John W. Olmsted, History: Riverside

	1903-1986
	Professor Emeritus

John W. Olmsted will be long remembered as a founding father of the Riverside campus, a man with a special dream that higher education must be built upon a personal and universal involvement in the traditions of the culture. His philosophy of education was developed during his year at Oxford University, was tested during his tenure as assistant to Dean Gordon Watkins of the College of Letters and Science at UCLA, and was most fully realized when Provost Gordon Watkins brought him to the new Riverside campus as the first chairman of the Humanities Division. Here he assembled a remarkable faculty that included distinguished scholars like Philip Wheelwright in philosophy and future notables like Jean Boggs, now director of the Canadian National Gallery of Art. Olmsted meanwhile led the humanities into a variety of interdisciplinary approaches, core courses, and seminar-type instruction beginning with freshmen. Much of the “old UCR” was his inspiration.

Jack Olmsted was Denver born, but moved early to southern California where he attended Los Angeles Polytechnic and Alhambra high schools. On the death of his father, Jack was sponsored by L. L. Nunn, the hydroelectric engineer, for his last two preparatory years at the Deep Springs School in eastern California. He then enrolled at the old Vermont campus of the University of California at Los Angeles in 1920. In his junior year he transferred to Berkeley where he received his bachelor's degree in engineering and geology in 1925. He had already proved himself gifted in many areas, playing varsity tennis and reading widely, activities which influenced him in rejecting a job as geologist for Union Oil Company and accepting instead a Rhodes Scholarship to study at Oxford University. In England he continued his tennis, played at Wimbledon in 1926, and captained the university team that defeated Cambridge in 1928. Often in later years he told stories of tennis greats with whom he had rubbed elbows, like Bill Tilden, Helen Wills Moody, and Alice Marble. More important, however, was his developing love for the discipline of history, and he consequently

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received from Oxford the degrees of bachelor of arts and master of arts in modern history in 1928 and 1931. Following his new interest and combining it with his earlier one in the sciences, he eventually worked toward his doctorate at Cornell University, receiving his Ph.D. there in 1944.

Meanwhile he had accepted an associateship in history at UCLA from which he rose through the various ranks to the full professorship in 1951. After he moved to the new Riverside campus in 1953, he served as chairman of the Humanities Division until 1961 and professor of history until his retirement in 1970.

As a teacher Olmsted was characterized by careful attention to individual students, discussing at length performance in each examination and every paper. He master-minded the interdisciplinary humanities requirement, developed the course in historiography for the department, and was tirelessly devoted to the idea and practice of the senior thesis for all students, as well as to broad, interdisciplinary comprehensive examinations at the senior level.

Jack Olmsted's historical writings centered around the seventeeth-century scientific revolution in France. In two seminal articles in Isis, the leading journal in the history of science, he described an expedition of Jean Richer to Cayenne and the introduction of telescopes as astronomical instruments. He later published an additional evaluation of Jean Richer in the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society (1960). His final work in this vein was a study of the scientific activities of the Abbe Picard, which is scheduled to appear posthumously in the Proceedings of the Academie Royale des Sciences.

The breadth of interest so characteristic of Olmsted may be illustrated in many ways. During much of his career he worked on committees in the operation of both Deep Springs School and the Telluride Association. His concern for the relationship between higher education and athletics was translated into his years of service as the UCLA faculty representative to the Pacific Coast Athletic Conference (1939-46), and as its president in his final year. He served for many years on the Pacific Coast Committee for the Humanities, helping institute its journal, The Spectator. His interest in the arts was reflected in his yeoman chairmanship of the committee on drama, lectures, and music at Riverside, attracting even in the formative days of that campus such luminaries as Lukas Foss, W. H. Auden, William Carlos Williams, and productions of Brecht and Moliere. Meanwhile his dedication to the highest levels of scholarship blossomed with his successful involvement in the establishment of a chapter of Phi Beta Kappa on the Riverside campus, achieved remarkably early in its life, only the third such chapter to be granted in the entire UC system. His was a tireless devotion to the highest ideals of the academic life.

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John Olmsted's first wife, Ruby, is deceased. He is survived by his second wife, Elizabeth Ross; two sons, William and John; and four grandchildren.