and personal dignity. His intimates and members of his immediate family realized that behind his reserve and dignity there was also warm friendliness, kindliness, affection, and a high degree of sensitivity.
Bernard Alfred Etcheverry, Civil Engineering and Irrigation: Berkeley
| 1881-1954 | |
| Professor of Drainage and Irrigation, Emeritus |
Bernard Alfred Etcheverry served the University of California, Berkeley, continuously for forty-six years and for a total period of forty-seven years. His first appointment was as Instructor in Civil Engineering, held during the academic year 1902-1903. After two years as Associate Professor of Civil Engineering and Physics at the University of Nevada, he returned to Berkeley in 1905 to serve successively as Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, and Professor of Irrigation and Drainage until his retirement in 1951. Throughout that time he acted first as Chairman of the Department, later the Division of Irrigation.
Professor Etcheverry was born in San Diego, California, on June 30, 1881; completed his high school work at Lycée de Bayonne, Académie de Bordeaux; and was graduated at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1902 as University Medalist, with a B.S. degree in civil engineering. He was married to Helen Hanson on August 6, 1903, at Berkeley. He had two sons, Bernard Earle Etcheverry and Alfred Starr Etcheverry. He died on October 26, 1954, in New Haven, Connecticut.
He was a member of Psi Epsilon fraternity and of six honor societies in the University--Phi Beta Kappa, Tau Beta Pi, Sigma Xi, Chi Epsilon, Alpha Zeta, Sigma Iota Phi--and was awarded National Honor membership in Chi Epsilon in 1954. He was also a member of the American Society of Civil Engineers and the American Geophysical Union. At various times he served on numerous committees of the American Society
Professor Etcheverry was engineer on the construction of the Greek Theatre. During the early years of his teaching, his summers were spent on irrigation problems in western Canada and on an investigation of the use of concrete in irrigation systems. This latter work was performed in behalf of the Irrigation Investigations of the U. S. Department of Agriculture. In 1912 he had begun the preparation of his three-volume treatise, Irrigation Practice and Engineering. These were published during the years 1915-1917. They became and have remained through forty years standard treatments of the subjects covered. He thus gained recognition, both at home and abroad, as the leading author in this field. He was also author of Land Drainage and Flood Protection, first published in 1931.
Professor Etcheverry was continuously active in professional practice. From 1912 to 1917 he made investigations for the City of San Francisco of the uses of water from the Tuolumne River. In 1915 he was a member of the Board of Review for several projects of the U. S. Bureau of Reclamation, passing on repayments under these projects. He was consulting engineer for the State Reclamation Board from its organization in 1913 until his death, advising the Board on the many engineering and policy matters arising out of its supervision of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Drainage District. For several years he was a member of the Board of Appraisers assessing benefits resulting from the project of the State Reclamation Board. As the leading witness for the Board in litigation relating to those assessments, he successfully defended both the methods used (largely developed by him) and their results. In later years he served as one of the consulting appraisers for the U. S. Bureau of Reclamation in its acquirement of lands and water rights for its Central Valley Project.
He was a member of the consulting board which was appointed by the State Engineer to assist in the preparation of the State Water Plan adopted by the legislature in 1931, and continued to serve as a general consultant for the State Engineer on numerous special assignments. In 1945, at the time of its organization, he was appointed by Governor Warren a member of the State Water Resources Board, and was its Vice-Chairman at the time of his death.
Professor Etcheverry acted as consulting engineer for many other public and private organizations during the course of his long career. These included a report on the water needs of Kern County made for that county. In recent years he was consulting engineer for the Kern County Land Company on its plans for water development. He had been a consulting engineer for the Kern River Water Storage District at the time of its activity. He was a member of the board to review the appraisal of the properties proposed to be acquired by the San Joaquin River Water Storage District. Other clients included the Madera Irrigation District and several of the reclamation districts in the Sacramento Valley. He was consulting engineer for the Pacific Gas and Electric Company in litigation over water rights on Pit River, for the California-Oregon Power Company in matters involving Klamath Lake, and for the City of San Francisco in its early litigation with the Modesto and Turlock Irrigation Districts. He was an expert witness for the Lindsay-Strathmore Irrigation District in litigation over water rights on Kaweah River.
Professor Etcheverry represented an outstanding example of the fortunate combination of an effective teacher of engineering and a successful practicing engineer. His high academic record demonstrated his scholastic abilities. His professional record demonstrated his ability to apply his knowledge to important problems in the field of irrigation engineering. His personal qualities enabled him to meet the contacts of the classroom, of professional practice, and the trying field
Bernard Etcheverry was a man of extraordinary friendliness. He was highly regarded and deeply esteemed by his students and colleagues, alike. He was intensely loyal to his professional tasks and to his intimate friends.
Lloyd H. Fisher, Political Science: Berkeley
| 1911-1953 | |
| Professor | |
| Associate Director, Institute of Industrial Relations |
Lloyd H. Fisher's brief career at the University was tragically ended by his death, after a long and severe illness, on February 2, 1953. He was only forty-one years of age, had been with the University only since 1946, and had just been promoted to the rank of full Professor. As a member of the Department of Political Science at Berkeley, as Assistant Director and then Associate Director of the Institute of Industrial Relations, as a social scientist whose penetrating mind and wide-ranging interests refused to be bound by the limits of any one narrow field, and as a colleague whose passion for the dignity of the individual helped to direct but never obscure the working of a first-rate mind, he had a profound influence upon those who knew him, an influence which was just coming to be recognized nationally at the time of his death.
Fisher was a person with wide interests and equally broad training. He was born in Philadelphia in 1911, went through Philadelphia public schools, and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania before his twentieth birthday. Then followed a year of graduate study in anthropology and sociology at the University of Paris and another year of graduate work in the same two fields at the University of Pennsylvania. At this point, he broke off his formal connection with the academic world to begin nearly a decade of important government service. From 1935 to 1942 he served with the U. S.
In 1947 Harvard University recognized Fisher's growing reputation by awarding him the Wertheim Fellowship in Industrial Cooperation, and this was followed by an additional fellowship during the following year. The years at Harvard were years of intellectual discovery for Fisher. He rounded out his graduate training in economics and political science, and in 1949 received the doctorate in these two fields. In these two brief years he not only completed all the requirements for the degree, but also prepared the manuscript of his first book, The Harvest Labor Market in California. This manuscript was published a few days after his death.
He returned to the University of California in the fall of 1949 as Associate Professor of Political Science, and subsequently became Assistant Director and then Associate Director of the Institute of Industrial Relations. He played a major role in the direction of the Institute's research program.
Fisher chose to identify himself as a political scientist. He was instrumental in reorganizing Berkeley course offerings in
Fisher's writings reflect the scope of his intellectual interests as well as his unique ability to bring new questions to bear on old problems. In a paper he wrote while he was still a student, he criticized the use of biological analogies in the study of society by showing that the customs of certain tribes seemed to sanction their self-destruction. A study of race violence led him to investigate the relationship between the irrationality of unorganized group-behavior and the varying readiness to organize among different social groups. The growing power of private associations over their members led him to an investigation of internal conflict as a means to safeguard the freedom of the individual as well as the rationality of the organization. Fisher's writings ranged from race relations to farm policy, from the internal government of trade unions and job evaluation in the aircraft industry to collective bargaining patterns, from the position of the casual laborer to the relation between private associations and the State. Underlying this diversity of interests was his deep pre-occupation with the impact of society upon the individual and his desire to understand what institutional arrangements best safeguard the freedom and dignity of the individual.
It was this preoccupation that led Fisher to a systematic study of political theory. He was persuaded that the ultimate value and meaning of life, everywhere rich in conflicts, was
Harriet E. Glazier, Mathematics: Los Angeles
| 1870-1955 | |
| Assistant Professor Emeritus |
Assistant Professor Emeritus Harriet E. Glazier died November 7, 1955, fifteen years after her retirement from active service. Before this, she had spent forty-four years in college teaching, and three years as principal of a small high school. Throughout her life and career, one outstanding characteristic was always apparent: her strong devotion to duty.
Miss Glazier was born March 3, 1870, in Haverhill, New Hampshire. Immediately after her own elementary education, she undertook the task of acting as principal of a small high school at Barton Landing, Louisiana, from 1889 to 1892. She received her A.B. degree from Mt. Holyoke College in 1896, and remained there for one year as Instructor in Mathematics. From there she went in 1897 to Western College for Women at Oxford, Ohio, where she served with the title of Professor of Mathematics from 1905 until 1920. She was called to the newly founded Southern Branch of the University of California in 1920. While at Western College for Women she found time to continue her education and received her degree of Master of Arts from the University of Chicago in 1908.
She gave the best years of her life--1920 to 1940--to the University of California, Los Angeles. She was a very competent teacher, maintained high standards of instruction and achievement, and was appreciated by students of varied ability. She had an abiding influence upon a number of the best students of the Department of Mathematics in the early
Her influence in the educational world will continue for a long time, for her students are now teachers at all levels--from the primary grades to college professors. Her duty was well done.
Harold Reed Guilbert, Animal Husbandry: Davis
| 1897-1952 | |
| Professor | |
| Animal Husbandman in the Experiment Station |
Death came to Professor Harold Reed Guilbert on October 17, 1952, while he was attending a meeting of the Agricultural Board of the National Research Council in Washington, D.C. Thus ended the career which began twenty-eight years ago when Professor Guilbert, then a young man just out of Kansas State College, joined the staff of the Department of Animal Husbandry, College of Agriculture, at Davis.
Professor Guilbert was born in Columbus, Ohio, December 5, 1897. He received the B.S. degree in 1920 and the M.S. degree in 1924 from Kansas State Agricultural College. In 1920 he married Frances Steele. Two daughters were born, and both survive him. Their mother passed away in 1938. He rose from Assistant Animal Husbandman in the Experiment Station and Associate in the Department of Animal Husbandry to full Professor in 1945.
Professor Guilbert spent a sabbatical year in 1942 at Cornell University in advanced study at the School of Nutrition and again in 1949 traveled in Europe and also spent the Michaelmas term at Cambridge University in the. School of Agriculture.
Early in his career, Professor Guilbert became nationally known for his work on vitamin A deficiency and vitamin A requirements of livestock. His pioneer accomplishments in this field made him a valuable member of the Technical Committee on Vitamin A Researches, a committee of nine
He continued to show leadership in research in livestock nutrition and management and his many publications remain as a record of his success in this work. He was appointed chairman of the subcommittee on “Recommended Nutritive Allowances for Beef Cattle” of the Committee on Animal Nutrition of the National Research Council. Later, because of demonstrated ability as chairman of this committee, and because of the excellence of the report which his committee published, he was appointed to membership on the Agricultural Board, where he served until his death. The members of the Agricultural Board of the National Research Council are appointed on the basis of their demonstrated leadership in the agricultural sciences, and their ability to comprehend the broad applications and implications of these sciences in national and world affairs. They are given the task of advancing and interpreting scientific knowledge pertaining to agriculture. Professor Guilbert was well fitted for this post and served with distinction.
The existence of vitamin A deficiency in cattle under natural conditions on California ranges was definitely established by Professor Guilbert and his colleagues at Davis. He appreciated the value of this discovery and began a study which was carried on intensively for several years. As a result of this work, it became generally accepted that the vitamin A requirement of animals was proportional to the body weight of the animal. This fundamental fact was worked out by means of night blindness tests with cattle, sheep, horses, and swine and by other biological tests for poultry and rats. The great importance of these contributions to the study of vitamin
In addition to the vitamin A studies, Professor Guilbert demonstrated the economy of supplemental feeding of beef cattle on the range during the period when the range was deficient. He was interested in means of detecting the prepotency of beef bulls and developed tests based on the efficiency of gain of offspring. He perfected the University of California grading and record of performance program which is now in wide use for evaluating purebred breeding beef cattle. For many years, he supervised the livestock research investigations carried out with University-owned cattle on the Forest Service's San Joaquin Experimental Range in Madera County. He also was responsible for organizing and supervising the research program with beef cattle at the Imperial Valley Field Station, El Centro, California.
Professor Guilbert was meticulous in his teaching and recognized at an early date the importance of relating knowledge in the basic sciences to management problems of beef cattle. He organized the meat production course and taught it to Animal Husbandry students for twenty-five years.
Throughout life, Professor Guilbert demonstrated great courage and common sense in meeting problems as they arose. With his passing, the University has lost a most valuable teacher and research worker. His friends and supporters both within the University and in the cattle industry were legion.
Ernest Albion Hersam, Mining and Metallurgy: Berkeley
| 1868-1950 | |
| Professor of Metallurgy, Emeritus |
Ernest Albion Hersam was born March 9, 1868, in Stoneham, Massachusetts. After his early and preparatory education in the schools of Massachusetts, he entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was granted the B.S. degree in 1891. During the year 1891-1892 he served his alma mater as Assistant in Chemistry. The following year he went to the University of California as Analytical Assistant in the Mining Department and was given the added title of Instructor in Metallurgy in 1894. He became Assistant Professor of Metallurgy in 1897, Associate Professor in 1903, Professor in 1923, and retired in 1938 as Professor Emeritus.
Professor Hersam devoted himself conscientiously to his teaching and enjoyed the work and it is undoubtedly through his many years of teaching that he made his major contribution to the field of metallurgy. His was a quiet and unobtrusive personality, friendly, kindly, and considerate, particularly to his students.
His research activities were handicapped for many years by a peculiar restrictive policy of his department, and yet he had a continuing interest in the problems of metallurgy and ore dressing and published quite a number of contributions to these subjects.
His first paper was on the use of the triaxial diagram in the calculation of slags, followed by one on the testing of gold ores by amalgamation. He published a series of articles on fine particles, including sizing by screens, a standardized sizing
On leave of absence from the University 1922-1923, under special appointment of the U.S. Bureau of Mines, and as secretary of a committee on milling methods of the American Institute of Mining and Metallurgical Engineers and in cooperation with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he conducted a survey of research in the milling industry. One of the results was a special bulletin on standardization work by the Milling Methods Committee.
From 1926 he was on a McGraw-Hill Book Company advisory committee to outline and supervise metallurgical tests.
Professor Hersam's interest in the activities of a considerable range of scientific and professional societies is indicated by his membership in the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Institute of Mining and Metallurgical Engineers, the American Mining Congress, Mining and Metallurgical Society of America, the Franklin Institute, Society for the Promotion of Engineering Education, Society of Chemical Industry, Association of American University Professors, Sigma Xi, Tau Beta Pi, Theta Tau, and Phi Lambda Upsilon. He was chairman of the San Francisco
He displayed ability and charm as a toastmaster, and skill in presiding at certain student functions.
Grace Evelyn Danforth, whom he married at Stoneham, Massachusetts, in 1892, passed away in 1901. His only son died in infancy. In 1910 he married Ida Louise Downing at Stockton, California, but lost her by death the year he retired. He enjoyed home life, and both of his marriages were happy ones.
Ernest Hersam died in Berkeley, California, June 24, 1950, and in accordance with his wishes was buried in the family plot at Stoneham, Massachusetts, the town where he was born.
Joseph Dupuy Hodgen, Dentistry: San Francisco
| 1865-1949 | |
| Professor of Histology and Dental Pathology, Emeritus |
Joseph D. Hodgen was born in Lexington, Kentucky, September 12, 1865. He was the youngest son of Isaac Newton Hodgen, M.D., who came to California September 1, 1875, locating for the practice of medicine in Woodland. His forebears were clergymen, physicians, and dentists. Here in Woodland he attended public schools and Hesperion College, graduating from this and Oakland High School in 1885. Entering the Dental Department of the University of California, located in Toland Hall, San Francisco, with the Class of 1887, he not only carried on his work there, but also did partial work at Berkeley, where he was made a member of the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity. Upon receiving his D.D.S. degree from the Dental Department in November, 1887, he went to Woodland, where he entered practice with his father, who practiced some dentistry along with his medical practice.
In 1891 he was appointed a member of the State Board of Dental Examiners by Governor Markham and remained a member and Secretary until December, 1897. In 1891, in response to an invitation from the faculty, he came to San Francisco to become Superintendent of the Infirmary, which position he held until 1894.
On January 26, 1892, he was appointed assistant to Professor Goddard in Dental Metallurgy, serving as Instructor in Chemistry and Metallurgy under both Dr. Goddard and Professor Lengfeld until 1900, when he was appointed, by the Regents, Professor of Chemistry and Metallurgy, which position he held until 1907.
From June, 1892, to June, 1895, Dr. Hodgen edited and published the monthly dental journal, Pacific Coast Dentist, later called the Stomatological Gazette. In August, 1893, he was elected Secretary of the National Association of Dental Examiners.
In September, 1896, he published the first edition of his Practical Dental Metallurgy. This book with revisions is now used in many dental colleges in the United States.
By appointment of the Board of Regents in 1907, he was made Professor of Operative Dentistry, which chair he held until 1917, when he was appointed Professor of Histology and Dental Pathology. He continued in this position until 1919, when he was made Professor of Histology and Dental Pathology, Emeritus.
He introduced, into the developing profession, the idea of treating infections by chemistry. This was a long time before the development of pharmacology. He contributed much to dental literature and to the profession generally.
He held membership in the following societies, some of which carried through his entire lifetime: National Dental Association (American Dental Association), California State Dental Association, American Medical Association, American Chemical Society, Alumni Association of the Dental Department of the University of California (President, 1899-1900), Xi Psi Phi Dental Fraternity, and the Mechanics Institute and Library, of which he was in his later years a Director, and President. Through this latter position he was an ex-officio Regent of the University (1940-1943).
Dr. Hodgen died July 8, 1949, and is survived by a daughter, Margaret T. Hodgen, Professor of Sociology and Social Institutions in the University at Berkeley. Mrs. Hodgen preceded him in death several years earlier.
Joseph William Hull, Art: Los Angeles
| 1893-1953 | |
| Assistant Professor |
Joseph William Hull, born in Sussex, England, April 7, 1893, died at his home, 1515 North Bundy Drive, Los Angeles, on April 4, 1953.
With the death of Joseph William Hull, the University of California lost a teacher of many talents and a man whose career was unusually varied.
After finishing elementary school at the age of fourteen, he left home to go to sea, where, during three years, he circumnavigated the world a number of times.
From 1910 to 1914, he developed his artistic talent by study in England and on the European continent, making records of his travels in precise watercolor, so redolent of the contemporaneous English style. In 1914 he enlisted in the British Navy, and as a warrant officer in the medical department he saw service in Europe and the Near East.
After the war, he remained in Constantinople for three years, where he continued his study of art and the history of art. The years 1922 to 1926 were spent in further study and travel in Europe.
In 1926 he came to La Crescenta and established an art studio; later he managed an art gallery with Count Jean de Strelecki in the Vista del Arroyo Hotel in Pasadena.
At the age of forty-six, after becoming an American citizen, he entered the University of California, Los Angeles, as a student, was graduated a Bachelor of Arts three years later, and immediately was engaged as a full-time Instructor in the
In the summers of 1951 and 1952 he conducted study tours of Europe, and through lectures, illustrated by color photographs he had taken abroad, he gained a reputation as an authority on European travel.
His work at the University proper included scientific illustration, perspective drawing, and art history of Europe and Middle America; and in the Extension Division he conducted lectures on “Backgrounds of Foreign Travel.”
He was a member of the American Society for Aesthetics, the California Water Color Society, the Laguna Beach Art Association, and the Westwood Village Kiwanis Club.
Joseph Hull's whole life was an unremitting search for an ideal of knowledge. His enthusiasm for his work and deep interest in all his endeavors recognized no stopping place; in spite of impeded health, he never rested from his labors. His youthful spirit and keen understanding made him a joyful companion and an unusually lucid lecturer beloved by his students.
Sigurd Bernhard Hustvedt, English: Los Angeles
| 1882-1954 | |
| Professor Emeritus |
With the death of Professor Emeritus Sigurd Bernhard Hustvedt on October 4, 1954, the University of California, Los Angeles, lost a man whose administrative wisdom and scholarship helped it to grow from the newly established Southern Branch into a distinguished university.
Professor Hustvedt joined the faculty as Assistant Professor of English in 1921. He retired in 1949 after nineteen years of full professorial rank. During the formative period on the Vermont campus and the maturing years in Westwood, the University felt his influence far beyond the classroom, where he was an effective teacher. On Senate and administrative committees, his wisdom and sound judgment helped to set up the broad lines of policy and establish the standards of teaching and scholarship maintained on the Los Angeles campus.
A native of Iowa, a graduate of Luther College, he began his graduate work at Berkeley in 1911, where Professor Walter M. Hart awakened in him an interest in folklore, and especially in balladry--the field in which he was to rise to scholarly eminence. The next year he went to Harvard, where he worked under Kittredge, and took his Ph.D. in 1915. He was there awarded the Parker Fellowship in Comparative Literature (1914-1915) for ballad study in England and the Scandinavian countries. On his return, he began his teaching career at the University of Illinois, but it was interrupted by World War I, in which he served as a Captain of Infantry.
Professor Hustvedt's scholarly publication was centered in the ballad field. His first book, the result of his work under Kittredge and his tenure of the Parker Fellowship, began his important survey of ballad scholarship. Published in 1916 by the American-Scandinavian Foundation, Ballad Criticism in Scandinavia and Great Britain During the Eighteenth Century marks, as Professor Archer Taylor has said, “an epoch in ballad studies.” This was followed in 1930 by Ballad Books and Ballad Men, which carried the historical account through the making of Francis J. Child's great collection. Professor Hustvedt planned a third volume, which was to review the remarkable scholarly developments of the twentieth century, but this was not completed. Portions of this projected book were published-- “A Melodic Index of Child's Ballad Tunes” and “A Method of Publishing Collections of Simple Airs” -- and laid foundations on which others have built.
Professor Hustvedt was not narrowed to one interest. He was especially interested in Milton and the literature of the seventeenth century. At both the undergraduate and graduate levels, his courses in Milton and his contemporaries were enriched by his profound knowledge of Puritan theology. When the Los Angeles campus was given the William Andrews Clark Library, he immediately recommended the systematic strengthening of its great holdings in the seventeenth century and put forward the plans for an edition of
No brief memorial can do justice to the significance of Professor Hustvedt's contributions to scholarship and to the University of California, Los Angeles. His contributions to both were fundamental ones.
John Clement Kaudy: Riverside
| 1923-1953 | |
| Junior Chemist in the Citrus Experiment Station |
John Clement Kaudy, Junior Chemist in the Citrus Experiment Station, Riverside, passed away September 1, 1953.
Dr. Kaudy was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on March 10, 1923. He graduated from St. Lawrence High School, Mt. Calvary, Wisconsin, in 1941. He attended Milwaukee State Teachers College for a year, and in September, 1942, entered the University of Wisconsin.
In January, 1943, he joined the Army and served three and one-half years as a radar officer. Following his army service, he returned to the University of Wisconsin and in succession completed requirements for his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees, the latter being awarded in June, 1951. His major subject at the University of Wisconsin was chemistry and soil science. His thesis work and nine months of postdoctorate research at this institution concerned the use of borax for weed control and the use of sodium as a fertilizer on Wisconsin soils. This and other research in which he had a role have been published in part in the Proceedings of the Soil Science Society of America, Proceedings of the American Society of Sugar Beet Technologists, and in the Agronomy Journal.
In March, 1952, Dr. Kaudy joined the staff of the Department of Soils and Plant Nutrition of the University of California Citrus Experiment Station as Junior Chemist and was assigned to study the effects of fluorine as an air pollutant on plant growth. In the short period of his work on this subject he, working with some of his colleagues, perfected a method for the precise determination of fluorine in plant materials;
Dr. Kaudy pursued his research with energy, yet always had time for friendly chats with his colleagues. His warm and friendly nature, ever bright and contagious smile, together with his obvious ability as a scientist, very quickly won the friendship, affection, and respect of his fellow workers.
He was a member of the Sigma Xi and Gamma Alpha societies, of the Soils Science Society of America, and the American Society of Agronomy. In the comparatively short period of his professional life, he made a deep impression on his associates; the combination of a brilliant and retentive mind, good judgment, systematic approach, interest, and energy soon marked him as having a bright future. We have all gained from his short stay with us and the memory of his wonderful courage and stamina in the face of overwhelming odds will forever be remembered by his colleagues.
Dr. Kaudy is survived by his wife, Marie E. Kaudy; three children, Elizabeth Ann, Ruth Carrol, and Eugene Kaudy; by his mother, Mrs. Eugene Kaudy; and a sister, Mrs. Mary Pfiel.
Harold Kirby, Zoölogy: Berkeley
| 1900-1952 | |
| Professor |
Harold Kirby was born in 1900 in Tusket, Nova Scotia. He received his undergraduate education at Emory University, Georgia, and his graduate training in protozoölogy at the University of California under the late Professor C.A. Kofoid. Following the completion of his doctorate in 1925 he accepted an appointment as Instructor in Zoölogy at Yale University. In 1928 he was recalled to Berkeley to begin twenty-four years of service on the faculty of the University of California, during the last four of which he was Chairman of the Department of Zoölogy. He died on February 24, 1952, as the result of a heart attack sustained on a Boy Scout trip into the Sierras. He is survived by his wife, Margaret Thomson Kirby, who also holds a higher degree in zoölogy; a daughter, Janet, and a son, Roger.
At the time that he was a graduate student, working under Professor Kofoid, Harold Kirby became fascinated by the problems presented by the complex flagellates living in the digestive tracts of termites. He devoted the major portion of his scientific career to a careful elucidation of the very highly specialized structures found in these protozoa, following them accurately as they developed within a single organism, and working out a well-documented explanation of their evolutionary history. The address which he delivered in 1946 as Vice-President of the American Society of Parasitologists is a masterpiece of clear exposition of the relationship of many of the termite flagellates to other members of the group, with
But he did not limit himself to the study of this one group of the protozoa. The same careful and accurate investigations were applied to other kinds of protozoans, resulting here also in important contributions to the field of parasitology. From the very beginning of his scientific career he exhibited an exceptional breadth of knowledge of all the one-celled organisms. In 1941, he wrote two chapters for Protozoa and Biological Research. These deal with the relationships between protozoa and other animals and with the parasites of protozoa. They still remain the authoritative treatments of the subjects, for Kirby not only gathered a wealth of material from many divergent sources, but he presented it with remarkable clarity.
In all his scientific investigations, Harold Kirby was a remarkably careful and accurate worker. His conclusions were based on ample evidence, and his contributions to the science of protozoölogy were of fundamental importance. This same care in observation and the same enthusiasm for research was transmitted by him to his graduate students, who are carrying on in his tradition. His continuing interest in their welfare formed a bond that was rudely broken with his sudden death.
Harold Kirby was concerned not only with protozoölogy and parasitology; he was also a naturalist who loved field work. As early as 1925 he made a trip to the Fanning Islands of the Pacific and in that same year published a paper on the bird life of those islands. In the Museum of Vertebrate Zoölogy are to be found good specimens of birds prepared by him. There were trips to Panama, to Europe, and as a Guggenheim Fellow to Africa, Madagascar, and Java. He greatly enjoyed work at the Hasting Reservation of the University, where the wealth of biological information, worked on and assembled there, provided an attractive environment. And
Dr. Kirby reflected credit to the University by his activities in scientific societies and on editorial boards of important journals. He was a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Morphology and of the Journal of Parasitology. He was a member of the University of California Editorial Committee and, for several years, Chairman of the Board of Editors for the University of California Publications in Zoölogy. In 1947 he was elected a Fellow of the California Academy of Sciences. He was Vice-President of the American Society of Parasitologists in 1946-1947, and in 1952 he was elected Vice-President of the American Society of Protozoologists. He was a delegate of the American Society of Zoologists at the 13th International Congress of Zoölogy in Paris in 1948, and while there he served as an alternate member of the International Commission on Zoölogical Nomenclature.
Dr. Kirby's departmental administration was characterized by integrity, by fairness, and by democracy. In Harold Kirby the man there was gentleness and a warm regard for his associates; there was gentlemanly conduct and a fine Christian faith; there was neatness and orderliness in his office and laboratory; there was organization in his habits of work and in his thinking; there was dispatch in his actions; there was quietness which was appreciated, yet withal his quietness he had courage and took strong positions on principle, equity, justice, and academic freedom; there was wisdom and judgment in his counsel; there was charity for all. These qualities were respected and loved; they will be missed in the life of the Department and of the University.
Roy E. Lawhorne, Art: Santa Barbara
| 1885-1952 | |
| Lecturer Emeritus |
Roy Elliot Lawhorne was born in Summer, Oregon, October 21, 1885. His father, William Griffith Lawhorne, and his mother, Lois Jean Pratt, were both residents of that State.
Following public school, he began his basic drawing courses at the age of eighteen, and spent the next three years in landscape and life drawing studies with Jefferson Post. He enjoyed the following four years in exploring the fascination of photography with various teachers, at the same time earning his living doing part-time commercial art work.
In 1912 he met Emma Hall Johnson, whom he married on May 2, 1914, at Coquille, Oregon. During these years he continued the study of the art of photography, composition, and photochemistry. A subsequent period was spent in further concentration in this particular field, and simultaneously he was photographer and cartoonist for the Coos Bay Times, the Portland Evening Telegram, the Portland Oregonian, the Pacific Motorboat, and other papers and periodicals.
Mr. Lawhorne was always searching, and became profoundly interested in many arts. He not only mastered the technique of those that interested him, but, as a true artist, he believed that he must have a complete and sympathetic understanding of both materials and tools used in each. In this way he acquired knowledge of wood-carving, furniture design, and ceramics. When he moved to Santa Barbara in 1920 and became associated with Phil Paradise, a painter and
He practiced commercial art professionally in Santa Barbara, having outside accounts with the Ward Baking Company and Johnson-Ayers Advertising Company. During this time, he established a silk screen process plant which aided in the production of many advertising color posters. An ingenious designer, Lawhorne was for ten years Art Director for the Seaside Oil Company, executing their calendars and advertising, and, in addition, designing the famous Fiesta posters for the City of Santa Barbara.
Because of his continued study and success in advanced photography, optics, and color printing, Life, The Saturday Evening Post, Mademoiselle, and several other magazines published many of his photographs. On several occasions, his photographs and water colors were exhibited in galleries in Santa Barbara and at the Sacramento State Fair, as well as traveling art exhibits.
Always a lover of the out-of-doors, Roy Lawhorne was an archery enthusiast, taking recognized part in state-wide competition. In addition to his love of the sport, he was intensely interested in fashioning his own bows and arrows, which became works of art themselves. Another expression of his feeling for nature was his rock mountain house. He was a frequent traveler to the desert, which he loved and which also provided inspiration for his painting.
Whether Mr. Lawhorne was painting or photographing the bobbing boats in the harbor, the brilliant coloring of the desert, or the misty violets of the mountain, his work revealed profound sensitivity of composition and understanding of nature.
His teaching reflected these qualities as well as his tremendous experience and experimental activity. His warm, human
Roy Lawhorne began teaching at Santa Barbara College in 1926. He also taught in Brooks Institute of Photography. He was interested in the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and other art organizations. The two professional groups in which he most enjoyed participation were the Institute of American Inventors and the Photographic Society of America. In both, he prized life memberships.
Declining health became apparent soon after his retirement as Lecturer in Art at Santa Barbara College in June, 1950. He was able to return to the campus only twice before his last illness. His death occurred on May 3, 1952. He is survived by Mrs. Emma Johnson Lawhorne and by scores of friends and students on whose lives and careers his influence has made an enduring imprint.
Andrew Cowper Lawson, Geological Sciences; Mining: Berkeley
| 1861-1952 | |
| Professor of Geology and Mineralogy, Emeritus |
Andrew Cowper Lawson was born in Anstruther, Scotland, July 25, 1861. In his sixth year his parents moved to Hamilton, Ontario, where he received his early education. He was granted the B.A. degree in 1883 by the University of Toronto as gold medalist in Natural Science, and joined the staff of the Canadian Geological Survey. Five seasons of field work on Archaean rocks led to new interpretations which were considered rank heresy in Canada. They were, however, well received at the International Geological Congress, London, 1888, and later generally accepted. In later years he returned several times to work in Canada, and his contributions to the earth's primitive history were among the most important in his career. In the meantime, he had continued graduate work and received the M.A. degree, Toronto, in 1885, and the Ph.D., Johns Hopkins, in 1888.
Early in 1890 he resigned from the Canadian Survey and went to Vancouver as a consulting geologist. In October, 1890, he accepted the position of Assistant Professor of Mineralogy and Geology at the University of California and remained with that institution the rest of his life, becoming Associate Professor in 1892, Professor in 1899, and Professor Emeritus in 1928.
Concerning Lawson's appointment, Professor Le Conte explained that he had brought this able young man to the University to develop the scientific side of geology, while he would devote himself to the philosophical aspects. Lawson
He established the first scientific publication series at Berkeley, The Bulletin of the Department of Geology, the first number of which appeared in May, 1893. Within the first three decades, besides his Coast Range studies he made contributions based on observations in the Sierra Nevada, the Tehachapi Mountains, the western desert region, and on ore deposits in Nevada and Montana. In 1906, as Chairman of the State Earthquake Investigation Commission, he organized an extensive field program, to which many geologists contributed their services, and prepared the most complete and informative report ever published on a great earthquake. In the early 1920's he became interested in isostasy and its geological consequences, and almost all of his publications from then on were devoted to this subject, eighteen appearing in the following three decades, the last in 1950. From 1900 on, he also served as consultant in economic and in engineering geology.
Professor Lawson took an active interest in faculty affairs, served on various committees, especially the Editorial Committee and the Library Committee, of each of which he was chairman for a number of years. On Dean Christy's death he accepted temporarily the deanship of the College of Mining (December, 1914), which he held for three and a half years, during which he developed a new and more flexible curriculum for the College. In 1919 he took active part in a movement that resulted in a reform of the organization of the University faculty and its relation to the Administration.
He was one of the founders of the Faculty Club and for many years was a regular and active attendant of the Kosmos Club and the Berkeley Club, both discussion groups of wide range.
His hobby was collecting paintings, and he enjoyed building construction; for example, he personally constructed an art gallery annex to his home. He also wrote a number of short poems, some appreciative of the beauties of Nature, others on various themes which gave evidence of kindly, sentimental, and philosophical traits only rarely shown otherwise to his acquaintances.
Lawson was a Fellow of the Geological Society of America (President, 1926); a member of the Society of Economic Geologists, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Seismological Society of America (President, 1909), National Academy of Sciences, American Philosophical Society; and an honorary member of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists. He was Chairman of the Division of Geology and Geography, National Research Council, 1923-1924. He was Faculty Research Lecturer, 1926-1927. He was granted the honorary degrees of D.Sc., University of Toronto, 1923; LL.D., University of California, 1935; and the D.Sc., Harvard University, 1936. He was awarded the Hayden Medal of the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences, 1936, and the Penrose Medal of the Geological Society of America, 1938.
In 1889 Lawson married Ludovika von Jansch of Brünn, Moravia. She died in 1929 after a long illness. In 1931 he married Isabel R. Collins of Ottawa. He had four sons by his first wife and one by his second. He died June 16, 1952, and is survived by his widow and three sons.
Andrew Cowper Lawson lived a long and active life, during which he contributed abundantly to geology and to the training of geologists. His was a remarkable personality of many
Harold Lewis Leupp: Berkeley
| 1877-1952 | |
| Librarian Emeritus |
Harold Lewis Leupp, born in New York City, October 11, 1877, was the son of Francis Ellington Leupp, a distinguished journalist and biographer, and from 1905 to 1909 U. S. Commissioner of Indian Affairs. Harold Leupp was educated at Cornell (A.B., 1902) and received his professional training in the New York State Library School at Albany. After service with the John Crerar Library and the University of Chicago, he came in 1910 to the University of California. As Associate Librarian to 1919, and Librarian upon the retirement of Mr. Rowell, he served the University for thirty-five years. From 1945, he was Librarian, Emeritus. After his retirement, he acted as Chief of Section, Library Depot, at the San Francisco Presidio. This was the last phase of a military service which began in World War I, during which he rose from Second Lieutenant to Captain of Infantry, and was carried forward by activity in the O.R.C., in which he had the rank of Major. He had originally, indeed, intended to apply for a nomination to West Point.
Leupp's interests in books moved paramount through his life. As Librarian, he performed many valuable services. While he was still Associate Librarian, he planned and oversaw the completion of Doe Library; he foresaw, planned for, and finally achieved the development of the Department of Library Science, which grew into a graduate school, and thus gave an active center to his unflagging interest in the professional education of librarians for the State and for the entire
With regard to the University Library as a collection of books, maps, papers, and documents, Leupp assiduously kept the balance among the many claims. He joined the Committee on the Library in exploiting special and enthusiastic interests, but he took great trouble to maintain growth in areas in which from time to time faculty interest failed. He justly regarded, as of first importance, the development of the sets and the series. These he recognized as basic in a university library, and he had the foresight to insist on acquisitions before the increasing number of university libraries increased competition. At intervals, he instituted reviews of sets and series to eliminate waste and fill up gaps. That the Berkeley campus Library is remarkably strong in basic collections must be largely laid to Leupp's credit.
Harold Lewis Leupp died at his home in Berkeley on Monday, February 11, 1952, of a heart attack. He is survived by his widow, Beulah Louise Cross Leupp; three daughters, Gordon, Alice, and Constance; and two sons, Francis and Graham.
Joseph Byrne Lockey, History: Los Angeles
| 1877-1946 | |
| Professor Emeritus |
Joseph Byrne Lockey, Professor in the Department of History at the University of California, Los Angeles, since 1922, died in the Finney General Hospital, in Thomasville, Georgia, on September 24, 1946, after a few weeks of illness. He had retired from active service with the University on July 1, and had expected to spend his last years in his native state of Florida.
Born and brought up in Jackson County, Florida, he received his earlier college training at the University of Nashville, and his advanced graduate work at Columbia University, where he took his M.A. degree in 1909 and his Ph.D. in 1920. He was descended from English and Welsh settlers who came to Virginia and the Carolinas in the early colonial period. After a few years of teaching in the Florida public schools, he accepted an appointment as Inspector of Public Schools in Peru, where he served from 1909 to 1914. While in Peru he published several books in Spanish which dealt with aspects of elementary school teaching. He took a justifiable pride in the fact that he introduced basketball and other North American sports into the country. What was of particular importance for his later work was the fact that he learned there to know the language and people of a Latin-American state. In this way he developed an interest in what was to become his life work--Latin-American history.
When war broke out between the United States and Germany in 1917, he went to Plattsburg, New York, to serve in
After the war he resumed his studies at Columbia, where he placed himself under the tutelage of John Bassett Moore. His dissertation, “Pan-Americanism: Its Beginnings” , was published in 1920. It won prompt recognition in the United States and in Latin America for its sound scholarship and its clear presentation of a neglected aspect of American history. In 1927 this book was translated into Spanish and published in Venezuela under the title of Orígenes del Panamericanismo in connection with the first centenary of the Pan-American Congress.
Following three years' service as Professor of International Relations at George Peabody College in Nashville, Tennessee, he was made Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he remained until his retirement. During that time he published a series of penetrating articles on many aspects of Latin-American history in a number of leading historical and international law periodicals. In 1939 he collected nine of these articles and published them under the title of Essays in Pan-Americanism through the University of California Press.
Professor Lockey's scholarly work won him many friends and admirers at home and abroad. In recent years the history of his native state, with its rich store of Spanish, French, and English traditions, became one of his major concerns. The first volume of Select Documents for the History of Florida, beginning with 1783, was ready for publication some time before his death, but wartime exigencies had delayed its appearance. It was published by the University of California Press in 1949 under the title, East Florida, 1783-1785. Dr. Lockey's literary style was clear and cogent. Perhaps because his standards of workmanship were high, the quantity of his
The influence exerted by Dr. Lockey on the teaching of history in the University was very great. To his seminar students the evenings spent under his inspiring leadership were unforgettable. They learned to discuss each other's work courteously but fearlessly, and to accept gratefully even the most severe criticism. Many of them experienced for the first time the thrill of making some fresh contribution to historical knowledge. His workroom became the center of a group of eager investigators, including a number of younger colleagues in the Department of History, as well as his advanced graduate students. The early diplomatic history of the United States, especially as it centered in the history of Florida, received here an impulse that resulted in an impressive series of books and articles by colleagues and graduate students. As a result of Dr. Lockey's prestige among Latin-American scholars, a work by one of his students, Dr. Harold Bierck, was published in Biblioteca de Cultura Popular of the Venezuelan Ministry of National Education, under the title of Vida Pública de Don Pedro Gual. Lockey's interest was not confined to the mature students. His lower division lectures attracted large numbers of undergraduates to his course on the History of the Americas. His material was always well organized and attractively presented, and he lightened his lectures with occasional flashes of quiet humor. Many a student, stirred by the earnestness and enthusiasm of his teacher, here found his interest in the study of history roused for the first time.
Lockey never tried to get anything for himself. With the wisdom and humor that characterized him in all his relationships, he knew that titles and honors are often vain and empty things. But when honors or responsibilities did come his way, he accepted them modestly and then used them for advancing
Among the learned societies of which he was a member or fellow were the American Society of International Law, the American Historical Association, the American Geographical Society, the Mississippi Valley Historical Association, the Historical Society of Southern California, and the Florida Historical Society. To the P. K. Yonge Library of the University of Florida he left all of his personal library.
Friends and colleagues will recall Dr. Lockey's dignified and gracious bearing, his fine old-fashioned courtesy and kindness. He looked and acted the gentleman, because that was exactly what he was. Added to this was a sense of relative values, of discriminating judgment. His associates could always look to him for sober and mature counsel on complex or difficult problems. His integrity and his unflagging enthusiasm for the cause of learning attracted students as well as colleagues to seek his advice. To the qualities of the scholar he added in a very real sense the attributes of the gentleman.
Paul Marhenke, Philosophy: Berkeley
| 1899-1952 | |
| Professor |
Paul Marhenke was born in the city of Hannover, Germany, January 5, 1899. It often struck his friends as a happy coincidence that Leibniz's city should have been the birthplace of a scholar who shared so many of the great seventeenth-century philosopher's interests. For Professor Marhenke was at home in several languages, had read widely in history and in politics and in several of the natural sciences, and was especially interested in mathematics and in those recent developments of logic and semantics which continue the tradition of Leibniz's work and in some ways reflect his hopes for the development of a “Universal Characteristic.”
Marhenke had completed the course in the Bürgerschule and a half year in the Präparandenanstalt in Hannover when his parents brought him with them to California in 1913. After graduating at Pasadena High School, he entered enthusiastically upon studies in mathematics and classics, and later in philosophy, at the University of California, where he took the bachelor's degree in 1919, the M.A. in 1922, and the Ph.D. in 1927. He was appointed Instructor in Philosophy in 1927, and continued as Assistant Professor from 1930 until 1938, as Associate Professor from 1938 to 1947, and as Professor of Philosophy from 1947 until his death on February 29, 1952, only a few months after he had been appointed Chairman of the Department.
While Marhenke's range of interests was considerable, his scholarly work and his teaching centered on theory of knowledge
Professor Marhenke was among the first American scholars not only to recognize the importance for logic of Russell and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica (and some of its sources in the treatises of Frege and Peano), but also to study the method and structure of that work meticulously. He was able thus to give many generations of students thorough introduction to recent logic, and to help them to appreciate the striking new developments made by logicians in recent years.
Professor Marhenke demanded of his students, as he demanded of himself, uncompromising precision of thought and statement. This was no pedantic demand. His colleagues and his pupils have recognized again and again that they have owed to his insistence on rigor an understanding of fundamental problems that they would not otherwise have reached.
Few men have been more devoted to their university and to their students than was Paul Marhenke. And his devotion was returned. As the years passed he came to realize how many people at work in the physical sciences, mathematics, engineering, law, and psychology, as well as philosophy, admired him for the example of thoroughness he had not only set them, but had also helped them to follow. His dogged determination to accept nothing shoddy made his patience
In 1934 Professor Marhenke married Esther M. Robinson. She and their two sons, Karl and Paul, Jr., survive him. To many of his colleagues and students, discussion in the hospitable house he and his wife built high up in the Berkeley Hills, or on walks with him and his dogs, or on excursions in the Sierra (which he loved), will rank in intellectual interest with the more customary hours of intense work at his black-board at the University.
Frederick Lawrence Mason, Optometry: Berkeley
| 1886-1954 | |
| Assistant Professor Emeritus |
Frederick Lawrence Mason was born in Gouverneur, New York, on January 20, 1886, and died on December 26, 1954, in the second year following his retirement from the faculty of the University of California.
He received his early schooling in New York State, obtaining the A.B. degree in science from Syracuse University in 1909. Following this he taught high school science in the cities of Bath and Rome, New York, from 1909 to 1916. It was during this period, undoubtedly, that he developed the rigorous method of teaching which was to characterize his entire teaching career. Professor Mason was city bacteriologist in Rome, New York, from 1914 to 1916, during which time he also instructed in science in the city high school. At the conclusion of this period, he decided to study the profession of optometry. He entered Columbia University for this purpose, and completed a two-year curriculum in optics and optometry under the direction of Professor James E. Southall. Immediately thereafter, during World War I, he was commissioned an Ensign in the U. S. Navy, serving in the Bureau of Ordnance in 1918 and 1919. After being released from the Navy, Professor Mason practiced optometry for brief periods in the states of New York and Iowa prior to coming to California, where he established a practice in the Los Angeles area.
In 1924, a year after the curriculum in Optometry was established at the University of California under the directorship
Professor Mason was married twice, first in 1922 to Ethel Dodson of Davenport, Iowa, who died in 1945; and in 1949 to Lynne Goodman of Berkeley, who survives him.
During the early developmental years of the curriculum in Optometry at the University of California, Professor Mason played an important part in establishing courses and maintaining high scholarship standards. His students have on many occasions stated that his method of teaching and his ethical standards have markedly influenced their future careers.
In order to help his students gain a more complete knowledge of the field, Professor Mason wrote a textbook, Principles of Optometry. This book first appeared in 1936, and a second edition in 1940. His straightforward, rigorous, and analytical approach to vision and optometry is apparent in this text. In many young professions and sciences, such as optometry, and indeed in some of the older sciences, there is frequently some uncertainty as to the scope, fundamental basis, and status of the profession or science. Professor Mason did not share in this uncertainty, but constantly followed a single unified approach which is perhaps best summarized in his own words, taken from the second edition of his Principles of Optometry:
“The principles of optometry, in their rational aspects, embody the optical and physiological laws which reveal the quality of performance of the eyes as they coordinate to secure a common brain image. The optical images directly contribute to this effect, and add or detract in proportion to the state of perfection in which
― 94 ―they are mentally superposed. Imperfections in their formation are sequential to optical defects existing in the optical systems of the eyes; they are advantageously corrected through optical appliances mounted before the eyes, and are, accordingly, appraised upon a basis of the established laws of optics....
“Optometry, as a physical science, is therefore founded upon the visual effects which can be created by lenses and prisms, and upon the functions of the eyes which are activated when either or both such appliances intercept the light which stimulates the sense of vision.”
Professor Mason's interests were always directed toward teaching. He designed and built one of the first haploscopes to be used in this country. His investigations of the visual processes with the aid of this instrument were largely directed toward gaining more knowledge of visual functions, so that his teaching could be more significant. As a consequence of his singleness of purpose, in teaching both his regular students as well as the practicing optometrists who took courses from him in the University Extension Division, he had little or no time to write papers for the various scientific journals dealing with vision. Professor Mason believed his contribution was to impart knowledge and a way of thinking to students. Many of his ideas are now known and accepted throughout the profession of optometry, not necessarily from papers written by him, but through the publications of his many students inspired by his teaching.
Optometry is a clinical science devoted to the visual welfare and visual efficiency of mankind. The success of any optometrist can largely be measured by his ability to aid his patients. Students, and many of the faculty members of the University of California, can attest to the fact that when Professor Mason's academic and clinical contributions are evaluated on this basis, he must be considered as having been an outstanding member of the faculty.
Professor Mason will long be remembered by his students,
Irving Allen Mather, Education: Santa Barbara
| 1899-1955 | |
| Professor |
At the height of his career, Dr. Irving Allen Mather, Professor of Education, Santa Barbara College, died suddenly, on August 29, 1955. He was fifty-six years old. Despite ill health which had been his lot for several years prior to his death, he remained persistently faithful to his work and devoted himself untiringly to his beloved professional activities.
Professor Mather was born January 30, 1899, in Dryden, New York, of Canadian parents. The family early moved to the State of Washington, where he graduated from high school in 1915. The following year he enrolled in Oregon State College where he majored in chemical engineering and received his Bachelor of Science degree in 1920.
Following a year as an engineer in industry, Dr. Mather accepted a high school position as teacher of science and mathematics. The next year he began a seven-year period as a school administrator. Then in 1929 he entered the University of Oregon as a major in education to study for his advanced degrees. Here at the same time he held a research and teaching fellowship. Dr. Mather received his Master of Science degree in education in 1930 and three years later his Ph.D. in education, with a minor in economics. During the summers of 1931 and 1932 he served the University as Instructor in the Education Department.
After completing his doctoral studies Dr. Mather accepted a position as Head of the Science Department and Director of Curriculum in the Carpinteria (California) Union High
Professor Mather was much concerned with the matter of predicting college success. On this subject he engaged in both research and writing. Outside his classroom teaching, the area that most absorbed Professor Mather's attention after coming to Santa Barbara College was the recruiting and preparation of teachers. He devoted his recent sabbatical leave to these subjects. In line with these interests he visited representative colleges and universities, public and private, in various parts of the country and talked with many leading authorities. His resulting observations and conclusions are proving of decided value to the Santa Barbara College teacher education program.
The lasting impression of those who have known Dr. Mather well is that he gave his life for his work. For him, nothing short of the professional best was acceptable. His close companions will remember him as an earnest, friendly individual; his colleagues, as a serious, hard-working associate; his students, as a high-grade teacher and kindly advisor.
In 1925 Professor Mather married Kathleen L. Mahoney, who survives him. Also surviving him is a daughter, Patricia Joan, now a student at the University of California, Los Angeles.
John Hector McDonald, Mathematics: Berkeley
| 1874-1953 | |
| Professor Emeritus |
One obtains a picture of John Hector McDonald from the autobiography which was appended to his doctoral dissertation, “On the System of a Binary Cubic and Quadratic and the Reduction of Hyperelliptic Integrals of Genus Two to Elliptic Integrals by a Transformation of the Fourth Order”: “I was born on the 11th day of December, 1874, at Toronto, Canada. I attended the public schools of Toronto for four years, the high school for two years, and the University of Toronto for four years, graduating in 1895 with the degree of A.B. In 1896 I entered the University of Chicago as a student of mathematics and astronomy, and studied ten quarters. I received instruction in mathematics from Professors Moore, Bolza, and Maschke, and in astronomy from Doctors Laves and Moulton. My dissertation was carried on with Professor Bolza. I feel under a deep obligation to all the teachers named, but particularly to Professors Moore and Bolza for the continued and varied assistance which they gave me throughout my whole term of graduate study.”
Doctor McDonald came to the University of California, Berkeley, upon appointment as Instructor in Mathematics, in January, 1902, became Professor of Mathematics in 1927, and retired as Professor of Mathematics, Emeritus, in 1945. He passed away on July 4, 1953, after a short illness.
Professor McDonald had a profound and broad knowledge of the entire field of mathematics. His instruction was conducted on the highest level of scholarship; his graduate
Professor McDonald's publications were mainly on theory of numbers, Bessel's functions, transformations of elliptic integrals, and on differential equations. They appeared in Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada, Transactions of the American Mathematical Society, and Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society. This gifted mathematician withheld much of his research from publication, but his varied interests found expression in many doctoral dissertations.
For many years it was his great pleasure to visit annually with his revered teacher, Oskar Bolza. His last visit, in 1933, is worthy of special note. Professor Bolza had resumed lecturing at his old University of Freiburg, Germany, and finally retired in 1933 at the age of seventy-six. Then Professor McDonald spent several weeks with Professor Bolza, and the two took long walks daily during which they discussed again the subject which had always engaged their interest, the transformation of hyperelliptic into elliptic integrals by transformations of specified degrees. At McDonald's request, Bolza renewed his research in this field and succeeded in completing the solution of a problem which had long interested him. Bolza's paper on this subject was published in the Mathematische Annalen, 1935, and included several references to the work of McDonald.
In 1944, Professor McDonald was married to Sophia Levy, Professor of Mathematics. Her field of theoretical astronomy fell within the range of his interest in analytical dynamics and celestial mechanics. The colleagues who were privileged to
He enjoyed nine years of study in retirement. His most recent readings were in the theories of probability, statistics, and topology, continuing without interruption to the day before he became ill. His colleague, Professor Griffith C. Evans, said of him, “Fortunate is a man who enjoys his intellectual pursuits throughout his entire life.”
Thomas Clair McFarland, Electrical Engineering: Berkeley
| 1893-1954 | |
| Professor |
On August 21, 1954, Thomas Clair McFarland, in the prime of life and apparently in excellent health, suffered a heart attack at his summer home in the mountains at Pinecrest. Although a few weeks later he seemed out of danger and well on the road to recovery, on September 16 his heart suddenly stopped, bringing to a close over thirty-four years of devoted service to the University.
He was born on a farm near Porterville, California, to James Albert and Annie Laurie McFarland, studied electrical engineering at the University of California, and received the B.S. degree in 1916 and the M.S. in 1924. After graduation he spent two years as a test engineer for the General Electric Company and about a year as an engineering officer in the United States Naval Reserve during World War I. He was called back to the University of California as an Instructor in Electrical Engineering in 1919. Since then, he has served the University well, as a Professor, as a Director of Research, and for ten years as Chairman of the Division of Electrical Engineering.
Professor McFarland early found that he had unusual facility in writing. Two of his first publications were University of California Extension correspondence courses in Direct Current and Alternating Current Electricity. His best-known writings were two scholarly books, Direct Current Machinery, published by the International Textbook Company in 1938, and Alternating Current Machines, published by Van Nostrand
His teaching demonstrated the same care, diligence, and scholarly attainments as his publications. His courses were popular, although he insisted on a high level of performance from his students. The large number of University committees on which he was called upon to serve further exemplifies the diligence which he devoted to all of his duties and the high esteem in which he was held by his colleagues. He was unanimously elected Vice-Chairman of the Faculty of the College of Engineering a year before his death.
In addition to his teaching, his professional career included a considerable amount of engineering consulting for private industry and for the State. Until his duties as Chairman of the Division of Electrical Engineering, even during the summer, absorbed most of his time, he spent many of the summer months on engineering development for the Pacific Telephone and Telegraph Company, and a year's leave was devoted to research at the Bell Laboratories. He took an active part in the affairs of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, serving successively as Technical Program Director, Secretary, Vice-Chairman, and Chairman of the San Francisco Section; also as a member of the Executive Committee from 1946 through 1951, as a member of the national Committee on Education, and as the A.I.E.E. representative on the San Francisco Engineers Council. In 1953 with Professor Dalziel he prepared a “Report on Hydroelectric Development in California” for the Chancellor's Committee on Education, Training, and Research in the Problems of Western Development. At the time of his death he was also serving
Professor McFarland was a Fellow of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers and a member of Sigma Xi, Eta Kappa Nu, Tau Beta Pi, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco.
In 1923 Tom McFarland married Esther Touraine and bought a home in Berkeley, which soon became a favorite meeting place for both faculty and students in electrical engineering. Tom and Esther worked together beautifully as a team to build a feeling of friendship, of unity and loyalty, among the faculty members, nonacademic employees, and students in electrical engineering.
In one sense the spirit of Professor McFarland lives on in Cory Hall, for he as Chairman of the Division of Electrical Engineering was responsible for much of the over-all planning and many of the details involved in the design of the building. To a far greater degree, however, his artistic mountain home in Pinecrest, built by his own hands and in which he and Esther so generously entertained students and faculty friends for many years, will always be linked inseparably with his spirit of friendly, kindly, loyal cooperation which endeared him to the hearts of his friends. To aid in keeping his memory alive, these friends have established a fund to honor each year the graduating electrical engineering student who has made the best record by naming him the Thomas Clair McFarland Scholar for the year, engraving his name on a plaque in Cory Hall, and giving him an engraved medal and a small cash prize.
Robert Valentine Merrill, French: Los Angeles
| 1892-1951 | |
| Professor |
The untimely death, on January 1, 1951, of Robert Valentine Merrill brought a tragic loss to his family and friends and to the scholarly circles with which he had been associated for many years. The Department of French of the University of California, Los Angeles, of which he was Chairman, lost a brilliant teacher, a considerate colleague, and an inspiring leader. The University lost an able, prudent administrator, an untiring worker in the scholarly community, an uncompromising fighter for academic freedom and justice. The Modern Language Association and the Mediaeval Academy lost a well-known scholar in the Renaissance field. But the many who were privileged to be more intimately associated with him lost far more--a staunch, never-failing friend, a cheerful companion with a charming, whimsical sense of humor, a discreet, helpful adviser in perplexity, generous with his time, strength, and resources, and finally an admirable model of fortitude in the courageous resignation with which he faced his last illness.
Robert Merrill was born in Middletown, Connecticut, on November 24, 1892, the son of the distinguished classical scholar, Elmer Truesdell Merrill. Following in his father's footsteps in the choice of a specialty, he received his education at the University of Chicago and then went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, completing his baccalaureate there in 1916 in classical languages and literatures. America's entry into World War I found him still in England, where he entered the
Through his contacts with the French people during vacations from Oxford and during the war, Robert Merrill was attracted to French language literature and he began his teaching career in 1919 at the University of Minnesota as Instructor in French. In the following year he was called to the University of Chicago in the same rank and he took his Ph.D. degree in the Department of Romance Languages there in 1923. He remained in the Department, advancing through the various ranks, until 1946, when he was called to the University of California, Los Angeles, as Professor of French and was named Chairman of the Department in the following year.
Throughout his career Professor Merrill's field of specialization was the Renaissance. His excellent foundation in Greek and Latin served him well and helped him to produce a long list of substantial articles dealing chiefly with Platonism in French and Italian writers. He was active in the Comparative Literature and Renaissance sections of the Modern Language Association, in both of which he held various offices, in the Mediaeval Academy, the Modern Humanities Research Association, and the Société des Textes Français Modernes. In 1949 he was named Editor of the sixteenth-century volume of the Critical Bibliography of French Literature, edited by Professor David C. Cabeen, a task which he promoted with the utmost vigor but was not privileged to complete.
During his four brief years in the University of California Professor Merrill had made a secure place for himself in the confidence of the Administration and in the esteem and affection of his colleagues and students. As Chairman of the Department of French he guided its activities tactfully, prudently, and firmly. He built up the strength of the Department in staff and in library assets and greatly enhanced its reputation in the academic world. In the Academic Senate
Profound sincerity, sympathetic understanding, and an unerring sense of justice--these were the chief characteristics of Robert Valentine Merrill. He believed in what he did and what he wrote and what he taught with a simple faith that made him unassailable. His was a fervid devotion to the cause of the Humanities in a world that now is frequently inclined to treat them with cold disregard, a devotion that was akin to and probably carried over from his religious faith, for Merrill was a devout and convinced Christian. He had an open ear and an open heart for those in difficulties or in distress. His hospitable home, ever graciously presided over by his loyal wife, Mary Letitia Fyffe Merrill, was always open to friends and acquaintances, colleagues and students alike.
Robert Merrill detested injustice in whatever form he encountered it, and he fought fiercely for the rights of others even if he disagreed basically with their principles. It was this quality that won him the confidence of all in his capacity as departmental administrator, for favoritism was unknown to him. It was this quality that he instilled into his students, in classroom and personal contacts. It was this quality that won him the admiration and friendship of all who dealt with him and that will keep his memory alive among all who ever knew him.
Guy Stillman Millberry, Dentistry: San Francisco
| 1872-1952 | |
| Professor of Dental Health Education, Emeritus |
Guy Stillman Millberry, born November 3, 1872, in Menominee, Michigan, entered the College of Dentistry, University of California, in the fall of 1898, graduating in the spring of 1901. He established himself in practice, but in the fall of 1903 he was called back to the College to become Laboratory Assistant in chemistry and metallurgy.
In the spring of 1906, San Francisco was visited by an earthquake and fire, the downtown area being to a large extent destroyed. Inasmuch as a considerable part of the course in Dentistry was carried on in the old Donahue Building at Sixth and Market streets, and that building was destroyed, all of the work in dentistry was re-established in the fall at the present location, Third and Parnassus avenues. Shortly after the earthquake and fire, Dr. Millberry re-established himself in practice but was soon persuaded to give this up and devote full time to the University as Superintendent of the Infirmary and Acting Professor of Chemistry and Metallurgy. In 1910 he became Professor of Chemistry and Metallurgy, and in 1914 also Dean of the College. He held those positions until 1939, when he was made Professor of Dental Health Education and retired in 1940 as Professor of Dental Health Education, Emeritus. Dr. Millberry became Dean of the College just prior to the beginning of an extensive study of the dental curriculum and the dental profession by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, and during that time there was no little turmoil within dental schools as to
At the time that Dr. Millberry became Dean of the College, the relationship with the University was that of an affiliated college. Under his guidance, with complete assumption of responsibility financially as well as educationally, the school became one of the regular colleges of the University.
Dr. Millberry's professional career was confined to his own Alma Mater and the organized profession of California, though to no little extent in national associations as well, inasmuch as all were so closely related. He was a member of the American Public Health Association, serving on various committees, including the Western Branch, of which he was President in 1928-1929. He was a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the California Academy of Sciences; a member of the American Dental Association, Chi Psi Phi, Epsilon Alpha, Sigma Xi, and Delta Omega; and a member of the Dental Advisory Committee, Procurement and Assignment Service, War Manpower Commission.
He was the author of innumerable papers on dental education, his chief interest lying perhaps within the field of public health. Under his direction, the University of California was one of the very first to establish a course in dental hygiene and to train and educate a new profession, the Dental Hygienist. He was Revising Editor of Hodgen's Dental Metallurgy, fourth, fifth, and sixth editions.
Dr. Millberry was a man possessed of intense vitality and intense activity. He was an excellent teacher, and inspiring to
Guy Montgomery, English: Berkeley
| 1886-1951 | |
| Professor |
Guy Montgomery was born in Albion, Nebraska, June 9, 1886, the son of George M. and Carrie Letson Montgomery. He died September 23, 1951, having served the University of California for thirty-five years. His wife, Grace McGonagle Montgomery, whom he married June 14, 1911, survives him.
He was a man of wide interests whose early studies in the theater were to find later expression in the singular richness of his instruction in the English drama of various periods. After graduation from the University of Nebraska in 1909, he was for seven years an instructor at West High School, Salt Lake City. In 1916 he began graduate study at the University of California. Professor Charles Mills Gayley recognized his brilliance and his exceptional gifts as a teacher; and in 1917, the year in which he received the degree of Master of Arts, he was appointed Instructor in English. Four years later, on completion of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, he was given both that degree and promotion to the rank of Assistant Professor. The continuing high quality of his service to the University is attested by the rapidity of his subsequent promotions. In 1925 he became Associate Professor, and was made Professor of English in 1929. The following year he was appointed Chairman of the Department of English, and continued in the chairmanship until 1942.
He was a valued member of many committees, and for nine years (1930-1939) was Associate Dean of the College of Letters and Science. In 1926 he was Exchange Professor of English
Guy Montgomery was an exceptionally effective and popular teacher, with the rare quality of communicating his perceptions to students easily and richly. In the classroom, or in conversation, he would frequently make shrewd, illuminating comments that went to the heart of a problem, or threw flashing light upon an author or an age. His scholarly interests centered in the Restoration and the Neoclassical period; but his best teaching was in Shakespeare, for whom, as the interpreter and imaginative creator of life, he had greatest love. His readings from Shakespeare, and his interpretations of the life the dramatist imparted to the men and women in the plays, gave those who heard them a greatly increased understanding of that life, and of the poet's art. He also taught excellently well, and edited, Francis Bacon's Essays; but it was not so much the essay as a form that interested him as the mind and character of Bacon the man. His sympathetic and perceptive discussion of Bacon's life, in the introduction to his edition of the Essays, admirably illustrates this concern for the man in his work. The searching and reflective quality of his mind--always tempered with humor--appears also in his stimulating published comment on the morality of Restoration comedy (in “The Challenge of Restoration Comedy,” Essays in Criticism by Members of the Department of English, University of California Press, 1929): “I cannot help detecting in the overboldness of men and women in their relationships and in the frankness of their conduct, instead of an abandonment of all moral standards, an approach to conduct, if not technically scientific, yet genuinely experimental. It was not yet time for setting up hypotheses; scientists were engaged in collecting curious facts.”
The penetration and the humor of his teaching and writing were evident in the daily relations of his life as well. He retained to the last his sense of fun, his capacity to laugh with others and with himself, though the flashes of wit long famous on the campus ripened in his later years into a gentle glow. He had exceptional zest for life and capacity for friendship, which those who knew him will not forget.
Ernest Carroll Moore, Education; Philosophy: Berkeley, Los Angeles, and Systemwide
| 1871-1955 | |
| Professor Emeritus |
The chronology of the life of Ernest Carroll Moore can be recited in a few short paragraphs. Born in 1871 in Youngstown, Ohio, he lived to exceed the biblical three-score-and-ten by thirteen and one-half years. Forty-five of these eighty-three years were devoted, in the words of President Sproul, to “valiant and victorious striving in the arena of education.”
Dr. Moore's early interest in education, which he caught from his mother, is indicated by his choice of Ohio Normal University, from which he received an A.B. degree in 1892. Two years later he earned the Bachelor of Laws degree at the same institution and began immediately to practice law. After a few months, however, finding the legal profession not to his liking, he turned to the ministry, but quickly decided that it, too, held no inspiration for him.
By 1896, when Dr. Moore received a master's degree from Columbia University after a short span of teaching in a grammar school in Mississippi, the die had been cast. Thereafter, for almost half a century, the profession of education was in the fullest sense of the term his true life work. Immediately he accepted a fellowship in education at the University of Chicago, and for two years studied with John Dewey, earning his Ph.D. in 1898. He supplemented his university study by working at the University Settlement in New York and later at Hull House, Chicago, under Jane Addams, an interest which led him to serve from 1903 to 1910 as a member of the California State Board of Charities and Corrections--three years as its President.
The man who was to guide the destiny of the University of California, Los Angeles, for its first seventeen years began his University career at Berkeley, where from 1898 to 1901 he was an Instructor in Philosophy. From 1901 to 1906 he was an Instructor, then an Assistant Professor of Education, and in 1905 he became, in addition, Director of the Summer Sessions. For four years, 1906-1910, he served as Superintendent of Schools for the City of Los Angeles, discharging the responsibilities of this highly important post with effectiveness and distinction.
In 1910 Yale University called Superintendent Moore to a Professorship of Education, a chair from which Harvard lured him in 1913, where he remained four years. The record shows that in 1913-1914 he was a Professor at both Yale and Harvard, one of the few men ever honored with such a joint appointment.
“One does not leave Harvard,” says Dr. Moore in I Helped Make a University, “unless greater opportunities call him.” So in 1917, after seven years in which “we were homesick daily and nightly,” he returned to California as President of the Los Angeles State Normal School and began his period of extraordinary service to the University. Within two years, the State Normal School had become the University of California, Southern Branch, and Dr. Moore its first Director. Thereafter, the administrative title was in turn Director and Vice-President of the University, Vice-President and Provost, until 1936, at which time he returned to teaching duties as Professor of Philosophy and Education. Four institutions awarded him the LL.D. degree after he returned to California: the University of Southern California, 1916; the University of Arizona, 1923; Pomona College, 1931; and the University of California, Los Angeles, 1942. He retired in 1941 and lived serenely and quietly at his home on Woodruff Avenue until his death, January 23, 1955.
Dr. Moore is survived by Kate Gordon Moore, Professor of Psychology, Emeritus, Los Angeles campus, whom he married in 1943; a brother, Milo Stuart Moore, formerly head of the Chemistry Department at Los Angeles Polytechnic High School; and one adopted son, Kermit S. Moore. His first wife, Dorothea Lummis Moore, to whom he was married in 1896, died in 1942.
The career, so briefly sketched, had at least four facets. This man was first a teacher of rare skill and profound scholarship. He was steeped in the writings of Plato and Aristotle, as well as John Dewey and William James. Andrew Horn, a student of Dr. Moore's, formerly Associate Librarian on the Los Angeles campus, and now Librarian of the University of North Carolina, writes of him in these words:
For example, he was wont eloquently and lovingly to read long passages from Aristotle or Plato; and once I chanced to pass his desk before he had closed his books (which he carried in a Harvard green bag). I was curious to see his translation because it varied slightly from the Jowett which I had been following as he read. It was not a translation, but the text in Greek! We had been hearing, without realizing it, a beautiful sight translation.
Dr. Moore was like that, amazing those privileged to sit at his feet equally by the richness of his erudition and the applicability of that which he knew and expounded to the problems of education in the here and now.
Not only was Dr. Moore a great teacher and philosopher, he was an author of significant and timely books and articles. A book reviewer in the New York Times for May 17, 1936, speaks of his The Story of Instruction: the Beginnings in words which apply to all his writings:
Mr. Moore...shows in this book a notable faculty for illuminating his subject and making it real and vital, so that the reader sees it as something intimately related to and connected with our own times and environment. His theme is the training of youth in Greece and Rome.
― 116 ―
The reviewer describes
chapters full of life and color that fairly hum with the intensity and variety of the interests that engage the Athenians he portrays....
These are words of high praise. Every reader of the numerous volumes that have come from his pen will echo them, and will say with Johns H. Harrington:
The words uttered from the platform, in the classroom, and in the pages of his books remain as dynamic as the fierce and humble man who conveyed them. They belong not only to the past and the present but also to the future. (Johns H. Harrington. “Ernest Carroll Moore--Scholar, Teacher, Leader” . CTA Journal, January, 1954.)
Dr. Moore's last book, I Helped Make a University, exemplifies the third facet of his career--administration. He was for four years Superintendent of Schools of Los Angeles. He was President of the State Normal School from which the University of California, Los Angeles, emerged. The title of his book is probably too modest--it might more properly be “I Made a University with Help from Many and Opposition from Some.” The fibre, the imagination, the tenacity of the man were tested to the uttermost in the years he administered the affairs of the Los Angeles campus. The President of the University, speaking at the banquet honoring Dr. Moore upon the occasion of his retirement, summed up the case admirably in these words:
Education in Dr. Moore's time has been a controversial field.... It has taken a skilled quarterback to “master mind” on such a troubled gridiron; it has taken a man of courage to integrate properly the dreams of tomorrow with the world of today. Dr. Moore has made good in both respects. He has made you and me and generations yet unborn his eternal debtors.
The fourth facet of Dr. Moore's career, of which too often sight has been lost, concerns his wider influence in the community
Let his own words end this memorial statement. In one of his books he writes:
The task of the educator is a strange one. He must so act upon others that they will feel, think, and act for themselves. What he himself does, no matter how perfectly, is never the end which he seeks.
The instruments with which he works--the knowledge which the race has already attained--are not the end either. Like himself and his acts they are but means also. The feeling, the conviction, the reaction of the man inside the learner, is the one thing needful, is the aim of all our striving.
― 118 ―
The final paragraph of the last book he wrote states his faith in the shrine at which intellectually he worshipped.
But the greatest of these is philosophy and never more on trial than in this sorry world in which we live. Shall men tell the truth? Or resolve to live by lying? There are whole populations which have been indoctrinated in prevarication. Is kindness any longer a human virtue? Or is the true life of man an incessant struggle to see who draws first? There has been a transvaluation of values. The world is a battlefield and great nations direct their pilots to machine-gun refugees on crowded roads and call it war. We need a Socrates to teach us what words mean, but more to teach us what conceptions mean. That is what philosophy does, when it is not deadlocked over the barren problem of realism versus idealism. It is a kind of perspective of life, a sailing chart which helps us to find out how human undertakings are related to each other, where dangers lie, and how to sound the depths and keep to navigable waters.
Ernest Carroll Moore knew how to sound the depths and he kept the University of California to navigable waters.
Ben Duncan Moses, Agricultural Engineering: Berkeley and Davis
| 1882-1951 | |
| Professor Emeritus | |
| Agricultural Engineer in the Experiment Station, Emeritus |
Ben Duncan Moses passed away in San Francisco, September 7, 1951. Born in Silver City, New Mexico, November 22, 1882, he received his early education in that State. He graduated from the New Mexico Normal School in 1901 and did graduate work at the same institution in 1902. In 1905 he entered the University of California and received, in 1909, his Bachelor of Science degree in mechanical engineering.
Following graduation he was employed for a year by the Holt Manufacturing Company at Stockton, California. He then returned to the New Mexico Normal School at Silver City, where for one year he served as a faculty member. In 1911 he returned to the College of Mechanics at the University of California, Berkeley, where for four years he was an Assistant.
The Yuba Manufacturing Company (Marysville, California) employed him in 1915. He served this company for seven years, respectively, as salesman, service manager, and branch manager.
His lifelong interest in educational work brought him back to the University in 1922 as Assistant Professor of Agricultural Engineering on the Davis campus. Here he remained for twenty-nine years as an active and valuable staff member of the Division of Agricultural Engineering. In 1950 he retired to the Emeritus Professorship status.
He married Lillian Sheridan, who survives him, on June 6, 1911. Three of their four children, Benito, Harold, and Alice (Mrs. W. H. Hurley), survive. Allen is deceased.
Professor Moses was an active and productive research worker in the Agricultural Experiment Station, as well as an enthusiastic and inspiring teacher. He was promoted through the various academic and Experiment Station titles to Professor of Agricultural Engineering and Agricultural Engineer in the Experiment Station. His bibliography lists over forty publications, many of which were in joint authorship with the Experiment Station workers. A thorough engineer, he preferred to work with agricultural scientists in making engineering investigations applicable to agricultural production. Professor Moses enjoyed a wide circle of friends. His cheerful and optimistic outlook on life endeared him to all. Always he gave generously of his time and talents to students, which accounts for not only his popularity as a teacher, but the many alumni who called on him when visiting the Davis campus.
Previous to his passing, Professor Moses, with one of his former students, Professor Kenneth R. Frost, of the University of Arizona, prepared a college text on farm power. Although Professor Moses did not live to see the success of his efforts, it has since been adopted as a text in many of the land-grant colleges.
He was one of the founders and for twenty-five years served as Secretary-Director of the California Committee on Relation of Electricity to Agriculture. Because of his numerous and valuable research contributions in extending the uses of electricity to farms, the Pacific Coast Electrical Association in 1950 awarded him a distinguished service plaque.
Professor Moses was an honorary member of the California Tractor and Implement Club. In a memorial to him, the Club stated: “He was a frequent speaker and facile writer, humorous, careful, conscientious, informal, and insatiably honest.
Professor Moses was a devoted supporter of the Boy Scouts. For fifteen years he served as a Scout Master and in 1948 he was awarded the Silver Beaver medal, the highest award for Scout leaders. Because of his many unselfish community activities, in 1950 the community of Davis elected him as its most prominent and valuable citizen of the year.
Professor Moses always had time to say a cheerful word, or offer encouragement to others. Owing to his friendly attitude and friendly nature he was widely known as “Ben.” One might say he was generous to a fault, yet the wide circle of friends he enjoyed among faculty, Experiment Station staff, students, alumni, youth, and citizens throughout the State testifies to his usefulness in a life well spent, in extending science as applied to living, in promoting good will among men, and in demonstrating the dynamic values of useful and unselfish citizenship.
Professor Moses was a Fellow of the American Society of Agricultural Engineers, a member of the Davis chapter Sigma Xi, and a member of the Pacific Coast Electrical Association. Locally he was active in the Christian Science Church, the Davis Faculty Club, and Rotary International.
George Rapall Noyes, Slavic Languages: Berkeley
| 1873-1952 | |
| Professor Emeritus |
George Rapall Noyes, Professor of Slavic Languages, Emeritus, died at Alta Bates Hospital in Berkeley on May 5, 1952.
Like most other American Slavicists of his generation, George Noyes was a self-made man in his chosen field. Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on April 2, 1873, he attended Harvard University and graduated in 1894 as top scholar of his class. In 1895 he received the M.A. degree. In 1898 he completed his dissertation, “Dryden as Critic,” and was awarded the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Although his formal schooling thus had been in English literature, George Noyes nevertheless had been developing a growing interest in the language and literature of Russia, and had, at Harvard, entered upon the study of Russian under the general direction of Professor Leo Wiener. Upon completing his graduate work, Dr. Noyes was awarded the John Harvard Fellowship and went abroad to spend the next two years pursuing his study of Slavic philology at St. Petersburg University.
On his return to the United States in 1900, Dr. Noyes was appointed Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin. In the fall of 1901, however, he accepted President Wheeler's invitation to join the faculty at Berkeley as Instructor in English and Russian, and thus to launch a program of Slavic Studies at the University of California. In 1902 he married Florence Augusta Paine, a native Bostonian, with whom he shared a long and productive life.
During the course of the next dozen years, George R. Noyes
Professor Noyes' numerous and varied publications reflect the breadth of his interests. They are devoted to questions of Slavic literature and of Slavic linguistics as well as to problems of English literature. A complete list of his works would include more than forty individual volumes written, edited, or translated by him. His monograph Tolstoy (1918), in the series, Master Spirits of World Literature, edited by Walter Morris Hart and George R. Noyes, established his reputation as one of the leading authorities on Tolstoy in the English-speaking world. His editions of the works of Dryden, Poetical Works of Dryden (1909; second revised edition, 1949) and Selected Dramas of John Dryden (1910), established him as an authority in English literature. His greatest achievement, however, lay in the field of translation from the Slavic languages. In fact, he founded one of the most important schools of translation from the Slavic languages in the English-speaking world. Professor Noyes' excellent command of literary English, combined with his fine knowledge of Russian and Polish, of Czech and Serbo-Croatian, enabled him to achieve a fine balance between literary accuracy and good English style. He always maintained that a good translation should preserve the flavor of the original and yet so read as to remove any suspicion that it had been written originally in another language. His translations range from a volume of Heroic Ballads of Servia (1913) to a volume of Poems by Adam Mickiewicz (1944). They also include such titles as Plays of Alexander
During his career Professor Noyes was a member of numerous scientific and literary organizations and had many honors accorded him. He was a member of Phi Beta Kappa; he served as President of the Philological Association of the Pacific Coast (1928); he was Chairman of the Slavic Section of the M.L.A. (1937); he was elected first President of the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages (1942). He served as Corresponding Member of the School of Slavonic Studies, King's College, University of London; he was Collaborator of the Literary Commission of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Cracow; he was elected Corresponding Member of the Philological Section of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Cracow; he served as Corresponding Member of the Slavonic Institute of Prague; he was chosen Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Boston; and was a member of the Warsaw Scientific Society. In October, 1929, Professor Noyes was awarded the degree of Litterarum Doctor (honoris causa) by the University of Wilno, on the occasion of the 350th anniversary of its founding; in 1930, he received the Officer's Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta, and in 1945 its Commander's Cross; in 1938, the Golden Laurel of the Polish Academy of Literature of Wilno was bestowed on him. In 1945, George R. Noyes, Professor of Slavic Languages, Emeritus, was awarded the degree of Doctor of Laws by the University of California.
Slavic studies in America owe much of their growth during
With the passing of George R. Noyes, his colleagues lost a respected friend and a distinguished scholar.
James Nuckolls, Dentistry: San Francisco
| 1902-1952 | |
| Professor of Oral Histology and Oral Pathology |
James Nuckolls was born in Redwood Valley on October 2, 1902, and died suddenly following a heart attack at San Rafael, California, on April 19, 1952.
Dr. Nuckolls graduated from the College of Dentistry, University of California, in 1927. Two years later he joined the teaching staff of that College as an Assistant in Dental Anatomy. Under the influence of the G. V. Black system of operative dentistry and dental pathology he developed rapidly into an able clinician and distinguished operator of great manual skill which received recognition by his appointment in 1941 as Professor and Chairman of Operative Dentistry. However, from the first he had exhibited a deep interest in the fundamental biological sciences as the basis of dental practice. Early in his career he had published a classical work on the anatomy of the deciduous teeth, but he felt the need of a more dynamic approach to basic dental problems. He rapidly acquired great competence as a physiologist and biochemist and extended his researches to attack problems on tooth development and eruption, the histopathology, biochemistry, and bacteriology of dental caries, and the periodontal lesion. His work on dental caries was outstanding in its originality and has revolutionized current thinking on this disease. Recognition of his leadership and achievement in the biological approach to dentistry came in 1947 with his appointment as Professor of Oral Histology and Oral Pathology
Dr. Nuckolls was a devoted teacher, rewarded by the equal devotion which he received from his students and colleagues. To his administrative leadership he brought a keen, inspired, and practical mind, wise in its grasp of transient and permanent values. To the University he gave unstintingly of himself; he was a most valuable member of academic and administrative committees, and, likewise, always in demand for service on the committees of learned societies. Dr. Nuckolls' many friends from all walks of life, knowing of his monumental devotion to the work in which he believed, have thought fit to memorialize him by the establishment of an annual Nuckolls Lectureship in the College of Dentistry.
In character, Dr. Nuckolls was a rather shy, very modest man full of benevolence and charity. He was an accomplished yachtsman who loved the fabulous panorama of San Francisco Bay. He won many championships and medals and was Commodore of his Yacht Club, but nothing delighted him more than a lively cruise with some companion who was in tune with the ways of the sea. He died while preparing his boat for such a voyage and had requested that his remains be returned to the sea.
| “Here is my journey's end, here is my butt | |
| And very sea-mark of my utmost sail.” |
Manuel Olguín, Spanish and Portuguese: Los Angeles
| 1908-1956 | |
| Associate Professor of Spanish |
Manuel Olguín was born in Santiago, Chile, and graduated from the University of Chile in 1929. He began his teaching career as an Instructor in French, then in Philosophy, in his native country. He came to the United States in 1941, and in the following year received his M.A. degree from Oberlin College. His degree of Doctor of Philosophy, in the field of philosophy, was granted by the University of California, Berkeley, in 1946, and in the fall of that same year he came to the University of California, Los Angeles, as an Instructor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, where he remained until the time of his death, when he held the rank of Associate Professor. His survivors are his wife Barbara, and his two sons, Daniel, aged four and a half, and David, ten months old.
Dr. Olguín taught with distinction advanced courses in several aspects of Spanish-American literature, and his many publications in the field of literary criticism, aesthetics, and Spanish-American literature, which appeared in the Journal of Aesthetics, the Revista Iberoamericana, Books Abroad, the Modern Language Forum, and many other journals, were warmly praised in this country and abroad. Dr. Olguín was also a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Aesthetics. His most recent work, a book entitled Alfonso Reyes: Ensayista, is a study of the life and essays of the dean of Mexican letters, who is perhaps the greatest living Spanish-American author. This book appeared in Mexico only a few days
Dr. Olguín was a dedicated teacher, as well as a scholar. He was a warm, sincere, deeply human person, ever willing to go out of his way to help and encourage his students. His classes were stimulating, and were cherished by those who attended them. His lectures were a source of much inspiration and intellectual awakening.
But Dr. Olguín's influence and encouraging hand reached far beyond the walls of the classroom. He was an engaging public speaker, and lectured before many different kinds of audiences. He frequently illustrated his lectures with ingenious drawings, and possessed an elf-like humor which was truly captivating. He had also read papers before many learned groups, and had been invited to teach at several other universities and colleges, where he was always a great success. To all this he brought a wide cultural and philosophic background. He was also a gifted artist, particularly in water colors, where his talents were outstanding.
He spoke and wrote fluently in three languages: Spanish, French, English; and this superior linguistic training, plus his work in literature, philosophy, and literary criticism, enabled him to give his students an insight into another culture which was profound and fascinating, and which constantly broadened the intellectual horizon and increased human tolerance.
Dr. Olguín was truly and deeply loved by a wide circle of students and colleagues. His loss will be irreparable to his friends, to the University, and to the field of the humanities.
Axel Ragnar Olson, Chemistry: Berkeley
| 1889-1954 | |
| Professor Emeritus |
Axel Ragnar Olson, Professor of Chemistry at the University of California, died December 22, 1954. He had been in failing health for some time and as a result had retired from active duty as of July 1, 1954. The last months were devoted to the task of preparing several papers based on his research work. He is survived by his wife, Hanna Kinell Olson, whom he married in 1919, and two sons, William and Peter.
Professor Olson was born in Hälsingborg, Sweden, on February 6, 1889. He was brought to this country by his parents in 1891 and grew up in the Middle West. After a brief period in the photoengraving industry he entered the University of Chicago, where he graduated in 1915. He continued his studies at the University of California and completed the work for his doctorate in 1917. During 1918 and 1919 he served as a Lieutenant in the Chemical Warfare Service of the Army, A.E.F. After the war he returned to the University of California as a Fellow of the National Research Council. In 1922 he was appointed Assistant Professor of Chemistry. He became Associate Professor in 1926 and Professor in 1930. The year 1929-1930 was spent in Europe on a Guggenheim Fellowship. He was a member of the American Chemical Society, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Association of University Professors, Phi Beta Kappa, Sigma Xi, Alpha Chi Sigma, Alpha Sigma Phi, and the Faculty Club.
In research, Professor Olson displayed a wide variety of interests.
In teaching, Professor Olson was noted for the stress he laid on fundamental principles. This was true both in the course in thermodynamics, which he taught for many years, and in the elementary course in quantitative analysis which he took charge of after the retirement of Professor Blasdale. The ideas which he developed in the latter work were collected in a text prepared in collaboration with his associates. His research activities attracted many graduate students of high caliber. In this group were included Professors H. C. Urey and T. F. Young, now at the University of Chicago; Professor F. A. Long, Chairman of the Chemistry Department at Cornell University; Professor Ralph Halford, of Columbia University; Dr. George Glockler, formerly head of the Chemistry Department
Professor Olson also served the University as a member of many committees. Particularly outstanding in this field was his work as Chairman of the Committee on University and Faculty Welfare, which came at a time when he was also President of the local section of the American Association of University Professors. In this dual capacity he initiated the steps which led to a great improvement in the retirement system for the faculty.
In his social life Professor Olson reflected his interest in his students and colleagues as people. His friendly nature and congeniality led to frequent informal entertainment in his home. On these occasions visitors in the area were particularly welcome and were given an opportunity to meet fellow students and colleagues. Professor Olson will be remembered by many as a friend as well as a scientist.
Edwin Robert Parker, Horticulture: Riverside
| 1896-1952 | |
| Professor | |
| Horticulturist in the Citrus Experiment Station |
Those of us who knew and learned to love Edwin R. Parker, remember him as an associate who, through the years, radiated good cheer and friendliness. His thoughts were on others rather than himself. Former staff members or students always received a cordial welcome when they returned to the campus and they left with Dr. Parker's hearty laugh ringing in their ears. At the office or in the field, at public gatherings or in private conferences, at orchard demonstrations or in committee meetings, his was an outstanding personality due, in large part, to his good nature and a desire to be fair to the opinions of others. During the years when he was head of the Division of Orchard Management, Citrus Experiment Station, Riverside, the Division personnel enjoyed exceptionally good camaraderie, partly due to the frequent social occasions and picnics when all members, with their families, etc., sang, played, and visited together, many times enjoying the fine hospitality of Helen Marie and Ed in their own home. Here we learned to know him as a true friend, and to appreciate his many fine qualities.
Edwin Robert Parker was born August 21, 1896, at Monett, Missouri, where his father was a pharmacist. In 1907 the family came to California and settled in Long Beach. After attendance at the public schools, and graduation from high school in 1915, Edwin matriculated at Pomona College, Claremont. There he was affiliated with Phi Delta fraternity, and served as its President. The A.B. degree at Pomona was received
In 1925-1926, Parker majored in plant science as a graduate student at Cornell University. This was followed by three years of research work at Riverside which resulted in the publication of a paper with Dr. L. D. Batchelor, entitled “Variation in the Yields of Fruit Trees in Relation to the Planning of Future Experiments.” The major part of his paper was presented by him in February, 1929, as a thesis in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, awarded by Cornell University. His keen interest in statistics led to his enrollment in 1935 for a special six-weeks course given at Ames, Iowa, by Dr. R. A. Fisher, statistician from England.
On December 21, 1931, at Pasadena, Dr. Parker married Helen Marie Nielson, who, with their daughter Joan, continues to make her home in Riverside. He is also survived by his mother, Ida Nesbitt Parker, who lives at Long Beach.
Dr. Parker was a Fellow of the American Association for
Much of Dr. Parker's professional life was devoted to experimental work leading to a better understanding of the fertilizer requirements for citrus production. “The yields resulting from field trials have, in many cases, indicated the varying responses of plants to soil conditions which appear to be independent of the considerations of the trial. These normal fluctuations in yield constitute a source of experimental error to which all field trials are subject. They are of such importance that they must be taken into account in the planning of such experiments, as well as in the interpretation of the results.” The above quotation from one of Dr. Parker's early publications was the starting point of his extensive field trials. He planned and was, for many years, responsible for the long-term fertilizer experiment at the Citrus Experiment Station. Many publications have resulted from this experiment, and it is known in all parts of the world where citrus is produced. It is the basis for much of the current fertilizer practices.
Dr. Parker was a pioneer in the use of micro-nutrients in the field of agriculture. His work on zinc and other micronutrients has shown the importance of these elements in citrus production. He was a leader in his chosen field of research.
Dr. Parker also contributed measurably to the research on “quick decline.” In 1945 he conducted extensive inarching and topworking experiments in order to investigate the possibility of salvaging affected trees. Although these procedures proved impractical, the work contributed greatly to a better understanding of the problem. The extensive rootstock trials to determine the disease tolerance of miscellaneous citrus selections were also begun by him. Tolerant rootstocks offer a practical solution to the “quick decline” problem.
In January, 1938, Dr. Parker visited Florida in order to study at first hand the citrus and avocado industries of that State. His “Notes on Avocados in Florida” is to be found in the California Avocado Association Yearbook for 1938. Chapter 4, volume 2, of The Citrus Industry contains his account of the production of the citrus crop. He also contributed substantially in subject matter and illustrations to Chapter 9, on “Symptoms of Citrus Malnutrition,” of Hunger Signs in Crops. The list of publications under his own authorship numbers twenty-five, with fifty-seven other papers under joint authorship. These cover a wide range of subjects, such as fruit sizes, application of urea to foliage, thinning fruit, control of mottle leaf, cover crops, navel water spot, preharvest drop of fruit, in addition to those already mentioned.
It is not necessary to erect a stone monument to commemorate the life of Edwin Parker, for the deeds of great men live after them. Although we miss him, we rejoice in his achievements.
Reuben Peiss, Librarianship: Berkeley
| 1912-1952 | |
| Associate Professor |
Reuben Peiss, Associate Professor of Librarianship, died on February 23, 1952. His death was a sharp loss to the University, to the library profession, to his family, and to his friends.
Reuben Peiss, the eldest child of Alexander and Rose Pasternack Peiss, was born in Hartford, Connecticut, on July 2, 1912. He attended Northeast Elementary School and the Weaver High School in Hartford, graduating from the latter as salutatorian of his class.
In 1929 he entered Trinity College, Hartford, as the Hartford Scholar, holding the local alumni association scholarship. He continued on scholarships throughout his entire stay at Trinity. He was the Holland Scholar for 1930-1931 and 1932-1933 (the Holland Scholarships valued at $600 a year being awarded to the highest-ranking student of his class). He was elected to Phi Beta Kappa in his junior year. He was graduated in 1933 with honors in both Philosophy and English, and was salutatorian of his class. He won several awards and prizes during his years at Trinity for poetry and composition.
Trinity College awarded him her best scholarship, the Mary Terry Fellowship; this carried Reuben Peiss to Harvard for a year's study in philosophy, resulting in a master's degree (1934). He returned to Hartford and taught philosophy for three years in the Federal Emergency Relief School, Hartford Federal College. He entered the Department of Library Science at the University of Michigan in 1937, and upon graduation a year later, he was appointed to Harvard College Library, where he distinguished himself as a cataloguer and as an editor.
The quality of his work became so apparent that he was called upon to enter his country's service in 1943 as a field worker in the O.S.S., stationed in Lisbon, Portugal, and elsewhere, where his duty was to acquire the publications issued in the warring, hostile Axis countries. He fulfilled this function so admirably that at the war's end, he was appointed to head the Library of Congress Mission to Germany. All the records indicate that the very great success of this mission was mainly due to Peiss.
His European assignments had shown that he possessed the rare qualities of a great acquisitions librarian. A rapid decline in his health followed his European exertions, but in 1947 he was recovered sufficiently to become Acting Special Assistant of the Acquisition and Distribution Division of the Department of State. During his stay at the State Department he published his translation and emendation of the German Hessell's History of Libraries. This translation has become a minor classic in its field.
Never robust, he wisely decided in 1950 to leave the rigors of the Washington climate behind him and accepted an offer to become Associate Professor of the School of Librarianship at the University of California. It is wonderfully surprising how in the brief time that was remaining to him he became so much at home at Berkeley; in classroom, conference, and meeting he became a prime mover in California library affairs until his death not two years later.
He was in pain or in its shadow nearly all that time. Clawed by pain, he would fight it down and do a man's work or more in his classroom and office before participating to the full in the administrative affairs of the School of Librarianship. He was a beloved and respected member of the faculty; his grinning wit and humor in the teeth of his malignant danger are remembered. He will live in our memories.
George Reuben Potter, English: Berkeley
| 1895-1954 | |
| Professor |
George Reuben Potter was born May 31, 1895, at Fitchburg, Massachusetts. He came of an old New England family, closely associated with the rise of Methodism in that region.
He graduated from Wesleyan University with the A.B. in 1917. Thereupon he enlisted in the Medical Corps of the United States Army and served until the end of the war, being engaged in laboratory work with the rank of Sergeant.
After the war he pursued his graduate studies in English at Harvard University, receiving the A.M. in 1920 and the Ph.D. in 1922. During the year 1920-1921 he also served as an Assistant in English at Harvard.
His first regular teaching appointment was as Instructor in English at Dartmouth College, where he served from 1922 to 1925. In the latter year he came to Berkeley as Instructor in English. He became Professor in 1944 and served as Chairman of the Department, 1950-1952.
In his graduate study and for a few years afterwards Professor Potter devoted his research chiefly to English poetry in its relationships to science, particularly to the concern of various writers with pre-Darwinian theories of evolution. In 1923 he published an article on Beddoes, and this was followed in the next few years by articles on Coleridge, Akenside, Swift, and other writers. By these studies he established himself as a pioneer in the investigation of the relationships of science and literature. Later his interests shifted to the Elizabethan period and the seventeenth century. In 1928 he
Upon this great work, in collaboration with Mrs. Evelyn M. Simpson, he was actively engaged during his last years, and two volumes of the edition of ten volumes have already been published. From the work which he had already completed toward the other volumes and with the continuing collaboration of Mrs. Simpson, the completion of the whole project seems to be assured.
His good judgment, his conscientiousness, and his ability to work well with others also brought to him many responsibilities in organizations outside the University. He served, at various times, as chairman of a study group for the State Department of Education, as President of the College English Association of the San Francisco Bay Area, as chairman of a section of the Modern Language Association, as Editorial Advisor to College English, as a consultant for the Publications of the Modern Language Association, and in other capacities.
Professor Potter was a notable teacher. Both at the undergraduate and at the graduate levels, his teaching was marked by both the earnestness and the geniality that were characteristic of the man. Among his students he will be remembered not only for his courses in the writers of the Renaissance and the seventeenth century, but also for The English Bible as
George Potter was a man remarkable for the large number of happy personal relationships that he established and maintained. On June 21, 1924, he married Mabel Harrington. Their children are Karl Harrington, David Chase, and Nancy Harding.
Not only was he a man of warm family relationships, but also of many friends. This capacity for friendship, together with his unflagging good humor, enhanced his value to the University, enabling him to work excellently on many important committees. In such work he was notable not only for ideas and for executive capacity, but also for his ability to aid others to work together in harmony.
He was a man of many interests--having collected, for instance, a nearly complete set of the works of P. G. Wodehouse. Athletic in his youth, he remained an active mountaineer throughout his life, and an always cheerful and enlivening companion on the trail. His delight in nature, particularly in its alpine aspects, was of an intensity that deserves to be described as truly Wordsworthian. The communion with the beauty and the vastness of the mountains was his goal, not the crossing of some particular pass. If it was not granted to him to follow the trail to the end, but to come to his rest while still upon the pleasant middle slopes, we can only think that this was in harmony with his own spirit.
Hans Reichenbach, Philosophy: Los Angeles
| 1891-1953 | |
| Professor |
Hans Reichenbach died suddenly on April 9, 1953. He was recognized, in this country and abroad, as a leading philosopher of logical empiricism and as a world authority in the philosophy of science.
Born on September 26, 1891, in Hamburg, Germany, Hans Reichenbach came to spend his life in widely separated parts of the world--Central Europe, the Near East, and the Far West of the United States. His personal life and professional career were affected by the totalitarian political pressures of our age, but also became a symbol of the traditional idea that there is an international community of free scholars.
He received his academic training in Germany, studying primarily mathematics, physics, and philosophy and taking his Ph.D. at the University of Erlangen in 1915. He began his academic career in 1920 at the Technical Institute in Stuttgart as a Lecturer in Physics, and later in Philosophy. While he discovered early that his primary interests were theoretical, he always displayed, to the end of his life, great practical abilities. He had also studied engineering, and worked, from 1917 to 1920, as a physicist and engineer in the scientific laboratory of a radio firm in Berlin. Throughout his life he retained and used many of his practical skills as a hobby in his home and workshop. In 1926, he was appointed, with the recommendations of Einstein and Planck, to the position of Associate Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of
His influence was, of course, particularly great in the Department of Philosophy, where his colleagues acknowledged gratefully the impetus provided by his outstanding work, and where he was most successful in stimulating and supervising the work of more than a dozen Ph.D. candidates during the last ten years. But his influence extended throughout the University. He maintained close connections with other departments, especially the Department of Physics, where he taught a graduate course in statistical mechanics during World War II. He also served on numerous doctoral and promotion committees, at one time was a member of the Graduate Council, later a member of the Research Lecture Committee, and was himself appointed Faculty Research Lecturer in 1946, the second philosopher upon whom this honor has been bestowed.
This formal listing, however, cannot convey the true measure of his impact upon the University and upon his students, which was expressed as much through daily personal contact with him as through the force of his ideas and his amazing productivity. He was a most successful lecturer on all levels of instruction, and communicated to all his students, whether undergraduate or advanced, his own personal conception of philosophy as a rigorous scientific pursuit demanding intellectual integrity, logical precision, and indefatigable research. He taught as much by the personal example he set as by the distinguished work he accomplished.
The major intellectual influences in his own life and thought
The first book he published was on Relativitätstheorie und Erkenntnis a priori (1920); and to the problem of interpreting and clarifying the logical foundations of relativity, involving the basic concepts of space, time, and causality, he returned in several major works: Axiomatik der relativistischen Raum-Zeit-Lehre (1924); From Copernicus to Einstein (1927; American edition, 1942); Philosophie der Raum-Zeit-Lehre (1928; an English translation to be published posthumously); Atom and Cosmos (1930; translated into four languages); Ziele und Wege der heutigen Naturphilosophie (1931). At the time of his death he was completing another comprehensive work on the nature of time, with special emphasis on thermodynamics, quantum mechanics, and information theory.
His dissertation (1915) was concerned with an analysis of the concept of probability, written still under the influence of the philosophy of Kant. The theory of probability continued to engage him throughout his life, stimulated by his analysis of the meaning of scientific truth and prediction, the problem of induction, the status of causality and probability in quantum mechanics, and culminating in the monumental work, The Theory of Probability (1935; revised English edition, 1949), and in the application of his system of three-valued logic to the Philosophic Foundations of Quantum Mechanics
It is impossible to do justice to the enormous productivity of Hans Reichenbach or to the full significance of his work. In the philosophy of science he had few who were his equal; and the body of his work represents original philosophical thinking of the highest quality, indispensable to any student in the field and leaving a lasting mark upon the progress of science and philosophy. His publications in scientific journals alone consist of over eighty titles, many of which, like his books, appeared in several languages. However, in addition to the technical works he wrote, he was also singularly gifted in translating complex and abstract ideas into simple, clear language intelligible to the nonspecialist. He frequently contributed to nonscientific papers and journals; the book Atom and Cosmos grew out of a series of talks given over the Berlin radio; a recent work, The Rise of Scientific Philosophy (1951), was a selection of the Book Find Club. This rare ability of being at once a skilled expert, an original thinker, and a responsible popularizer immensely increased his effectiveness as a teacher. By virtue of this combination he was himself the best example of his conviction that the primary task of philosophy was to make our ideas as clear as possible.
He made other noteworthy contributions to philosophy. In Berlin he founded a circle of scientific philosophy and became Coeditor--with R. Carnap, a member of the Vienna circle--of the journal Erkenntnis; Annalen der Philosophie, a highly influential voice in the development of scientific philosophy and logical empiricism, later transplanted to this country as the Journal of Unified Science. He also retained close contact with numerous scholars and scientists throughout this country and the world. Only last year (1952), he gave
While the loss of Hans Reichenbach is truly immeasurable to the Department of Philosophy and to the University, the body of his work and distinguished achievements will continue to be alive in the scientific world, because they have already become a permanent part of contemporary philosophy.
Wilfred William Robbins, Botany: Davis
| 1884-1952 | |
| Professor Emeritus | |
| Botanist Emeritus |
Upon assuming the directorship of the University Farm at Davis thirty years ago, Dr. Claude B. Hutchison's first recommended appointment to the staff was a man from Colorado who had made a name for himself in that State as a teacher of college students, as an Agricultural Extension worker, and as an original investigator. Upon taking up his new duties with the Division of Botany, Dr. W. W. Robbins entered vigorously upon a program of teaching and applied research. His infectious enthusiasm, lucid discussions, and clear understanding of agricultural problems soon established him as one of the most influential teachers in the State. Dr. Robbins was born on May 11, 1884, in Mendon, Ohio, the son of a Midwest farmer. He early migrated to Colorado. The University of Colorado awarded him the A.B. degree in 1907 and the master's degree in 1909. In 1917 he obtained his Ph.D. degree from the University of Chicago. These years of study were interspersed with teaching positions at Golden High School (1907-1908), at the University of Colorado (1908-1911), and at Colorado Agricultural College (1911-1914), where he was Head of the Botany Department and had charge of the Colorado Seed Laboratory. He served as Plant Physiologist and Pathologist for the Great Western Sugar Company (1919-1921), and as Botanist in the Office of Cereal Investigations, Bureau of Plant Industry, United States Department of Agriculture (1921-1922). He came to the University of California in 1922.
In the twenty-nine years that Dr. Robbins spent on the Davis campus, from 1922 to 1951, when he became Professor Emeritus, he successfully developed three fields of endeavor, any one of which would have been sufficient to establish him as an outstanding member of the staff of the College of Agriculture. His success as a teacher was immediate and outstanding. He was popular with students and was a most enthusiastic and stimulating instructor. His influence, through numerous textbooks of elementary botany, has been extended throughout the United States and into Europe, South America, and the Orient. His best known text, Textbook of General Botany, written with Professor R. M. Holman, has been used by two generations of students.
Botany, for Dr. Robbins, was not a theoretical subject to be unsullied by practical applications. He believed that ultimately all real knowledge must somehow have its impact on the lives of men. He put this belief into everyday practice throughout his whole professional life, which was dedicated to the use of botanical knowledge for the more efficient production of crops. He could best accomplish this by education, not only of college students but also of growers. He was the author of many Experiment Station publications; but perhaps of greater importance, he was a most stimulating speaker with the rare ability to teach while he entertained. His teaching day was more frequently one of twelve hours than of eight. His office door was always open to a student or a farmer with a problem, and his telephone rang incessantly.
Dr. Robbins' immediate research interests upon his arrival in Davis were concerned with asparagus, and he collaborated with Dr. H. A. Jones and Dr. H. A. Borthwick in several research projects on this crop. The sugar beet industry, which was struggling not too successfully to establish itself in California, soon drew his attention. Through his energy and foresight, a broad scientific program was initiated, which was successful and stands as an example of the manner in which a
During a recent extended tour made by Dr. Robbins throughout South America, in recognition of his contribution to South American agriculture, the University of Montevideo made him an Honorary Professor.
On the Davis campus his foremost concern was the campus as a whole, and he served on many important campus committees. He was a competent judge of character, drawing together on the campus a group of workers in his own Division that shared his enthusiasm for teaching and research, several of whom have already established international reputations.
Dr. Robbins retired in June, 1951. In his passing, his Division, the University, and the farmers of the State have lost those contributions which would surely have come from his mind and pen to enrich their lives.
Clarence Hall Robison, Education: Los Angeles
| 1873-1952 | |
| Associate Professor Emeritus |
Clarence Hall Robison, Associate Professor of Education, Emeritus, passed away at the family home, Rancho Alta Vista, Soquel, California, on May 22, 1952. Since his voluntary retirement in June, 1941, he had engaged in growing and marketing apples from his ranch home. It was thus that his last eleven years were spent in the field of agriculture, whose many biological problems had been a predominant interest all through his younger years and his early teaching experiences.
Dr. Robison was born on February 8, 1873, at Saybrook, Illinois. His paternal ancestors were of Scotch-Irish Presbyterian stock who pioneered in Pennsylvania. His maternal ancestors were Huguenots who arrived in Virginia by way of Holland and England. Like so many of the early settlers of Pennsylvania and Virginia, his forebears migrated by irregular stages over the years until he and his family arrived in California.
He received his A.B. degree from Northwestern University in 1895, his M.A. in 1897, and the Ph.D. degree from Teachers College, Columbia, in February, 1911. Dr. Robison began his teaching career as Instructor in Biological and Earth Sciences at Armour Institute of Technology in Chicago in 1895. In 1899 to 1903, he taught biology in the high school at Oak Park, Illinois. Between the years 1903 and 1920, he taught in state normal schools in North Dakota, Wisconsin, and New Jersey. For the last twelve years of this period, he was Head
His service with the University of California began as Instructor in Geography and Education in 1921 at the Southern Branch just two years after it was established. He is, therefore, to be numbered among the pioneering members of the faculty who had a large part in building the foundations of the present University of California, Los Angeles. While Professor Robison kept up some teaching during his entire period of service, there can be little doubt that his greatest contribution to the University came from his work in an administrative capacity. In 1923, he was appointed University Examiner, in which position he served until 1932. This was followed by a somewhat similar service under appointment as Associate Director of Admissions until 1938. He gave untiringly of his time to the solving of the many difficult problems of the ever increasing number of students entering the University from the high schools and junior colleges. That his work on these problems during these pioneering days was well and effectively done is evidenced by the fact that the Southern California Junior College Association in 1933 amended its constitution to make possible his election as an Associate Member in recognition of his helpful relationship with that organization during the preceding ten years. He initiated and carried through many improvements in the conduct of the Office of Admissions. He assisted in the revision and improvement of course numbers appearing in University curricula. He kept the secondary schools of the State well informed as changes were made in University courses and entrance requirements. He spared no effort in helping solve the personal problems of entering students. During an eastern trip in 1937, he visited, at the request of President Sproul, the officers of thirteen leading universities, interviewing them respecting their systems of counseling for freshman students, and prepared a summary report of what he learned. The information gathered enabled
Professor Robison was married on November 24, 1909, to Jane Refter Condit at Verona, New Jersey. Their three sons and a daughter were all born in New Jersey, and all except the oldest son survive their father. All of the children attended the University Elementary School and three of them graduated from the University. The large, commodious home of the family was the first faculty home built adjoining the campus and served on many occasions as the delightful setting for social gatherings of the faculty during the early years on the Westwood campus. The cordial hospitality of the Robison home will never be forgotten by the faculty of the early 1930's.
Professor Robison in many ways manifested a keen interest in civic and community affairs. He was a member at various times of the Los Angeles City Club, the Municipal League, the Alumni Chapter of Phi Delta Kappa; was active in the Northwestern University and the Teachers College alumni associations, and was a past president of each of them. The family were members of the Mt. Hollywood Congregational Church. He was a member of the Al Maleika Temple (Shrine) and was incorporator and member of the Board of Directors of the Masonic Club of U.C.L.A. He was also a charter member of the local chapter of Pi Gamma Mu.
In spite of heavy teaching and administrative responsibilities, Professor Robison found time to write and publish some thirty articles in nationally known magazines between the years 1904 and 1934. Most of his earlier writings were in the field of agriculture, nature study, elementary science, weather, and on the problems of teaching these subjects, especially in the secondary schools. A number of his later contributions had to do with problems of curricula, entrance requirements, student counseling, and with problems of relationship of the University to the institutions from which its students come. He also wrote sections on agriculture for two important books
With the passing of Clarence Hall Robison, one more of that notable group of pioneering faculty members who “helped make a University” on the Los Angeles campus has gone from our midst. The imprint of his work will last for many years to come.
Christel Barthold Schomaker, Germanic Languages: Los Angeles
| 1881-1956 | |
| Assistant Professor of German, Emeritus |
Christel Barthold Schomaker was born in Basbeck, Hanover, Germany, on December 25, 1881, and died in San Clemente, California, on March 6, 1956.
Following in the footsteps of his father, Professor Schomaker at an early age chose teaching as his profession. After his graduation from the teachers' seminary in Bederkesa, near Bremen, in 1902, he spent the next twenty years as a teacher in German elementary schools, at the same time functioning as church organist. In 1907 he married Bertha M. Wohlers, of Brooklyn, New York. He emigrated to the United States in 1923. After working for a period as a bookkeeper, he entered the University of California, Los Angeles, as an undergraduate and in one year took his A.B. degree (1927). After taking his M.A. at the University of California in 1929, in which year he also became a citizen of the United States, he embarked on a new and fruitful career as a teacher. In 1930 he joined the Department of Germanic Languages on the Los Angeles campus as an Associate in German; he was promoted to the Assistant Professorship in 1945, which rank he held at his retirement in 1948.
Professor Schomaker is remembered with great affection by a host of former undergraduate students of German as a very gentle and kindly, but nonetheless exacting, teacher. In his more advanced courses in German composition he made an important contribution to the training of a whole generation of candidates for the teaching credential in German.
While never ceasing to cherish the cultural heritage of his native land, Schomaker was animated also by a genuine devotion to his adopted country and particularly to this University. The following words written on the occasion of his retirement appear in a letter addressed to the Provost:
“I shall always consider it a great distinction to have served as a part of this institution.... Being of foreign extraction, I found American democracy as it presents itself in its schools a true revelation.... Teaching the fine young men and women of this country has been a source of joy and satisfaction.”
May Secrest, Agricultural Extension: Berkeley
| 1871-1951 | |
| Assistant Professor Emeritus |
May Secrest was a member of the staff of the University Agricultural Extension Service from 1920 until 1936. She died December 9, 1951, following fifteen years of retirement.
Born in Kansas of Swiss parentage, Miss Secrest was educated in the public schools of that State and was graduated from Kansas State Agricultural College in 1892 with a degree of Bachelor of Science. She did graduate work at Teachers' College, Columbia University, in 1901-1902 and in 1916-1917.
Miss Secrest served as Instructor at the State Normal School, Stevens Point, Wisconsin, and at Ohio State University. She established Home Economics at the Polytechnic School at San Luis Obispo in 1905 and taught at that institution until 1916.
After a year of graduate study, Miss Secrest accepted a position at the University of Minnesota. The following year she was appointed State Home Demonstration Leader and resigned two years later to become Assistant State Home Demonstration Leader in California. She continued in this position until her retirement.
Miss Secrest became a member of the Women's Faculty Club in 1920, the year it was organized. She was one of its most loyal supporters and was a Director for several years. Upon her retirement she was honored by election to permanent
Miss Secrest brought to the position of supervisor of home demonstration agents rare qualifications. Perhaps her Swiss ancestry contributed many of her unshakable characteristics--dignified as the mountains, serene as the lakes, brave as the mountaineers, never wavering in her belief in people, and devoted to her ideals with a deep integrity of mind.
She had an acute insight into human nature and an analytical mind. Contributing to her success in supervision was her habit of working with, rather than directing, others. A good listener, she reviewed with a member of the staff a complex situation until the answer naturally appeared; the difficulty precipitated to the bottom of the test tube, and the result was a clear solution. The farm home, the farm women, and the Agricultural Extension Service have been immeasurably enriched through her training, knowledge, and devotion to her work.
James Graham Sharp, Dentistry: San Francisco
| 1868-1954 | |
| Professor Emeritus | |
| Dean of the College of Dentistry |
Dr. James Graham Sharp's career began in the days of preceptorship, with or without formal education. He was born in Sacramento, March 24, 1868, his early education being received in the Napa Boys' Boarding School and the San Francisco and San Jose public schools. His family left Sacramento when he was seven years old, moving to San Francisco and later to San Jose, where he attended school until he was eighteen. He spent three years, 1886-1889, in Europe in pursuit of general education, and it was on his return from Europe that he entered the College of Dentistry (then affiliated with the University), from which he was graduated in 1893. In 1894 he was graduated from the Medical School with the degree of Doctor of Medicine, the early history of which School uniquely parallels that of the dental school started at a little later date. He then spent a period of eighteen months in the office of the late Louis Lane Dunbar, one-time Dean of the College of Dentistry.
Immediately after graduation from the Medical School, Dr. Sharp became interested in teaching in the College of Dentistry, occupying the following positions: Instructor in Microscopic Technics, 1896; Assistant in Physiology, 1897; Assistant in Surgery, 1898-1903; Professor of Principles and Practice of Surgery, 1903-1929. He was a member of the state and county medical societies and the state, county, and national dental associations. He became Dean of the College of
These ten years in many respects were the most interesting in the history of the College, for the need for more education and better skills was apparent. Dr. Sharp began a study of the educational situation immediately, including various so-called professional organizations, the result of which was the organization of the Dental Faculties' Association of American Universities, which included the Universities of California, Harvard, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania. Later, others joined the Association, making a total of eleven at the time of its discontinuance in 1924. Dr. Sharp was made the first President, serving for a period of four terms, or four years.
In 1910 a survey of medical education was made by Abraham Flexner under authority of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Dr. Sharp discussed the question of dental education with Dr. Flexner, from whom he received encouragement to proceed along similar lines. The result was that at the third annual meeting of the Dental Faculties' Association of American Universities, held in Iowa City, Iowa, March 8, 1911, he proposed the following resolution in his President's address:
That the Dental Faculties' Association of American Universities invite the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching to make an investigation of dental schools holding membership in this Association, such as was made of the medical schools of this country.
It was duly considered and adopted at that meeting, resulting ultimately in the survey by William J. Gies, Ph.D., under direction of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement
He was a capable dentist and oral surgeon, an ideal professional gentleman, an inspiration to his students, and one to whom both graduate and undergraduate could appeal for help which he was sure to receive most graciously.
Dr. Sharp retired several years ago after forty years of active practice in San Francisco. He lived in Palo Alto, where he was, through all the years, instrumental in the establishment of the well-known Palo Alto Community Players. He was at one time a member of the Palo Alto Planning Commission. He died May 26, 1954, and is survived by his wife, Rose Eppinger Sharp; a son, Dr. James G. Sharp, Jr.; a daughter, Mrs. Wheeler Thayer; two grandchildren; and seven great-grandchildren.
The historian of the future will find this man to be one of a few who laid the foundation and shaped the future of the College of Dentistry of the University. He will also find him to be one of a little larger number who did the same thing for dental education on the national level.
Ralph Eliot Smith, Plant Pathology: Berkeley and Davis
| 1874-1953 | |
| Professor Emeritus | |
| Assistant Botanist in the Experiment Station |
Ralph Eliot Smith, Professor of Plant Pathology, Emeritus, and pioneer plant pathologist of California, died in Berkeley on December 15, 1953. He established here one of the first university departments of plant pathology and organized the Agricultural Experiment Station research on plant diseases. His work contributed much to the success of the horticultural industries of the State.
He was born in Boston, January 9, 1874. Graduating from Massachusetts Agricultural College in 1894, he remained there until 1903 as Assistant Professor of Botany and German, meanwhile spending one year in Germany and two summers at Harvard in graduate study. As Assistant Botanist in the Experiment Station, he worked on many plant diseases, including the aster yellows virus disease and the asparagus rust, a disease that also was important in California.
This led indirectly to an invitation from Professor Hilgard to come to California and accept an appointment as Assistant Professor of Plant Pathology in the University. He arrived on April 1, 1903, and within a few days had obtained research funds from the asparagus canners and was in the asparagus fields studying the rust.
Following a disastrous pear blight outbreak in 1904, he helped to draft a bill passed by the Legislature of 1905 to provide funds to the University for a campaign against pear blight, which he organized and directed. The same legislature appropriated funds to establish a plant pathology “laboratory
Professor Smith organized and offered courses in plant pathology at Berkeley, beginning in 1904. Among his early assistants was his sister, Elizabeth, who carried on research in his Berkeley laboratory for many years.
Besides asparagus rust and pear blight, he investigated many other destructive crop diseases, including pear scab, lemon brown rot, peach blight, and later puzzling diseases of nutritional and virus origin. His zeal for research was coupled with a desire to help the farmer. He discovered how to control the rust by dusting with sulphur, the lemon rot by adding a disinfectant to the wash water, and the peach blight with an early winter spray. One is amazed at his prodigious activity. His field work ranged from the pear districts in the north to the citrus and walnut groves in the south.
Always keenly interested in walnuts, he published in 1912 a comprehensive treatise on walnut culture, varieties, and diseases. In 1912-1913 he visited southern Europe, studying walnut and citrus culture, and went on an expedition to the date gardens in the Sahara Desert. The period of 1918-1920 he spent in southern California, part of the time on leave from the University, developing a dust control for the walnut aphid. This “was a major discovery in the field of insect toxicology,” according to his colleague, Professor Essig.
During the next decade, Professor Smith greatly expanded his department at Berkeley and Davis. He fostered graduate study and offered an advanced course until he retired. His research was on fig diseases, peach rust, apricot green rot, diamond canker of prune, and the gray mold fungus, Botrytis.
Among his numerous publications was a series of comprehensive bulletins on the plant diseases of the State. He was an able writer. In his later years he searched the early records
He had a wide personal acquaintance with growers and agricultural officials. Perhaps no other person was as familiar with the orchard problems of the State.
In 1934, his Alma Mater conferred on him an honorary doctorate. He relinquished administrative work in 1936 and became Professor Emeritus in 1944.
He married Jessie Anna Carroll at Whittier in 1906. They had one son, Carroll, who died at the age of fifteen. Mrs. Smith died in 1949. They had summer homes at various times at Ben Lomond, Pinecrest, Saratoga, and Los Gatos. With their keen mutual interest in antiques, they shared an expertness in creating a beautiful home.
His last public appearance was as guest of honor at a dinner with a hundred of his friends in April, 1953, celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the department he founded. His address was a thrilling account of his pioneer experiences.
He was a kindly man, calm, dignified, and somewhat reserved. Among his students and colleagues he inspired confidence and loyalty.
William Anton Smith, Education: Los Angeles and Berkeley
| 1880-1954 | |
| Professor Emeritus |
William Anton Smith, Professor of Education, Emeritus, passed away at the Queen of the Angels Hospital, Los Angeles, on January 11, 1954, after having suffered a stroke two days earlier at his apartment at 10914 Wilshire Boulevard.
Dr. Smith was born at Frutigen, Canton Bern, Switzerland, on December 2, 1880, and so had just passed his seventy-third birthday at the time of his death. He came to America with his family at the age of ten years, early in 1891. The family settled in a rural community some forty miles from Portland, Oregon. His early education in Switzerland was continued in the elementary school in his community and included one year in the Williams Avenue School in Portland, Oregon, where he worked for his room and board. Then and later, he earned all of his own school expenses. His consuming ambition even in his elementary school days in Switzerland was to become a teacher. A neighbor quotes him as having said on one occasion, “If we had stayed in Switzerland, I would have become a teacher, but here I'll probably have no chance.” On another occasion, when driving to Portland with his parents, he remarked as they passed a schoolhouse, “That is where I should be.”
He kept this goal before him continuously and it was no doubt the drive of this consuming and long-cherished ambition that dominated all his efforts until his goal was attained. The strength of his ambition may be judged from the
Dr. Smith's secondary education was completed in 1905 at the Oregon Institute, Salem, Oregon, the preparatory school for Willamette University. He entered Willamette University for his undergraduate work and received the B.A. degree in 1909, and, at the age of twenty-nine, after another year of study, the degree of O.B. He pursued graduate study at the University of Washington during the year 1910-1911 and the summer session of 1911, receiving his M.A. degree and his Teachers' Life Diploma in 1911. In his work toward the M.A. he majored in Philosophy and minored in Psychology and Education.
Dr. Smith's work toward the doctorate was done at the University of Chicago, where he was in residence for Summer Quarters in 1912, 1913, 1914, and for the full year of 1913-1914. At Chicago his major was in Education, with emphasis on Educational Psychology, Curriculum, and Secondary Education; his minor was in Psychology. His dissertation was completed under the direction of Dr. Frank N. Freeman, later the Dean of the School of Education on the Berkeley campus of the University of California. Dr. Smith received his Ph.D. degree Cum Laude in 1916, at the age of thirty-six, after sixteen years of combined teaching and study.
Illustrative of Dr. Smith's continuous effort to keep abreast of the times in his chosen field, he took leave of absence to pursue postdoctoral work on the Berkeley campus in 1918-1919 and, in the Fall Quarter of 1919, at Stanford University, pursuing research in the field of Secondary Education in both institutions.
Dr. Smith's teaching and administrative experience in both elementary and secondary schools began before his advanced training was undertaken. His first teaching was done in elementary schools in Oregon in 1900, two years before he received his final naturalization papers in 1902. He continued
It was while he was on leave from the University of Oklahoma doing postdoctoral research on the Berkeley campus in 1919 that he received his appointment as Assistant Professor of Education at the newly established Southern Branch of the University of California at Los Angeles. His service began in September, 1920, and continued until his retirement in 1949. He was advanced to an Associate Professorship in 1928 and to the Professorship in 1940.
Professor Smith's work was highly regarded on the Berkeley campus of the University as well as at his permanent post at Los Angeles. Time after time he was called upon to teach in the Summer Sessions at Berkeley, so that he was almost as well known by the Department of Education staff there as he was at Los Angeles.
During his years on the University faculty Dr. Smith served frequently on important committees of the Academic Senate and those of the Department of Education. From 1923 to 1929 he was Chairman of the Department of Education. After graduate work was established, he sponsored a large number
Among his more important services outside the University, Dr. Smith served as a Member-at-Large of the National Committee on Research in Secondary Education from 1933 to 1935; as Associate Editor of the California Journal of Education; as a member of the Board of Directors of the Writers Round Table, Inc., Hollywood, California, for which organization he was Second Vice-President in 1940-1941.
Professor Smith was a member of Pi Gamma Mu; Kappa Delta Pi; Phi Delta Kappa; the American Association of University Professors; California Society for Secondary Education; National Education Association; Department of Secondary School Principals, N.E.A.; California Teachers Association; American Education Fellowship; and the Writers Round Table, Inc.
Dr. Smith was studious and scholarly in his interests; widely read and well informed in the areas of his special interest, which in all his later years was in the field of Secondary Education. He maintained, throughout the three decades of his service with the University of California, Los Angeles, a definite and consistent program of writing for publication. During that period he published four noteworthy books and some dozen short articles, as well as more than fifty reviews and digests of important books, theses, and published articles of other writers, many of which appear in the California Journal of Secondary Education, of which he was an Associate Editor. It is especially noteworthy that three of his books: The Reading Process, 1922; The Junior High School, 1925; and Secondary Education in the United States, 1932, were selected, in the year of their publication, for a place among the Sixty Educational Books of the Year. Often as many as eight hundred books were examined in making this selection of the sixty best. In his letter to Dr. Smith upon his retirement in 1949, President Sproul quoted the following statement
After his retirement in 1949 Dr. Smith was steadily and persistently working to complete what may well prove to be the very best of his writing. The manuscript is complete and at the time of his death he was negotiating for a publisher. It is the intention of his family and of his executor to secure publication of this, his last work. The book is in two parts and will constitute a very comprehensive history of world-wide education. The tentative title is Man, Society and Education. Its theme is the social implications of education. This book is really the culmination of a lifetime of research, study, and thought.
As a teacher, Professor Smith was highly regarded by both undergraduates and graduate students and by those colleagues who knew his work. He maintained high standards for his students and for himself. His scholarly mastery of his field was easily recognized by all who knew him. He enjoyed teaching and found in it his greatest satisfactions. He will long be remembered by students, colleagues in the University, and especially by secondary school people throughout the entire country as one of the ablest among the writers in the field of Secondary Education.
Professor Smith will be remembered personally, by those who knew him, as a genial and friendly person, modest and even to a degree retiring in disposition, conscientious and untiring in the fulfilment of all the duties and responsibilities assigned to him, and helpful to students who sought his advice.
There can be no question but that Professor Smith made a notable contribution nationally through his work on the National Committee on Research in Secondary Education as
Professor Smith is survived by two brothers, Fred J. Smith, of Hillsboro, Oregon, and Elmer W. Smith, of Portland, Oregon; two sisters, Miss Marie C. Smith, of Portland, Oregon, and Mrs. A. Zahler, of Hillsboro, Oregon; and by Mrs. Zahler's four children: Mrs. Alma Zahler Jones, of Portland, Oregon; Ronald W. Zahler, of Aloha, Oregon; Mrs. Aldeane Zahler Adams, of Vancouver, Washington, and Mrs. Shirley Zahler Knutson, of Boston, Massachusetts.
Olenus Lee Sponsler, Botany: Los Angeles
| 1879-1953 | |
| Professor Emeritus |
Olenus Lee Sponsler was called in 1922 to the University of California, Los Angeles, and became Emeritus in 1948, after having served as Professor of Botany for twenty years. He died on March 14, 1953, at his home in Sherman Oaks. Thus, he was a pioneer on a new campus, fostering there the spirit of scholarship and establishing and developing a Department of Botany which is now amongst the largest in the United States. This role of pioneer was not a strange one, for Sponsler was born of two pioneers, Israel Sponsler and Sarah Lee, on June 17, 1879, in Akron, Ohio, when that State was still young. Nor was he miscast in the role, as the growth of his scholarship attests; for pioneering was his essence, and his course, like that of his forebears from Germany and England, moved steadily toward an always receding horizon.
Sponsler began his professional career as a forester. After receiving the bachelor's degree from the University of Michigan in 1910, he served as Adjunct Professor of Forestry and Botany and as Associate Professor in charge of Forestry from 1910 to 1912 at the University of Nebraska. During this period he studied with Professor Bessey and received the master's degree in 1912. He then returned to Michigan as Associate Professor of Forestry from 1912 to 1917, teaching dendrology, silvics, and silviculture, and during this period was in charge of the Ecological Survey of the Michigan State Geological and Biological Survey. During World War I he served as Wood Technologist of the Army Airplane Division of the
Sponsler's earliest interest in high school and college had been in physics and chemistry and he had, in fact, worked for a while as an analytical chemist. This interest now reasserted itself, and in 1919 he elected a new career which would combine the physical and biological sciences, and enrolled as a graduate student at Stanford University. Studying there with Professors Peirce and Webster, he used the technique of X-ray diffraction to explore the structure of wood and its components, and was awarded the doctorate in 1922 for a thesis entitled “The Structure of the Starch Grain.” After coming to Los Angeles, he published a series of studies on the structure of cellulose which attracted international attention because of the concept of long chain molecules which it involved, and made the fundamental discovery, with W. H. Dore, of the structure of ramie cellulose by means of X rays. This work laid the foundation of a second promising career, had he chosen to follow it, because of its application to the then embryonic fiber and textile industries. But beyond cellulose lay another horizon: that which gives content and form to it, the living substance; and Sponsler chose to address himself to this. He outlined the problem in 1931 in a general statement on the mechanism of cell wall formation, and in 1934 in his Faculty Research Lecture, “Living Matter: a Molecular Approach.” Thereafter he explored many paths and byways which led toward his objective, and tested his ideas from time to time in symposia and seminars. During this period he taught himself to use two new experimental tools: the ultraviolet and the electron microscope. He began to formulate
The list of the societies in which Sponsler was active at one time or another is an index of the range of his scholarly interest: the Western Society of Naturalists, the Botanical Society of America, the Society of Sigma Xi, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the British Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Chemical Society, the American Physical Society, the Faraday Society, the Royal Horticultural Society, the American Forestry Association, the American Association of University Professors, the Society for the Study of Development and Growth, and the American Society of Plant Physiologists. He held membership in several and office in some, and received the Charles Reid Barnes honorary life membership from the American Society of Plant Physiologists. He was invited to participate in numerous symposia and discussions in the fields of biology, physics, and biochemistry, both here and abroad, the last being to address the International Congress of Biochemistry in Paris in 1951.
Sponsler was not content to take even the most sanctified notions for granted. He liked to turn an idea upside down and look at it from various angles; and in this quality of his mind
Edward Griffith Stricklen, Music: Berkeley
| 1880-1950 | |
| Professor Emeritus |
Edward Griffith Stricklen served in the Department of Music at Berkeley from 1912 until his retirement in 1949, was its Chairman from 1919 until 1929 and again from 1931 to 1937. But six years after the Department had been formed by John Frederick Wolle, Professor Stricklen began his University career as Reader under Charles L. Seeger. He was appointed Assistant in Music in 1913, Instructor in Music in 1914, then to the three professorial ranks in 1919, 1923, and 1936, respectively.
When, in 1919, Professor Seeger left the Department, Stricklen became Chairman. He was then the only full-time member of the staff, teaching theory, analysis, composition, and history of music. “During these years,” writes Glen Haydon, currently Chairman of the Department of Music at the University of North Carolina, who was one of his students at this time, “Stricklen could generally be met at luncheon time at the Faculty Club and I remember stimulating conversations with him on the veranda. His whole life was tied up with the Music Department during all the years I knew him. He had a wide interest in people and in ideas and gave much thoughtful consideration to the problems of musical theory. He had many personal friends on the faculty, but was never a person seeking to gain the public eye.”
Stricklen's notable contribution to the Department of Music was indeed as a teacher. His courses were carefully prepared; each assignment was immaculately planned and
Edward Stricklen was born in Oakland of New England ancestry; his father was John Edward Stricklen and his mother Mary Ida Henton. He was educated in the Oakland public schools and did not attend college. He was endowed with a natural and sensitive aptitude for piano playing and, had he wished, could undoubtedly have developed this to the standards of concert performance. His talent for musical composition attracted the attention of the established composers of this region. Of these William J. McCoy and Wallace Sabin became his teachers; thus his only instruction in musical theory and composition was obtained locally. Early musical associations were formed at the Bohemian Club, and in 1911 he composed the music for Porter Garnett's Bohemian Grove Play, The Green Knight. To be noted among other compositions is the music for the 1913 Partheneia and incidental music for Greek Theatre productions of Twelfth Night (1921, repeated in 1924) and Antigone (1928). Theoretical writings include Chromatic Harmony (1916), Harmonic Structure (in collaboration with Charles L. Seeger, 1916), and Notes on Eight Papago Songs (1923).
He was a man of wide culture and a constant reader in fields of great diversity. He sought genuineness and quality among friends and books. The Oriental classics and the writings of Emerson and Santayana were among his favorite readings. One of his friends writes: “It was a treat to hear `Rouge' Stricklen give a criticism of a book in a few telling phrases.”
Professor Stricklen maintained a home for some time after the death of his father; he never married. Prior to the beginning of World War II he moved to the Hotel Shattuck, where he lived quietly until his last illness. A ceremonious host and a rewarding guest, he liked to be with his friends singly, and maintained friendships on his own terms. During these later years he lived more and more within a world formed of his teaching, reading, and meditation. Students and colleagues of more than three decades, visiting him in his suite of rooms, provided his main recreation, and while many friendships became inactive none were forgotten.
Ernest Bloch writes: “I have not known Edward Stricklen so well, and for so long, as you have, but, since I stayed at the Shattuck during my courses, I enjoyed his company immensely; we had many talks, breakfasts, lunches together, and the more I knew him, the more I appreciated this very fine gentleman. Not often have I met a musician with such a broad culture; we shared a common admiration for great thinkers like Schopenhauer and the great masters of the past in music. He was a man of remarkable sensibility, endowed with a warm heart in spite of his pessimism and strange loneliness. But are not these a sign of disappointed idealism, more than anything else? I regret not to have been more intimate with him, and, since his passing away, I have been missing him every day at the Shattuck. But I shall never forget him, nor his great comprehension.”
Evalyn Anne Thomas, English: Los Angeles
| 1870-1950 | |
| Instructor Emerita |
Evalyn Anne Thomas was born near St. Joseph, Missouri, the direct descendant of American Revolutionary stock on both sides of her family. Her early education was in private schools and in the local college for girls. After a number of years spent in teaching, she was drawn by her talent for dramatics to the Emerson School of Oratory in Boston, from which she received the professional diploma in 1903 and the artistic diploma in 1904. The records indicate that she served on the staff of Emerson in 1904. A subsequent degree of Bachelor of Literary Interpretation was granted her by the School in 1920.
After 1904, moving to the Northwest, she returned to teaching, and from 1904 to 1910 served as Instructor in Dramatic Literature in the Ellensburg Teachers College in the State of Washington. In 1910, evidently intent on making a career of dramatic interpretation on the lecture stage, she went to England, where during 1911 and 1912 she gave readings of Greek drama at Oxford and elsewhere and was extremely well received by her audiences. These, interestingly, were the years in which Margaret Anglin began her popularization of Greek tragedy in America. During 1911 and 1912, Miss Thomas studied at Oxford under the supervision of Sir Walter Raleigh in literature and Gilbert Murray in Greek drama. In 1911 she visited Oberammergau, apparently as the guest of Anton Lang, the famous Christus of the Passion Play. Returning to America she launched her professional career in a highly successful
Miss Thomas' enthusiasm for Greek drama and her thorough training in its interpretation became the basis for her unique contribution to the early life of the University on the Los Angeles campus. Beginning in 1917 with the Antigone of Sophocles, which was performed to aid in sending an American ambulance unit to France, and continuing to the Oedipus of 1938, she produced and directed annually a Greek tragedy, the plays running in an unbroken series unparalleled in the theatre elsewhere. These were ambitious performances with large casts of fifty to eighty students drawn from her classes in the dramatic arts. In the two decades, more than a thousand students were given, through these plays, a fruitful experience of the theatre. And in years when the University at Los Angeles had little else of general appeal to offer the public, the yearly Greek plays brought large and deeply interested audiences to both the Vermont Avenue and the Westwood campuses and helped to make for the University a place in the general life of the community. This interest in the campus theatre on the part of both students and public, first stimulated by Miss Thomas, became the enduring foundation on which the later work of the University in theatre arts could successfully be built.
As a teacher, Evalyn Thomas had unusual gifts. She evoked in her students an extraordinarily intense desire to excel. Many of her best students went on to rewarding careers in the theatre and in the teaching of dramatics. Yet she took particular pains, too, with the backward or the handicapped, trying to help them find a way in which they might express themselves. Her untiring devotion was rewarded by strong
As a person, she created an unforgettable impression on those who knew her. Her amazing vitality, her salient force of character, her vigor of address, her lively and sometimes slightly grim humor, made her both a memorable colleague and a memorable teacher. She became a legend to her students during her lifetime. Her lasting memorial will be found, as she would have wished it, in the affectionate recollection of her students and friends.
Edwin Cooper Van Dyke, Entomology and Parasitology: Berkeley
| 1869-1952 | |
| Professor Emeritus |
Edwin Cooper Van Dyke was born in Oakland, California, April 7, 1869, and died in San Francisco, September 28, 1952. His father, Walter Van Dyke, was born in western New York in 1823, came across the plains to California in 1849, and became a prominent lawyer and judge and Associate Justice of the State Supreme Court. His mother, Rowena Cooper, was born on Prince Edward Island, Canada, in 1835 and came around the Horn in her father's ship to San Francisco in 1850. They were married in Uniontown (Arcata), Humboldt County, California, in 1854.
As a high school boy in Oakland, the son became interested in nature study and started the collection of insects which later became one of the largest collections ever amassed by one individual. His first scientific paper was published in the Aegis, Oakland High School paper, in 1885. In that same year, his parents moved to Los Angeles, where he continued his education and made the acquaintance of D. W. Coquillett, H. C. Fall, and other entomologists who helped him in his avocation.
He entered the University of California in 1889 and graduated in 1893, after which he entered Cooper Medical College in San Francisco, from which he received the M.D. in 1895. As an undergraduate, he was active in student affairs. He was a member of Beta Theta Pi fraternity and played varsity football. He earned his letter as a pole vaulter on the track team.
Dr. Van Dyke's medical career included postgraduate work in New York City and at Johns Hopkins and led to a successful private practice and recognition as a specialist in eye surgery.
Despite the exacting demands of medical training and practice, Dr. Van Dyke's interest in entomology not only continued but increased. He joined the California Academy of Sciences in 1904 and acted as Curator of Insects without salary until a full-time curator was appointed in 1913. He was also a charter member of the Pacific Coast Entomological Society, which was organized in 1901 and of which he was President from 1908 to 1931 and Honorary President for the Society's semicentennial year, 1951.
In 1913 Dr. Van Dyke broke off his medical career and became a professional entomologist. His first appointment was as Assistant in Entomology at the University of California, thus beginning a long and distinguished career as a teacher, collector, and specialist in the Coleoptera. He rose to Assistant Professor in 1916, Associate Professor in 1921, Professor in 1927, and became Emeritus Professor in 1939. He was exchange professor at Cornell University in 1917-1918.
On June 7, 1915, Dr. Van Dyke married Mary Annie Ames, who was a school teacher much interested in natural history. Mrs. Van Dyke accompanied her husband on field trips every year, covering every western state as well as parts of the Orient, where they spent a sabbatical year (1923-1924), and Europe and North Africa (1933).
It was on a field trip to the southeastern United States during the first year of retirement from the University that Mrs. Van Dyke passed away. Returning to California, Dr. Van Dyke readjusted his life and embarked on the last phase of his distinguished career. The remaining twelve years of his life were spent as Honorary Curator and Patron of the California Academy of Sciences. Dr. Van Dyke lived within walking
Dr. Van Dyke's formal contributions to science can be given in terms of hundreds of thousands of insects collected, and hundreds of papers published. But he contributed much more than this. He was a gentleman of highest ideals, and above all an enthusiast who inspired generations of students. He spent hours naming beetles for youngsters of grammar school age and lived to see an exceptionally large number of his protégés placed in key positions throughout the world, where they are carrying on the ideals which he instilled in them.
Earl Fiske Walker, Chemistry: Santa Barbara and Berkeley
| 1887-1949 | |
| Assistant Professor |
Earl Fiske Walker was born in Nebraska near Chadron, August 8, 1887. His father was a Methodist minister and his mother was a Randolph of Virginia.
Professor Walker received his elementary and high school education in the public schools of his home state, and in 1909 he received the A.B. degree from Wesleyan University, Nebraska. In 1912 he completed the requirements for the degree in pharmacy at the University of Nebraska. Continuing his advanced work at the same University, he studied with Dr. Hopkins, discoverer of illinium, and received his master's degree in 1915.
From 1915 to 1917, Mr. Walker was head of the Chemistry Department at Kansas Wesleyan University. During the summer of 1917, he assisted Dr. Stieglitz at the University of Chicago in research work in colloidal chemistry until he went into Naval service during World War I. There, he was assigned by the Navy to work in governmental laboratories doing research in pharmacy and chemistry from 1917 to 1919.
Mr. Walker served as Assistant Professor of Chemistry at Washington State College at Pullman from 1920 to 1922, having charge of inorganic and analytical chemistry courses. During the summers of 1920-1922, he took advanced work towards his doctorate at Stanford University in the field of colloidal chemistry.
In the fall of 1922, he accepted a position at Santa Barbara College in the Department of Chemistry. Here he taught inorganic
Professor Walker was a member of the American Chemical Society and Alpha Chi Sigma, honor chemical fraternity, and was the faculty sponsor of the Beta Sigma Chi fraternity at Santa Barbara College from 1926 to 1939.
Mr. Walker came to the College during its growing years and helped in its development through many changes until it became a part of the University of California in 1944. In his teaching, he was interested in challenging his students and in helping them to go on for advanced work. He seemed to be impelled by the direct and personal interest in them. To many, in an unobtrusive but effective way, he offered his friendship, giving good advice to those who asked for it, but seldom forcing it upon his students.
Ernest Linwood Walker, Medicine: San Francisco
| 1870-1952 | |
| Professor of Tropical Medicine, Emeritus |
Dr. Ernest Linwood Walker, for twenty-six years a member of the faculty of the School of Medicine and of the staff of the George Williams Hooper Foundation for Medical Research, San Francisco, passed away in Atherton, California, January 20, 1952, at the age of eighty-one years.
Dr. Walker was born in Freeport, Maine, June 24, 1870. He obtained his undergraduate and graduate training at Harvard University, receiving the degrees of Bachelor of Applied Science, Bachelor of Science, and Doctor of Science. The year he received his first degree, a Bachelor of Applied Science, he was appointed Bacteriologist for the Massachusetts State Board of Health and held this position for fourteen years. It was during this period that Dr. Walker did his graduate work at Harvard, serving for a while as an Assistant in Medical Zoölogy in the Medical School. His interest in medical parasitology and tropical medicine prompted him in 1910 to accept an appointment as a member of the staff of the Bureau of Science in the Philippine Islands. He served as Protozoölogist for the Bureau for three years, and then became Chief of the Biological Laboratory. In addition to his duties associated with the Bureau of Science, he taught courses in tropical medicine at the University of the Philippines. Dr. Walker remained in the Islands for four years, and in 1914 came to the Hooper Foundation with an appointment as Associate Professor of Tropical Medicine. He became full Professor in 1921 and served as a member of the faculty unti l his
Dr. Walker has received world-wide recognition for the classical experiments he performed during the four years he was associated with the Bureau of Science in the Philippine Islands. He, along with his associate, Dr. A. W. Sellards, published a now-famous series of articles in which these investigators conclusively demonstrated that Endamoeba histolytica is the cause of the symptom complex occurring in amoebiasis known as amoebic dysentery. In a series of experiments where human volunteers were fed cysts of Endamoeba histolytica, Walker and Sellards proved beyond doubt the pathogenicity of this intestinal protozoan. Furthermore, by conducting additional feeding experiments, these two workers were the first to differentiate Endamoeba histolytica and Endamoeba coli and conclusively prove that the latter amoeba is a harmless commensal commonly found in the human intestine. With the findings provided by these experiments, Walker and Sellards were able to differentiate the clinical types of amoebiasis and were the first to describe the “carrier” state in this disease. They clearly recognized the importance of the carrier in the transmission of Endamoeba histolytica. To this day, the only experimental evidence available relative to the incubation period of amoebic dysentery in man is that provided by these two investigators. Other studies at this time performed by Dr. Walker finally settled the question regarding the production of four-nucleated cysts by amoebae other than Endamoeba histolytica. Another species, Endamoeba tetragena, accepted by numerous investigators as a valid inhabitant of the human intestine was shown by him to be identical with Endamoeba histolytica. Furthermore, in a valuable paper published in 1911 he showed that all of the species of amoebae obtained in cultures from the intestinal tract of man and animals by previous investigators were free living forms introduced
Fundamental observations on immunity in amoebiasis were made by Dr. Walker in papers published during his stay in the Philippines. Since that time there have been few important additions to the basic information supplied by him. It can be truly said that Dr. Walker's observations and conclusions paved the way for the extensive research which has been carried on for the last forty years relative to the host-parasite relationships of Endamoeba histolytica and the role this parasite plays as a disease-producing agent in man.
While working in the Hooper Foundation, Dr. Walker for many years carried on investigations dealing with the etiology, chemotherapy, and epidemiology of leprosy. His interest in this disease took him to the Molokai leprosarium in Hawaii, where he worked for over a year. Although he did not succeed (as no one has succeeded) in isolating the etiologic agent of leprosy, his findings helped clarify some of the problems which were being investigated at that time. He strongly supported a modification of the prophylactic regulations demanding life-long compulsory isolation.
Those interested in tropical medicine and medical parasitology will always remember Dr. Walker as one of the outstanding investigators of that period when these two branches of medicine were in their formative years. He will be remembered by his colleagues and students as a gentleman to the core, kind, helpful, modest, and an excellent teacher.
Edgar Lovett Warren, Economics: Los Angeles
| 1904-1956 | |
| Lecturer | |
| Director of the Institute of Industrial Relations |
Edgar Lovett Warren, Director of the Institute of Industrial Relations and Lecturer in Economics on the Los Angeles campus, died on January 3, 1956, after an illness of six weeks. He is survived by his widow, Mrs. Carol Warren, and two infant sons, and also by two grown children of a previous marriage, Marjorie and William Warren.
Mr. Warren was born on March 7, 1904, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where his father, William R. Warren, was minister at one of the Christian (Disciples of Christ) Churches. His father later became editor of the monthly magazine, World Call, of the Christian Church and inaugurated the pension system for the ministers of that Church. At one time, his father was Professor of Classics at Bethany College.
Named for the late Edgar Odell Lovett, head of Rice Institute and a close friend of his father, Edgar Warren, following a family tradition, attended Kemper Military School in Missouri, which had been founded by his grandfather. In 1926 he obtained his bachelor's degree at Bethany College. Later, he continued with graduate studies at the Harvard School of Business Administration and at the Brookings Institution in Washington.
After some years in private industry as a professional economist, Mr. Warren entered the federal service in 1933. His interest in industrial relations took him to an important post in the Wage and Hour Division of the U. S. Department of
Late in 1947, Mr. Warren was appointed Director of the Institute of Industrial Relations, succeeding Dean Paul A. Dodd. Under Mr. Warren's leadership, the Institute developed many of its community relations programs for management and labor groups, as well as an extensive and highly regarded body of published research in the many areas of the industrial relations field.
Mr. Warren was a man of public spirit and readily assumed many tasks for civic and governmental organizations. He gave his time and energy unstintingly to the causes in which he believed. One of his keenest interests was civil rights and civil liberties, which he viewed with a Jeffersonian spirit. He achieved national distinction as an expert in labor-management relations, a career that was rewarded by his election to the presidency of the National Academy of Arbitrators in 1953.
To all those who knew him, Edgar Warren was a kindly and tolerant man with a deep liking for people, regardless of their status. He respected people and they respected him.
Dwight Everett Watkins, Speech: Berkeley
| 1878-1954 | |
| Associate Professor Emeritus |
Some time before his retirement, Dwight Everett Watkins expressed to a group of his colleagues this succinct formulation of a desirable way of life and death for a university professor: To discharge well and without extravagant ambition one's functions in the university over the usual span of thirty or forty years, to retire to a few years of unhurried creative, practical, and pleasurable activities, and then to pass on not unprepared for the end destined for men by nature. When Professor Watkins passed away on July 22, 1954, it could have been said of him that he lived and worked and died in close accord with that philosophy.
Professor Watkins was born on January 7, 1878, in Deaverton, in southeastern Ohio. Most of his higher education he obtained in the University of Michigan. There he earned his B.A. degree in 1901. After two years of teaching and school administration, he returned to his university and engaged in the study of law. Later he returned again and obtained the degree of Master of Arts. In the year 1912-1913 he pursued graduate studies in Harvard.
In the period of his first teaching and school administration he was Principal of Union City, Michigan, High School, Head of the Department of English in Michigan Military Academy at Orchard Lake, and Head of the Department of Public Speaking in Akron, Ohio, High School. After receiving his M.A. degree, he taught in two institutions exclusively: for ten years he taught Speech in Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois,
Professor Watkins cared strongly for his home and family. He was married twice, first to Ada Grace Lennox, of Ithaca, Michigan, and, several years after her untimely death, to Vera Beach, of Piedmont, an alumna of our University. He has been survived by his wife Vera and by his three children: Mrs. Genevieve Fenander, of Chappaqua, New York; Mrs. Gertrude Gahen, of Washington, D.C.; and Robert Watkins, who is with the Glens Fall Insurance firm in Sacramento. One of Professor Watkins' great satisfactions was to entertain friends in an afternoon or evening at his home.
As the field of Speech requires, Professor Watkins emphasized in his work the discovery and development and application of methods for the personal development of the individual student. He was persistently on the lookout for new pedagogical ideas, and sought to convert those that appealed to him into practical, workable teaching devices. He was probably the first in our country to advocate the use of recording apparatus in the training of the voice.
Accompanying this interest in the development of effective speakers there was in Professor Watkins one peculiar bent. He fretted over the need of teaching in an academic environment exclusively. He wanted to be out also in the world of work and to teach effective speaking to people who needed the power daily in their professions or jobs. He satisfied this desire by adding to his regular teaching load classes in the Extension Division, classes for professional and business groups not under University auspices, and correspondence courses. For some time he gave his services to theological schools also. This same urge led him also to the writing of self-help books. His professional services were thus widely spread.
Professor Watkins maintained a live interest in several kinds of writing, though most of it had a close relation to his
Alumni of the University when speaking of his courses are wont to pass this complimentary judgment about him as a teacher: “He was a good teacher. He was determined that we should make progress, and he was painstaking in making his ideas pointed and concrete.”
Within the Department of Speech Professor Watkins served for some years as Departmental Adviser and as Subject Representative for the School of Education. On him fell the office of Acting Chairman in the absence of the regular Chairman. He always entered interestedly into the deliberations of the departmental staff.
Clement T. Wiskocil, Civil Engineering: Berkeley
| 1889-1952 | |
| Professor |
Clement Tehle Wiskocil, Professor of Civil Engineering, University of California, Berkeley, passed away Friday, October 31, 1951, in an Oakland hospital, following a short acute illness that had kept him away from classes in his last weeks of life. Prior to this acute illness, Professor Wiskocil had, for a long time, fought against ill health while he carried on not only his duties but additional activities as well with a spirit and with courage and energy that will always be remembered by, and be a source of inspiration to, those who were close to him and knew him well.
Professor Wiskocil was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, August 24, 1889. His early education was obtained in the public schools of Milwaukee. He received the Bachelor of Science degree in 1912 and the Civil Engineering degree in 1913 from the University of Wisconsin, where he then served as Research Assistant until 1914. He was active in athletics and received letters in track and crew. In 1914 he married Olga E. Reiner, who survives him as do their daughter, Mrs. Patricia Hodes, of Alameda, and son, John Clement Wiskocil, of Berkeley, and four grandchildren.
He joined the University faculty of Civil Engineering in 1914 and became widely known as an outstanding teacher of structural engineering and engineering ethics. He was co-author of the book Testing and Inspection of Engineering Materials and for some years was the head of the civil engineering materials and testing laboratory. He was revered by
Professor Wiskocil spent many years as faculty advisor to student organizations, among which were Chi Epsilon, Tau Beta Pi, and the student chapter of the American Society of Civil Engineers. These he piloted with a firm and intelligent understanding of ethics and human relations. At a special dinner meeting in January, 1952, the student chapter of the American Society of Civil Engineers honored him for the contributions he had made to the chapter during the twenty-five years he was the faculty advisor.
In his teaching and in his counseling he brought together theory and the professional viewpoint, and he particularly stressed ethics and the relationships and duty of the engineer in practice to the public, civic bodies, and to others in the profession. For seven years students who had been taught, counseled, and guided directly by Professor Wiskocil won the national Daniel W. Mead award given annually for the best student paper on a subject in the field of engineering ethics. Under his leadership the morale and esprit de corps of the students in Civil Engineering were maintained on a high level.
He was a leader in the engineering profession and in educational activities, and served in many leadership capacities. He was President of the San Francisco section of the American
The influence of Professor Clement T. Wiskocil will long be felt in Civil Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley.
Courtesy of University Archives, The Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720-6000; http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/info
http://content.cdlib.org/view?docId=hb0w10035d&brand=oac4
Title: 1957, University of California: In Memoriam
By: University of California (System) Academic Senate, Author
Date: [1957]
Contributing Institution: University Archives, The Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720-6000; http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/info
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Academic Senate-Berkeley Division, University of California, 320 Stephens Hall, Berkeley, CA 94720-5842