Roy Wolfe

One of the pioneers in the field of tourism geography, Roy Wolfe, passed away on November 15, 2014, a few days before his 97^th birthday.

Roy I. Wolfe, known as “Izzy” to his family, was born Israel Wolbromski in Poland in 1917. In 1922 the family moved to Canada where he acquired his English name. He grew up in the Kensington Market area of Toronto, where he also spent his latter years.

The Great Depression interrupted his education but he received a bachelor’s degree in Biology from McMaster University in 1940. During the Second World War he served in the Medical Corps of the Canadian Army. Then between 1945 and 1947 he headed the Visual Education Service of the Veterans’ Rehabilitation Institute within Ryerson Polytechnic Institute (now University). During this time he studied for a master’s degree in Biology at the University of Toronto including a dissertation on the variation of finger prints across different Canadian ethnic populations.

In the next phase of his life, Wolfe recognized geography as the discipline most closely aligned with his own interests. He took a position at the Department of Highways of Ontario (DHO) in 1952 where he rose through ranks as Statistician, Planner, Geographic Advisor, and Research Geographer. During this time he studied for a PhD in Geography at the University of Toronto. Initially the doctoral committee refused to approve his proposed research on summer cottages because tourism and recreation were not seen as appropriate subjects for serious scholarly research at the time. The committee relented after a year and he undertook a study of the location, ownership, and use of summer cottages in the province of Ontario, as well as their owners’ travel patterns. The doctorate was awarded in 1956.

At the DHO Wolfe made a significant contribution to economic planning and transportation policy. He was also an early adopter of mainframe computers to facilitate statistical analysis. After he was recruited into the faculty of the Geography Department at York University in 1967, he remained active as a planning consultant, participating in nearly two dozen tourism-related projects for governments in Canada, the United States and the UK.

At York University he taught courses in the regional geography of Canada, transportation geography, and recreation geography. His research continued in tourism geography, focused on the interactions between urban centers and nearby recreation areas. His numerous scholarly publications were instrumental in the creation of the new sub-field of recreation geography; he also made significant contributions to the literature on transportation and planning.

Wolfe had been profoundly deaf since 1947 but this did not hinder his love of teaching and interacting with students. He could lip read in English, as well as Yiddish, French and German. He also enlisted the aid of others to take notes for him during conversations, lectures, and presentations. This role was frequently performed by his devoted wife, Rosemary, as well as by students or colleagues.

The profound hearing loss made him value clear and elegant writing as a way to communicate effectively. He devoted long hours to editing and marking students’ essays, trying to improve their writing skills, frequently covering the page with red ink. One former student recalled that he “made the pages bleed!” He eventually compiled a seven-page guide for students called “Hints, Admonitions, and Downright Threats from a Jaded Reader of Too Many Sloppy Essays.”

Despite his high standards and formidable nature, he was much loved by students. In 1981 he was successfully nominated for the annual teaching award of the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations (OCUFA). Subsequently the Canadian Association of Geographers created a teaching award in his name.

In addition to duties at York, he held visiting positions at the State University of Washington, WA, Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, NS, and Atkinson College in York, ON. He was also a member of the IGU Commissions on Transportation, and on Tourism and Recreation.

Wolfe retired in 1983 having left a substantial intellectual and personal legacy. He legitimized research on tourism in geography, undertook pioneering scholarship, and inspired many geographers in his generation. His work provided the intellectual foundation for much of the research in contemporary tourism geography, with his publications on second homes cited more in the decade prior to his death than any time previous. His work was also influential beyond tourism and geography in the fields of regional science and marketing.

In 1988, the Association of American Geographers established the annual Roy Wolfe Award in his honor which recognizes “outstanding contributions to the field and discipline of Recreation, Tourism and Sport Geography.” The award has been won by geographers from Canada, Finland, New Zealand, and the United States to date.

Roy was predeceased by his wife Rosemary and daughter Cynthia but leaves behind four children (Robert David, Richard, Judy and Mitzi), six grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

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Forrest R. Pitts

Forrest Pitts, emeritus professor of geography at the University of Hawaii, died earlier this year at his home in Santa Rosa, California.

Pitts taught for many years at the University of Oregon, University of Pittsburgh, and Seoul National University. In 1989, he retired from the University of Hawaii after 35 years of teaching and field research. His professional interests were in Asia and in computational approaches to geographic science.

After serving in the U.S. Navy during World War II and studying Japanese at the Language School in Boulder, Colorado, Pitts earned a bachelor’s degree in Oriental Languages and Literature at the University of Michigan. He continued his graduate studies in Michigan to earn a master of arts degree in Far Eastern Studies and a doctorate in Geography.

Pitts’ work is marked by fieldwork in Japan, Okinawa, and Korea. He was editor of Korean Studies, and served eight years as executive director of the International Geographical Union Commission on Quantitative Methods.

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J. Ross Mackay

J. Ross Mackay, Canada’s pre-eminent Arctic scientist and a world authority on permafrost, passed away peacefully on October 28, 2014, at the age of 98.

He served as President of the American Association of Geographers in 1969-70 and, as a Past President, will be honored with a full memorial in the Annals of the American Association of Geographers. This is scheduled for publication in 2017.

In the meantime, if you wish to find out more about his life and work please refer to the obituary in the journal, Arctic.

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Robert Hutton

Long-standing member of the AAG, Robert “Bob” Hutton, of Alexandria, VA, passed away on October 19, 2014, at the age of 82.

Hutton received his Bachelor’s degree in Russian Studies from Haverford College, PA, in 1954. He also spent the summers of 1953 and 1954 at a Russian Summer School held at Middlebury College, VT.

He then enlisted in the Army, receiving a sharp shooter commendation during Basic Training much to his own surprise as he was blind in his right eye! He served during the Korean War from 1954 to 1957, specializing in languages.

Following this he continued his education at Columbia University, NY, graduating with a Master’s degree in the Geography of East Asia in 1962. His final thesis was titled “Trade Relations between Japan, Communist China, and the Soviet Union.”

Hutton then spent his career working for the National Security Agency and the Library of Congress, retiring from the latter in 1998.

During his retirement he had many hobbies, one of which was wine. He said that his background in geography helped him to understand the soil and climatic conditions important to the production of wine. As a member of the American Wine Society and a writer for various wine journals, he traveled to wine events including the Vin Expo in Bordeaux and the London Wine Fair.

Hutton joined the Association of American Geographers in 1962 and maintained his life-time interest in geography. He was delighted to attend the Annual Meeting in New York in 2012 to receive recognition for his 50 years of continuous membership.

After his first wife died in 2007, he remarried in 2010. He is survived by his sister Elizabeth MacDonald; four children, Edward, Charles, Grace, and Susan; and six grandchildren.

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Arnold J. Kreisman

Born in Brooklyn, New York on September 29, 1925 to parents Isidore and Minnie, Arnie Kreisman passed away at the age of 89 on October 13, 2014. A US Army veteran who served in the Occupation Forces in Frankfurt, Germany, Kreisman later became a professional cartographer and geographer.

Attaining his bachelor’s degree from the City College of New York, his master’s degree from Syracuse University, and finally his doctorate degree from the University of Pittsburgh, he was heavily involved in resource and development planning. During his career he produced relief maps for the Aero-Service Corporation in both Philadelphia and Santiago, Chile. He also worked in Paraguay, El Salvador, the Dominican Republic, and Peru for the Organization of American States (OAS). With OAS, Arnie mapped the resources of countries, displaying the location of people in regard to ages, education, and skills, the location of natural resources, and the location of weather, water, and other geographic conditions to determine the best location for activities such as farming and manufacturing. Kreisman also had a political career, serving as a democratic committeeman in Montgomery County for John F. Kennedy in 1960.

After retiring he moved to Columbia, Maryland. Kreisman has two daughters, Erika and Julie, with his first wife, Janet Friedman, and a third daughter, Florence, with his second wife, Elena Pino, whom he had met in El Salvador. The father of successful professionals, his first two of his daughters both have careers as attorneys and his third daughter is a manager for the Early Childhood Instruction Team for D.C. public schools.

He is survived by his widow, his sister, Evelyn Prybutok, his daughters and son-in-laws, nieces and nephews, as well as four grandchildren, Alex, Katie, Najá, and Iris. He also has an unofficial “adopted son” named Juan Neffa, whom he brought to Pittsburgh from Paraguay as a teenager. Kreisman was a lifelong member of the AAG and will be missed dearly by his family, friends, and the geography community.

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Tom Rabenhorst

Tom Rabenhorst, Senior Lecturer Emeritus in the Department of Geography and Environmental Systems (GES) at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), died Saturday after a long battle with brain cancer.

Tom began his career at UMBC in 1973 as a part-time instructor while also an Assistant Professor at Montgomery Community College. He became a full time lecturer at UMBC in 1975, teaching courses in physical geography, cartography and remote sensing, while also developing its highly successful training program in cartography.

Over his 40 years at UMBC, Tom trained hundreds of students who have gone on to careers with many federal, state and local agencies, as well as private companies. He was always seeking ways to challenge his students and his ability to get the very best from them is evidenced by the numerous awards they won for cartographic design. In particular, his 2003 Advanced Cartography class designed and produced The Digital Atlas of Maryland Agriculture that was awarded “Best in Show” and “Best Digital Entry” in the National Map Competition held by the American Congress of Surveying and Mapping, honors never before given to a student entry. In addition, his students had remarkable success in winning highly competitive and prestigious National Geographic Society internships.

Tom was the co-author of two monographs (Applied Cartography and Applied Cartography: Introduction to Remote Sensing), and the author of numerous published maps, including an important contribution to the Historical Atlas of the United States (National Geographic Society) that utilized the base maps he developed for the Historical U.S. County Outline Map Collection 1840-1980. Tom was an avid hiker and, together with his wife Carol, he hiked and mapped the trail systems of several state and local parks and published interpretative maps of each that have become highly popular. At the time of his death, Tom, along with GES colleague Jeff Halverson, was working on a textbook on Severe Storms to be published by Oxford University Press. Tom also served for several years as the Cartographic Editor of the Annals of the Association of American Geographers, the flagship journal in American geography, and he was recognized for elevating the professional standards of cartographic contributions published in the journal.

Tom was a beloved friend to many and he impacted many lives at UMBC and beyond. He leaves behind many accomplishments but his legacy as a human being exceeds anything that can be written down in a curriculum vitae. His incredible vitality and willingness to help anyone who asked for his assistance will be missed.

Adapted with permission from a letter to the UMBC Community.

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Clarence Minkel

Bud Minkel passed away on September 22, 2014. Born and raised to a farming family in Austin, Minnesota, Bud would go on to see much more than just the rural landscape of the United States. Following high school graduation, he joined the United States Army and served in both the U.S. and Japan. He then went on to pursue his B.A. and Ph.D. in geography from Syracuse University.

Following his education, Bud became quite the world traveler, visiting every country in North, Central, and South America, Western and Southern Europe, China, Japan, Indonesia, Australia, New Zealand, as well as 30 African countries, and even Antarctica. He also successfully visited every county in the United States, a task that took him fifty years.

Bud spent time living in Guatemala, Brazil, Venezuela, Columbia, Japan, and Indonesia and had a leadership position in settling the border dispute between Ecuador and Peru in 1998. This world traveler would become the dean and a non-teaching emeritus professor at the Graduate School at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. His research interests were in economic geography and regional planning as well as Latin America.

He is survived by his wife, Phyllis and his five children, Thomas Minkel (Jackie), Sandra Topper (Jim), Theresa Giroux (Tom), Lorraine Ware (Phil), and many friends, colleagues, and fellow geographers. He was 86.

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Hans-Georg Bohle

AAG member Hans-Georg Bohle has passed away at the age of 66. Relevant in the field of human geography, he will be remembered by all that he taught, advised, and worked alongside. Hans attended the University of Göttingen and received his PhD in 1979, doing research on the Green Revolution in the Cauvery River Delta of southern India.

Hans held various academic positions including professor of cultural geography at the University of Freiburg (1989-1995), professor of geography of South Asia at the University of Heidelberg (1995-2004), and chair and professor of cultural geography and development geography at Bonn University (2004-2013). He retired in 2013.

He has published a variety of work, twelve monographs, eighty scientific journal articles, and sixty book chapters. He was also on the Steering Committee of Global Environmental Change and Human Security (GECHS) and was on the International Scientific Advisory Board of Global Environmental Change and Food Systems (GECAFS), as well as a member of Academia Europaea and the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina.

His research was focused on social vulnerability, specifically of people in critical regions. Interested primarily in food, water, and health, Hans sought to find explanations of the socio-spatial production of poverty and exclusion in the Global South and to identify people’s potentialities for human security and a life of self-determination, freedom, and dignity. He has been a fundamental contributor to risk and hazard research and has done work in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Chad, Sudan, Ghana, and Egypt. He will be remembered.

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David Huff

David Huff, Professor Emeritus of Marketing and Geography at the University of Texas at Austin, and giant in the field of applied geography, passed away on August 15, 2014, aged 83.

David L. Huff was born in 1931 in McMinnville, TN, then spent an idyllic boyhood on Lake Oswego, OR. At first he struggled to find a college or career that held his interest, trying many jobs and five undergraduate universities, plus a stint in the Army.

His academic motivation and interest was finally sparked at the University of Washington in Seattle, WA, at a time when quantitative geography was just emerging. Throughout the time of his MBA and PhD, he was strongly influenced by early analytical economic geographers and early quantitative sociologists, game theorists and rational choice theorists. He emerged from this exciting time in graduate school as a holistic quantitative social scientist. His doctoral thesis work from 1959 to 1962 in modeling trips to shopping centers and stores was published in 1963.

Huff’s first teaching position was at UCLA where he was very quickly promoted to tenure as a business and marketing professor because of his early accomplishments. It was here in 1964 that he developed the Huff Model to forecast market share and retail attractiveness. It is based on the premise that when a person is confronted with a set of alternatives, the probability that any particular item will be selected is directly proportional to the perceived utility of each alternative.

The model is an excellent example of a bridge between geography and business. It soon entered the textbooks and was used by academicians and practitioners throughout the world. Its popularity and longevity can be attributed to its conceptual appeal, relative ease of use, and applicability to a wide range of problems, of which predicting consumer spatial behavior is the most commonly known.

For the last 50 years the Huff Model has been taught in courses across marketing, economic geography, economics, retail research, urban planning and decision theory. It has been widely used by market analysts and planners to locate convenience stores, shopping malls, and other types retail establishments. It continues to be the standard model for the industry and is now incorporated into GIS systems.

Among Huff’s other academic contributions were the application of multivariate graphic displays to market analysis, the formulation of objective measures for delineating market areas, the development of computerized systems to monitor economic activities geographically, and the derivation of planning regions for the geographic delivery of health care and economic services.

After UCLA Huff took a Fulbright Lectureship at the Université d’Aix-Marseille in France which started a life-long love of French culture. He then moved to the University of Kansas as Director of the Center for Regional Studies but this position did not allow him the time he needed to do basic research so he readily accepted an offer from the University of Texas to become Century Club Centennial Professor of Business Administration where he remained until retirement.

In addition to his work in academia, Huff consulted for dozens of agencies including the U.S. Department of Transportation, Resources for the Future, National Institutes of Health, U.S. Bureau of the Census, and National Endowment for the Arts, as well as for numerous state and regional offices. He has advised hundreds of business firms on various aspects of market area analysis. In 2003 he was invited by Esri to become a technical advisor, using his expertise to develop advanced predictive models and review existing analysis capability in Esri’s business analysis products and services.

During his academic career, Huff received numerous teaching awards and much prestigious professional recognition. For example, the AAG awarded him the James R. Anderson Medal in Applied Geography in 1988, and he was the recipient of the Distinguished Mentor Award from the National Council for Geographic Education in 1998 in recognition of his long history of successful mentoring of master’s and doctoral students.

David had remarkable standing in the profession. He was a man who loved his work, was always full of enthusiasm, and generous with his time and talent. He will be missed by many, not only colleagues and friends, but also business professionals and the whole applied geography industry.

He leaves behind his wife of 61 years, Suzanne, his children Nancy, Karen and David, as well as 10 grandchildren and a growing brood of great-grandchildren.

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David Edmun Christensen

David Emun Christensen, Professor Emeritus at Southern Illinois University Carbondale (SIU), died July 28, 2014, at the age of 93. He will be missed by the faculty and staff in the Department of Geography and Environmental Resources, as well as the SIU and Carbondale communities.

Born in Ashland, WI, on February 17, 1921, Christensen served as an aircraft maintenance officer during World War II, attaining the rank of captain. He earned his doctorate at the University of Chicago and went on to teach geography, cartography, and urban planning at Florida State University and SIU. At SIU, he also served as the chair of the Department of Geography and as Associate Dean of the College of Liberal Arts.

Both during his academic career and since his retirement in 1984, he served the university and the community in several capacities. He was a member of the Carbondale Planning Commission for 21 years and served for several years as a member of the AARP Illinois State Legislative Committee and on AARP’s National Legislative Commission. In 1995 he was a delegate to the White House Conference on Aging.

He was a prolific writer, publishing several books on topics as diverse as poetry and population growth. His latest book, “This Apocalyptic Century” was published just this spring. He remained active in environmental, political and international affairs throughout his adult life.

In retirement, Dave and his wife Carol enjoyed extensive worldwide travel to numerous countries including China, Italy, and Turkey. Carol died in 2003 after 57 years of marriage. Dave was also preceded in death by his parents, Emun and Carrie; and both of his brothers, Ed and Alan. He is survived by his sister, Dot; and his four children, Dan (Dianne), Alan, Karen (Vic), Shari (Judy). He is also survived by his six grandchildren, Laura, Brian, Vic, Cassie, Nicole and Megan.

Memorials may be made to Carbondale Unitarian Fellowship Mortgage Fund or the David and Carol Christensen Undergraduate Research Award Fund in Geography and Political Science at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale.

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