Author: Leslie Egbo

WILLARD B. WALKER, professor of anthropology emeritus, died May 23, 2009, in Skowhegan, Maine. He was 82 years old. Walker was one of the mainstays of the Anthropology Department for more than two decades. He came to Wesleyan in 1966 as an assistant professor, where he and Dave McAllester established anthropology as a department. A specialist in Native American languages and cultures, Walker taught courses on the ethnography of the Southwest, the Southeast, and the Northeast, as well as maintaining a curricular focus on linguistic anthropology.

Walker received a bachelor’s degree in English literature from Harvard, his master’s in anthropology from the University of Arizona, and his Ph.D. in general linguistics, with a minor in cultural anthropology, Slavic linguistics, from Cornell. In 1945 during World War II, he served in the American Field Service, which was attached to the British Eighth Army.

His research interests ranged from Zuni phonology and semantics to the cryptographic use of Choctaw, Comanche and Navajo by the U.S. military in World War II. He was a dedicated fieldworker whose projects had both applied and theoretical aspects. He was particularly interested in native literacy movements and their reception in different communities. He compared the embrace of literacy in the native language among Cherokee to the notable resistance such movements encountered among the Zuni and the Pasamoquoddy of Maine.

In the latter case, he participated in designing the writing system and taught native literacy classes, which proved highly popular and yet singularly ineffective; specifically, he found that while the Pasamoquoddy enjoyed seeing their language graphically represented, they mistrusted native literacy as a constraint on oral creativity and thus a threat to the vitality of their cultural heritage.

After Walker retired from Wesleyan in 1989, he and his wife Perch moved to Canaan, Maine, where he continued to do research and to write, while also tending his beloved trees.

He is survived by his wife of 56 years, C. Pearline “Perch” Walker; two sons, and two granddaughters.

He was predeceased by a sister and a granddaughter.

HING TONG, a leading American mathematician who taught at Wesleyan from 1954–67, and who served as chairman of the mathematics department, died Mar. 4, 2007. He was 85. Born in Canton, China, he came to the United States at the age of 12. He received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania and a PhD from Columbia. Elected to Phi Beta Kappa and to Sigma Xi, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he studied with John Von Neumann. He also taught at Canton University and at Reed and Barnard colleges. A specialist in algebraic topology and analysis, he is well known for the original proof of the Katetov-Tong insertion theorem. After leaving Wesleyan, he taught at Fordham, where he also served as department chair, and from which he retired in 1984. He is survived by his wife, mathematician Dr. Mary Powderly Tong, five children; and two grandchildren.

David A. Titus, professor emeritus of government, died June 13, 2006. He was 71.

After receiving his bachelor’s degree from Harvard, he received master’s and doctoral degrees from Columbia. He served in the U.S. Naval Reserve and joined the Wesleyan faculty in 1966 as a lecturer in government, specializing in East Asian studies and comparative politics.

Prior to his retirement in 2004, he had served as chair of the government department, the College of Social Studies, and the East Asian Studies Program. He played a crucial role in establishing East Asian Studies at Wesleyan and was the resident director of the Kyoto Program three times. His doctoral dissertation, published as Palace and Politics in Prewar Japan, established his reputation as a leading scholar of Japanese politics; it was translated into Japanese in 1979.

Calling it a benchmark in the field, Professor of East Asian Studies William Johnston says, “It is impossible to mention the relationship between the Japanese emperor and politics in Japan before 1945 without referencing this work. In addition to penning this classic, David translated significant works of Japanese scholarship into English. During his career at Wesleyan, he also read and suggested changes to a large number of book manuscripts on Japanese political science and history, probably as many as 40 or 50.”

Professor of Government Richard Boyd concurs: “The overriding continuity of his connection to Wesleyan was his abiding dedication to his students in government, the CSS, and East Asian Studies. I doubt he ever turned down a student’s request that he direct a senior honors thesis, with the result that he carried huge thesis advising loads for almost five decades. Once he forgot to include an enrollment ceiling on his introductory class in comparative politics, and about 180 students enrolled. He accepted the challenge, taught them well, and graded all of the papers,”

Remembering him fondly as “the irreverent iconoclast, marching in the opposite direction of whatever trend majority opinion in the world or at Wesleyan seemed to be taking,” and noting that his entire professional career was at Wesleyan, Boyd calls Titus one “who define[d] a university experience for a generation of students and a collegial life for fellow faculty members.”

An avid birder and naturalist, Titus was a founder and president of the Mattabeseck Audubon Society. He enlivened numerous campus occasions over the years with his violin playing. Survivors include two sons, a daughter-in-law, two grandchildren, and a brother and sister.

Daniel Stern, former fellow in the Wesleyan Center for the Humanities, the Boynton Visiting Professor in Creative Writing in the College of Letters, and a Visiting Professor in Letters and English died Jan. 24, 2007, of complications following heart surgery. He was 79. The Cullen Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Houston, he joined its creative writing program in 1992. He wrote nine novels, five short-story collections, several plays and screenplays, and more than 100 essays and reviews. Stern received numerous awards, including the International Prix du Souvenir and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Award in Literature. He was also a cellist and had played with jazz musician Charlie Parker as well as with the Indianapolis Symphony. He is survived by his wife, Gloria Stern, one son, and two grandchildren.

BEATRICE L. QUINN, 95, who was employed as a secretary at Wesleyan for 48 years, died Mar. 2, 2008. She served as assistant secretary/assistant treasurer of the Alumni Association, retiring in 1977. A nephew survives.

Nelson Polsby, renowned political scientist, died Feb. 6, 2007, at the age of 72. He was a member of the Wesleyan faculty from 1961 through 1968, rising from the rank of assistant professor to full professor. A prolific author of books and articles, he was also editor of The American Political Science Review, the premier political science journal. Perspectives on Politics noted that Polsby ranked in the top 10 of most frequently cited political scientists among those entering the field when he did. In the early 1980s, Polsby was a visiting professor at the Roosevelt Center for American Policy Studies in Washington, D.C., a private think tank that specialized in issues of defense policy and disarmament. He is survived by his wife, Linda, his children, and grandchildren.

GERALD M. MEIER, a leading economist and former Stanford University business and economics professor who led Wesleyan in pivotal curricular innovations during the tenure of President Victor L. Butterfield, died June 21, 2011. He was 88. An alumnus of Reed College, he was a Rhodes Scholar, studied economics at Oxford University, and received a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University. Before being recruited to Stanford, he taught at Williams College and at Oxford, Wesleyan, and Yale universities. He was on the faculty at Wesleyan from 1954 to 1963, leaving the university as Chester D. Hubbard Professor of Economics and Social Science. During his tenure at Wesleyan he championed then-President Butterfield’s initiatives regarding tutorial-based learning on the undergraduate level. The author of more than 34 books, he helped to introduce the field of development economics to U.S. colleges and universities and is credited with inspiring generations of students to study the economies of less-developed countries. He lectured widely around the world and defined the role of an economist as “both a trustee of the poor and a guardian of rationality.” His 1964 textbook, Leading Issues in Economic Development, now in its eighth edition, has been translated into seven languages and is taught in classrooms worldwide. Survivors include his wife, Gretl Slote Meier, four sons, and six grandchildren.

Manchester, professor of history emeritus at Wesleyan, was 82 years old and had been in declining health after suffering two strokes.

The author of 18 books translated into 20 languages, Manchester first acquired an international reputation in 1967 with his account of the assassination of President Kennedy, The Death of a President: November 1963, which he had written at the request of Jacqueline Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy.

His other books include Goodbye Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War, which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and his biography of Douglas MacArthur, American Caesar, nominated for a National Book Award.

Manchester had expressed doubt that his Churchill trilogy would ever be completed. The first two volumes, Visions of Glory: 1874–1931 and Alone: 1932–1940, were published in 1983 and 1988, respectively, but poor health had prevented him from completing the third.

On May 21, Little, Brown and Co. announced that, with Manchester’s consent, Paul Reid, a feature writer at the Palm Beach Post, would help complete the final book about Britain’s World War II leader.

 

[Editor’s Note: Arthur Wensinger, professor of German studies emeritus, recalls his friendship with Manchester.]

We both came to Middletown in 1955, Bill to AEP as an editor, I to the German Department at the college. We knew each other only socially at first, at parties with the Lockwoods, Winslows, Knapps, Thompsons, Reeds, Boyntons, Gomez-Ibañezes, Coleys, Greens, Burfords, McAllesters, Viggianis, Seases—the other names of 45 years ago. But it was not until I was living at 10 Wesleyan Place that I saw more of him and Judy at Ruth and Joe Peoples’ nonstop evening open house at that address.

Our friendship ripened very gradually, though it was never what I would call a really close one, more of a collegial intimacy. Still, more often than not, if the two of us were at a gathering, we would find ourselves sitting together—me mostly listening to him. He fascinated me with his profound occupations and preoccupations, his talk of his books and the men he wrote about, his invasions and absorptions of their personae. It was a kind of utter commitment that I rarely, if ever, saw in another… And I much enjoyed his gossip about the high and mighty.

What he saw in me, I do not know. Was it the Mencken in Bill’s past and his strong attraction for German history and culture? Along the way, and especially later when he was working on the Krupp family history, he would exploit my knowledge of the language and its literature. It can also have been his interest in my (tenuous) connection with the Marine Corps: my uncle Walter W., a lifetime Marine, a general who among many other ventures led his regiment in the invasion of Iwo Jima. Bill could “identify.”

And there were other little connections. As a newspaper man, Bill was once inordinately amused by a rare piece of ephemera I had kept from my time in Munich in 1948, an issue of the Muenchener Merkur that had, uniquely, picked up the Chicago Tribune‘s notorious blooper about Dewey defeating Truman. He had never heard of it and absolutely had to have a photocopy of it for his office. That was one of the very few small favors I was ever able to do for him. It doesn’t begin to compare with the inscribed copies of his books that he regularly sent me, some with that cartoon self-portrait sketch.

It was hard to know what one could do for Bill Manchester. He was a most guarded man; he had to keep that massive encyclopedia and that trove of serial archives delicately balanced in his mind, lest it should spill over—which, of course, it did on occasion. Then he took his retreats. The last time I saw Bill was about a week and a half before he died. He asserted that he was quite ready; it was an unequivocal assertion. Driving home after not quite an hour with him, I pulled over and, I’m not sure exactly why, wrote down a few things he had said, some of them verbatim:

“After all those other things, now the doctors told me I have stomach cancer, inoperable. I will not have chemo or radiation just to eke out a few more undignified weeks of life.

“Have you heard that I’ve decided to go with this fellow from Florida? He’ll work on the third volume. He seems good for the job. I have quite a few pages already written, he’ll work in my Olin office…It’s not an act of final desperation. I’ve already turned down others who did not seem right. I want that trilogy finished.

“My house goes to Wesleyan, you know—they have been good to me. But there is a string attached. It is for the use of faculty only. It’s a nice place. John [Martin, the architect] did well by us. Now it’s for someone else.

“I am prepared for death and not afraid of it. I have been close to death before and seen a lot of it.” Some people claim, he said, that you can help a person die. “You can’t. It is something you must do by yourself.”

And this, verbatim: “I am unencumbered by any notion of an afterlife….If there is one for me, it will be in my books.”

He was very tough, no sentimentality. I had said I would stay for ten minutes, but it was now almost an hour. It was clear that it was time for me to go. He had a surprisingly firm handshake. I asked if I might return for another visit. The last thing he said was, “You can come back any time you want,” and he said my name. But I didn’t go to see him again.

BARBARA E. MACEACHERN, the director of the Graduate Liberal Studies Program at Wesleyan from 1981 to 2000, died Dec. 24, 2010, at age 71. She received her bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in English from the University of Rochester. She was a professor of English at Mount Holyoke College, the University of Rochester, the University of Southern California, and the University of Wisconsin before coming to Wesleyan. Active in the community and in professional associations, she was a past president of the Association of Graduate Liberal Studies Programs and a former managing editor of the Journal of the Association of Graduate Liberal Studies Programs. Guided by her deep belief in the value of a liberal arts education, she gave students and instructors the freedom to explore both traditional and unconventional paths of study, influencing the academic lives of hundreds of graduate students and educators. In recent years she became devoted to environmental conservation and historic preservation causes. She is survived by her son, Alexander S.B. Horn; her daughter, Victoria Elaine MacEachern Horn; one grandson; a sister; her husband, Nelson Thomas Horn; and a large extended family.