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The Geographies of New York Seltzer

To discover the joys and journeys of one of the world’s most iconic effervescent drinks, you first need to walk through the modern Jewish diaspora. Starting in the mineral spa town of Selters in German’s Rhineland, the naturally carbonated waters gave the drink its name sometime in the 18th century. Rich in sodium bicarbonate, calcium, magnesium and potassium, the waters of Selters were known for their restorative properties. The town is also in the Rhine River watershed, near the cities of Speyer, Worms, and Mainz, known as ShUM (שו”ם ), “the cradle of Ashkenazic Judaism,” when the drink first became popular. Selters provides one connection to the traditional Jewish involvement with seltzer as a health drink, and later a drink of celebration and merriment.

Early claims that seltzer is antibacterial are not untrue: the carbonic acid in fizzy water does lower pH and can kill some bacteria. The health benefits of naturally bubbly mineral springs such as Selters prompted scientists to perfect a human-made version by forcing gaseous carbon dioxide into water. The first to do this was Englishman Joseph Priestley in 1767. By 1783, enthusiasm for seltzer inspired watchmaker Johann Jacob Schweppe to found his company of the same name (yes, that Schweppe’s) in Geneva, Switzerland. He invented a revolutionary, crank-operated compression pump, perfected later by French inventors as the soda siphon, which works by being pressed instead of cranked.

A Carbonated Diaspora

Home to the largest single Jewish population in the world, just under 3 million regionwide, New York City long attracted Jewish migration, including the large population of Sephardic Jews from Brazil in in the 1650s during the Portuguese Inquisition. Mass in-migration accelerated from the 1830s to the late 19th century, especially after Czar Alexander II was assassinated in Russia, setting off a wave of pogroms (targeted ethnic violence against Jews) across Europe. That exodus is the one largely responsible for the Jewish food and food businesses that make New York famous now for its bagels, pickles, creamed herring, and other delights, including seltzer.

Map of Lower East Side of New York City
1899 map drawn by poverty reformer Jacob Riis showing the ethnic neighborhoods of the Lower East Side, where Jewish immigrants lived alongside many other new Americans. Image in the public domain.

 

Sometimes affectionately called Jewish Champagne, seltzer wasn’t just a luxury item. As the tenement districts grew overcrowded in the late 19th century, poverty and health hazards increased. Seltzer became an important way to avoid contaminated drinking water, and to have something elegant on a budget. The birth of the New York Egg Cream is attributed to Jewish candystore owner Louis Auster, probably in Brooklyn. Despite its name, there are no eggs or cream in it, just milk, chocolate syrup, and seltzer.

Anita Garlick recalls her childhood and the sought-after treat of the egg cream in the Jewish community of Brownsville, Brooklyn in the 1930s:

 

By the 1920s, all of New York had discovered seltzer, and kept the deliverymen busy dropping off crates of the stuff for use in soda fountains and cocktails. At one point, there were hundreds of routes and thousands of destinations throughout the five boroughs, particularly in the Lower East Side and downtown areas spanning from Canal Street up to 30th Street. Many bottling companies were in Brooklyn in neighborhoods like Williamsburg, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Canarsie, and Cypress Hills. But formal maps of the routes don’t exist, because “seltzer men” or syphoners operated independently, memorizing their routes or keeping them in private logbooks.

Seltzer delivery was a tough job, especially in buildings with no doormen or elevators. Manufacturing hubs were small-scale, trucks were initially horsedrawn, and some deliveries might even be made by bicycle for the tightest street grids.

Wise guy, eh?

New York seltzer took on a cultural life of its own. During Prohibition, many bars opened nonalcoholic soda fountains to survive. Even after repeal in 1933, seltzer reigned supreme, as the tricks and craft of the underground surfaced in new cocktail innovations.

In Hollywood, the spraying seltzer bottle became a recurring gag in movies, rivaling the classic cream pie in the face for screentime. Popularized by comedy acts like The Marx Brothers and the Three Stooges (incidentally, all of them Jewish immigrants or first-generation Jewish Americans), the lowly seltzer bottle because a sturdy weapon of mirth.

But by the 1940s the seltzer trade was waning, By the 1970s, it was nearly extinct. Hand-delivered seltzer from pressurized bottles disappeared for a variety of reasons, at least one of them surprising: The world’s seltzer bottle manufacturers were primarily in Czechoslovakia, and their factories were destroyed during World War II. The pressure to produce war materials effectively shut down American bottle production. The death blow was the widescale production of flavored sodas for soda fountains and bottled seltzer for groceries stores that left the industry flat.

The Last Seltzer Company in New York

In 2017, Eli Miller, one of New York’s last seltzer man, passed his route on to Alex Gomberg, a third-generation member of a seltzer family in Brooklyn. Gomburg’s Brooklyn Seltzer Boys has taken over the remnants of this once thriving business. Gomberg also cofounded the Brooklyn Seltzer Museum with co-curator Barry Joseph; the two sponsor festivals, virtual tours, and egg cream parties.

New York seltzer is made with New York tap water (some of the world’s best municipal water), from the Catskill and Delaware watersheds. Filtered through charcoal, sand, and paper, the water is then chilled to 42 degrees and mixed in a carbonator where liquid CO2 is introduced.

“We dial the gas up to 60 pounds of pressure; that’s a lot of pressure,” Gomberg told an interviewer from The Tablet. “You need a thick bottle.” Gomburg’s business, which was founded by his great-grandfather Moe in 1953, still uses the same 26-ounce bottles in blue, green, and clear glass, many decades old and hand-blown in Czechoslovakia. The metal siphons that cap the bottles are scarce, and Gomburg often resorts to piecing together two imperfect sets to make a new one. Although this creates a—forgive me—bottleneck in serving new customers, there are no shortcuts possible to the real thing.

“Good seltzer should hurt — it should be carbonated enough that it kind of stings the back of your throat,” says Gomburg. And there’s only one way to make it that way: with an old-fashioned siphon in an old glass seltzer bottle.

New Life in Old Places

The region where seltzer was born is making a comeback. In 2021, the ShUM area of the Rhineland was placed on the UNESCO World Heritage List for its Jewish history and culture. Although the Jewish population of these small cities is less than 50% what it was before the Holocaust, there is hope that additional attention and resources can help restore and preserve vital Jewish cultural resources and culture, notably the still-active synagogues in the region, including the world-famous synagogue of Worms, destroyed by the Nazis in 1938 and since magnificently restored.

The perfection and export of seltzer in the Jewish Diaspora is a very small part of the 1,000-year history of ShUM, a region better known for scholarship, religion, and culture than it is for bubbly water. But so much of culture is carried in food, in celebration, and in the day-to-day pleasures that bring us hope and connection. What better place to find hope than the effervescence of a cool drink?

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Donald E. Vermeer

From deep California roots, Dr. Donald Eugene Vermeer’s passion for geography took him around the world. A world expert in geophagy—dietary uses of clays—he was an influential scholar and leader in cultural geography and African studies. Throughout his career, Don Vermeer was a prominent and perennial participant at the annual AAG national meetings.  For decades, he could be easily spotted by his purposeful stride, joyful laughter, and classic bowtie.

A second-generation immigrant from the Netherlands, Vermeer was raised in a devout Dutch Reformed home in Oakland, California. Vermeer’s scholarly formation took place at the University of California, Berkeley when Carl Sauer and the Berkeley school of cultural geography was a dominant force in academic geography. Vermeer earned a B.A. in Geography in 1954 and was then called into military service as a Captain in the U.S. Army from 1954 to 1957, acting as the Officer-in-Charge of the Chemical, Biological, and Radiological Warfare School at Ft. Eustis, Virginia. Upon completion of his military service, Vermeer returned to Berkeley where he completed an M.A. in Geography and Geology in 1959. During his M.A. studies under Carl Sauer and James Parsons, Vermeer pioneered work on the geomorphology of Belize’s barrier reef and cays and their relationship to block faulting and the trade winds. He continued his studies at Berkeley, finishing his Ph.D. in Geography and Anthropology in 1964. While Vermeer’s training and commitment to fieldwork fell squarely within the Sauerian tradition, his dissertation on the agricultural and dietary practices of the Tiv, Ibo, and Birom in Nigeria was supervised by Clarence Glacken, author of the influential Traces on the Rhodian Shore. Vermeer’s dissertation was one of dozens by US-based geographers who focused on sub-Saharan Africa as “the winds of freedom” swept of across the continent in the 1960s.

Throughout his career, Vermeer continued in the Berkeley School tradition of grounded fieldwork, spending 4.5 years in West Africa, 14 months in Central America and the Caribbean and taking additional research trips to Afghanistan, Siberia, Turkey, and Bulgaria. His research led to multiple articles in the Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Science, Economic Geography, African Studies Review, Ethnology, Social Science Quarterly, Geographical Review, as well as environmental health and medical publications.

As a world-renowned expert in geophagy, Vermeer’s primary contribution was to demonstrate the nutritional and medicinal value of specific traditional practices of eating clay. His work on geophagy in both Africa and the American South received attention outside the social sciences in the Los Angeles Times, Gastronomica: the Journal of Food and Culture, and Places Journal. His expertise on swidden agriculture and indigenous food systems led to consulting work for the U.S. Agency for International Development, several private consulting firms, and the Islamic Republic of Mauritania. During the contentious debates over food scarcity and African population growth in the 1970s and 1980s, Vermeer’s research demonstrated the importance and adaptability of traditional, small-scale cultivation practices.

Vermeer’s teaching career began with a stint as Lecturer at the University of California-Berkeley. He then spent 1962-1968 as an Assistant Professor and Director of African Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He moved to Louisiana State University (LSU) where he spent two decades, holding roles as Professor of Geography and Anthropology, Department Chair, Associate Dean of the College of Agriculture, and Director of International Affairs. From 1988 to 1997, he served as Professor of Geography and International Affairs and Chair of the Department of Geography and Regional Science at George Washington University. In retirement, he served as a Research Adjunct Professor at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo where he helped create a new earth sciences major. In addition, he held visiting professorships at the University of Kansas, University of Cape Town, University of Ibadan, and the University of KwaZulu-Natal.

Don Vermeer was an active member of the American Association of Geographers and the International Geographical Union. Dedicated to professional service, he served as president of the Rocky Mountain Social Science Association, and the Southwest Social Science Association. He held editorial board positions for the National Geographic Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and served as an adviser to the Geography Standards project team that produced the 1994 Geography for Life: National Geography Standards. With his longtime wife Carrie Vermeer, he created the Vermeer Scholarship in Geography and the Vermeer Professorship in Geography, both at Calvin University in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Prepared by Mark D. Bjelland, Ph.D., Calvin University, with the help of Johnathan Bascom and Jason VanHorn, also of Calvin University

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Jean-Bernard Racine

Professor Emeritus at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, Jean-Bernard Racine passed away on March 23, 2026. He was renowned for bridging European and Anglo-American geographical traditions, playing a key role in introducing New Geography to the French-speaking academic world. He received the Vautrin Lud Prize in Geography in 1997.

Born into a Protestant family in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, Racine earned his undergraduate degree in Geography from the University of Aix-en-Provence in France in 1962. He obtained his doctorate in Geography from the same university in 1965 under the supervision of Hildebert Isnard. Inspired by regional geography, Racine coined the term “peri-urban” to describe land changes in Southern France in the late 1960s.

Following a trip to Quebec in 1965, Racine was appointed assistant professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Sherbrooke, which he headed from 1966 to 1969. In 1969, he was appointed associate professor at the University of Ottawa in Canada. His office was next to that of Stanley Gregory, a pioneer in the application of statistical methods to geography.

After his postdoctoral proposal was criticized for its lack of formal rigor, Racine embarked on a tour of American and Canadian universities, meeting Allen J. Scott at UCLA, Larry Bourne (one of his many “great friends”) and Bryn Greer-Wooten in Toronto, David Lowenthal and Alan Pred at Berkeley, and, most importantly, Brian Berry in Chicago, whose work on city networks he would admire for the rest of his life.

While in North America, Racine developed a long-lasting relationship with William (Bill) Bunge, with whom he shared a common interest first for theoretical geography, and later on for social justice and critical analysis of spatial structures. They stayed in touch regularly (and always by phone “for fear of being spied on by the CIA”) until the early 2000s.

Deeply committed to understanding how cities emerge and evolve, Racine shaped the field of urban geography by employing the statistical tools brought to the fore by the New Geography. The guidelines of this “revolution” were formalized in a small but influential book entitled “Quantitative Analysis in Geography” (L’Analyse Quantitative en Géographie) published in 1973 with Henri Reymond. Using Brian Berry’s statistical software, Racine applied quantitative analysis in his monumental second doctoral dissertation, devoted to the peri-urban growth of Greater Montreal in 1975.

At the age of just 33, Racine returned to Switzerland, where he served as director of the Institute of Geography at the University of Lausanne (UNIL) from 1973 to 1982. He was appointed associate professor and later full professor in the Faculty of Arts and at the School of Business and Economics (HEC), where he taught numerous courses in economic geography and epistemology. Racine was a brilliant speaker with a powerful voice that captivated his audience. At UNIL, he served as vice-dean (1980–1982) and dean (1982–1984) of the Faculty of Arts, before resuming the directorship of the Institute from 1986 to 1992 and from 2000 to 2004. He retired as professor emeritus in 2007.

Racine was one of the most influential figures in Francophone geography over the past fifty years. While he is mainly known for having imported quantitative geography from North American to Europe in the 1970s, his most enduring contribution to science is in theoretical geography. Less interested in techniques than in the questions that geography can help to formulate, Racine contributed to the renewal of geographical epistemology, often with other key Francophone geographers.

In 1981, he published “Geographical Questions” (Problématiques de la géographie) with Hildebert Isnard and Henri Reymond, a book that examined the questions that geographers face and how to approach them systematically. Racine published extensively with Claude Raffestin from the University of Geneva, who died in 2025, and with Antoine Bailly, another geographer who returned to Switzerland after living in Canada.

Racine played a decisive role in the culturalist turn that swept through the social sciences beginning in the 1980s. Like many other geographers, his shift toward cultural geography was inspired by the writings of David Ley, Anne Buttimer, Yi-Fu Tuan and, of course, David Harvey, whose book The Condition of Postmodernity was prominently displayed in his Lausanne office.

The son of a pastor, Racine’s approach was deeply rooted in a humanist tradition, which is reflected in a wealth of publications co-authored with his doctoral students, such as Antonio Cunha, Ola Söderström, Etienne Piguet, and Lorenza Mondada. Published in 1993, The City Between God and Man (La Ville entre Dieu et les Hommes) is undoubtedly the book that best combines his deep interest for urban transformation and religious faith.

In the ten years leading up to his retirement in 2007, Racine turned his attention to urban issues, particularly that of Lausanne, a city for which he had a deep passion. Far from resting on its laurels, and always surrounded by many young researchers, he threw himself with seemingly inexhaustible energy into the study of the city’s “fragile” or marginalized users. His humanistic approach to geography, attentive to the voices of young people, people with disabilities, and migrants, anticipates the most recent work in our discipline.

Internationally, Racine served as vice-chair of the International Geographical Union’s Commission on Urban Development and Urban Life from 1992 to 2000. He worked closely with or in parallel to influential French geographers such as Paul Claval, Sylvie Rimbert, René Dumont, Jean Labasse, Pierre Georges, Roger Brunet, and Denise Pumain. He played a leading role in the Dupont Group, founded in 1971 to introduce theoretical and quantitative geography in France, and in the organization of the Géopoint conferences beginning in 1976.

The author of four major books and 250 articles, Racine served as co-editor of Geographica Helvetica for many years and was a member of the editorial board of L’Espace géographique, Géographie et Cultures, and Articulo-Journal of Urban Research, founded by his doctoral students in 2005.

Racine’s influence on modern geography is evident in his ability to bring together geographers from remarkably diverse backgrounds. Based in Quebec and Switzerland, he managed to occupy a central position in our discipline without being located at its geographical center.

One of his most enduring contributions is having mentored two generations of geographers, all of whom, with rare exceptions, hold academic positions in Switzerland, Europe, and the United States. Racine tirelessly devoted his extraordinary intellect to the ideas that underpin modern geography. With his passing, we have lost one of the greatest brokers of Francophone geography.

Written by Olivier Walther

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Member Profile: Dydia DeLyser

Photo of Dydia DeLeyser“Figuring out what places are about” is the foundation of Dydia DeLyser’s inquisitive, hands-on work to explore and preserve American landscapes and cultural histories. A professor of geography emerita at Cal State Fullerton, DeLyser has cultivated this outlook from early on. As the child of Dutch immigrants who came to the U.S. in the 1960s, she learned early how place, belonging, and language could open—or close—doors.

“My first language is not English, it was Dutch,” she says. “So my earliest memories are of having sort of a secret language at home that nobody else could understand.” Her parents were “always trying to understand American culture, and yet never able to become a part [of it].”

For DeLyser, the outsider status was doubled by another kind of “outside:” the past. Her parents’ vivid stories of their experiences of World War II and the privations of life in Europe even before Nazi occupation lit up DeLyser’s imagination and appreciation for social history: “The broader cultural stories about our past, like my parents’ stories about the war, are also intimate personal stories that happen in the lives of individuals,” she says. “We connect our individual experiences to the broader narrative, you know, of victory over the Nazis or so many other issues. That’s a geographical or spatial experience.”

DeLyser’s hunger to understand and embrace places and times she couldn’t know firsthand have led to her foundational preoccupation with what she calls “the intimate geographies of social memory.”

Bridging Time and Space

DeLyser started working on her intertwined study of history’s large scales and intimate personal histories while she was still an undergraduate at UCLA, aided by her work at UCLA Library’s Department of Special Collections in the manuscript, photographs, and rare books library, one of the largest such departments in the country. The archive housed the personal papers of L.A. notables and international figures such as novelist Raymond Chandler, journalist Carey McWilliams, writers Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin, and Peggy Hamilton, the first fashion editor of the LA Times.

Reading their letters and manuscripts opened DeLyser’s eyes to new ways of knowing people, even after their deaths. Research—specifically, qualitative research with primary materials—was like a portal through the gap in time and place that had so fascinated and frustrated DeLyser from childhood. She has dedicated her career to the methods that make qualitative research vibrant.

“To me, scholarship should be empirically rich, grounded in some real thing,” she says. “It should be theoretically sophisticated and engaged with whatever conceptual conversations are current and engaging and relevant in the discipline or subdiscipline you are in, and it should be methodologically articulate.” Put simply, she says: “You should be clear how you know.”

DeLyser describes research methods as “an important form of credibility for a scholar, as the core of your scholarly credibility. If you can show how you know—because you interviewed these people or because these are the quotes or because you did this archival research or you spent ten years observing at this place or because you actually did the labor or whatever the reason—If you can show how you know, then we will trust you. And then we’ll be able to learn from you, we’ll be able to take on whatever your point is.”

If you can show how you know, then we will trust you.”

Early in her career, DeLyser established a close relationship to Bodie, a California ghost town in the Eastern Sierra region. Designated a National Historic Landmark and state park in the early1 960s, Bodie began as a gold-mining town that boomed in the 1870s, crashed in the 1880s, but then lingered well into the 20th century. As the population declined, at one point there were more buildings than people. And as residents left, they abandoned furnishings and things they didn’t want to pay to move, which became the  intact artifacts of their daily lives on display in about 200 buildings, from dishes, pots, and chairs in kitchens to unused caskets in the town morgue.

Exterior view of a building in Bodie, Calif. Credit: Jon Sullivan, Wikimedia Commons
Credit: Jon Sullivan, Wikimedia Commons

 

Starting when she was a college student with summers free, she began working as a low-paid, unskilled seasonal worker for maintenance, DeLyser gradually deepened her knowledge of Bodie over the next 35 years in all different ways, from conducting ethnographic research tourists there to using the Park’s own archive to understand how State Parks staff were themselves shaping what visitors saw and ultimately to using her research to make the case for broadening the town’s National Historic Landmark status, all while putting in true sweat equity in caring for the town, from physically working to stabilize the abandoned buildings to “cleaning about 10,000 [public] toilets.” Now, she is executive director of the town’s nonprofit, working to preserve Bodie in a state of “arrested decay—keeping the buildings standing while letting them look like they’re still falling down,” according to DeLyser. Today’s visitors to Bodie can peer inside its buildings to see the many personal items left behind by the final occupants, and imagine the lives of the town’s former inhabitants. DeLyser was interested in the impact of this on visitors, especially in the moments of recognition when a specific object reminded them of something in their own lives. DeLyser then sought to map these personal epiphanies onto the larger stories of history.

Interior view of a kitchen in Bodie, Calif. Credit: Fronl, Wikimedia Commons
Credit: Fronl, Wikimedia Commons

 

“Ghost towns are so connected to the mythic West in the United States, to the heroic, mythologized tales of the “Wild West” and all that, we simply connect ourselves to big themes about American culture. All of a sudden, from a small life and a small object, it links to the big themes. I’ve seen myself have ordinary objects spark magic in my life many times, and I’ve studied how it happens.“

Always say yes

DeLyser also engages enthusiastically as a teacher, mentor, and champion of the geography discipline. Over the years, she has served on AAG Council, was a founding member of the AAG Qualitative Research Specialty Group, contributed to the work of the AAG Harassment Free Task Force, as well as its Public and Engaged Scholarship Task Force. She worked tirelessly during the COVID pandemic to deliver supportive programming for graduate students, and also serves on the AAG Climate Committee, to name only a few contributions. It’s part of her commitment to hold the door open for the next generation of geographers.

“I’ve had to bust open doors myself in my career, but the point isn’t about busting open doors. The point is to hold the door open and create a pathway for success for the people who will come after us,” she says.

She brings the same esprit de corps to her research and publishing. “There’s no sense in scholarship unless it’s shared,” she says. “If I can learn something from my scholarship about the past, I feel obligated to share that, otherwise I take it with me. It happens in the moment, it happens in the present, but it’s always for the future.”

Living in Bodie, where only Park staff now live, gave DeLyser a strong sense of community, and a strong desire to give back to that community, something that has followed her throughout her career.

DeLyser is careful to appreciate and credit the communities she works with. Years later, as she launched a new research project about how neon signs have shaped the American landscape she recognized that there was a “neon community” or “communities” in the U.S., and, she says, “I wanted people to feel like they knew who I was and they welcomed my work, so it took me a long time to become part of that community, vested in being part of a community as ‘neon people.’” DeLyser says neon signs are “an incredibly overlooked part of the American landscape. People read the sign that says “OPEN” over the door that’s red and blue—they read that sign without even realizing that they’ve read it.” She wanted to bring those hidden signs and their hidden stories to light.

DeLyser had been introduced to the behind-the-scenes world of neon by her husband and longtime creative partner, Paul Greenstein, an expert in the history and repair of classic neon signs. Early in their relationship, she accompanied him to repair a sign over a restaurant, and the adventure sparked questions and conversations, which in turn led to more than a half dozen collaborations over the years. Greenstein and DeLyser have delved into the history and cultural significance of neon, antique cars, and Indian motorcycles. Their 2021 book Neon: A Light History  is the latest culmination of these collaborations.

DeLyser’s approach to research combines immersion in the topic, becoming embedded in the communities that hold deep knowledge about it. She sees her research across a spectrum of often deeply personal and committed hands-on experience and careful methodologies. “I had all the tools,” she recalls of her long relationship with Bodie. “I knew how to use a hammer and a Skilsaw, and I also I knew how to do an interview. I had a hammer in one hand and a notebook in my pocket.”

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Lisa Schamess
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On the Map

Tracking the Geography of Diseases: How Epidemiologists Map Infection

Geography In The News logoGeography in the News is an educational series offered by the American Association of Geographers for teachers and students in all subjects. We include vocabulary, discussion, and assignment ideas at the end of each article. 

By Neal Lineback

Have you ever wondered where you caught a cold? If so, you’ve asked the first question epidemologists ask about infectious diseases. Epidemiology is the study of how diseases spread. It relies on geography to find its answers.

You could say that epidemiologists study the “where” of diseases. Specifically, they study the paths of communicable diseases.

What are communicable diseases? They’re the ones you can catch. These illnesses spread through viruses, fungi, or bacteria, typically from person to person, and sometimes from animals to people. Some diseases come from contaminated food, water, or insects. All of these transmissions relate to geography. 

Viruses and bacteria are all around us, particularly in dense human populations. Some are harmless. But dangerous viruses range across a whole host of diseases, from pneumonia and whooping cough to measles, chicken pox, and polio, among others.

Among the least dangerous to healthy individuals is the common cold, or Rhinovirus. Its symptoms are normally mild. The cold is so common that it’s almost impossible to know where you caught it—unless you are an epidemologist. Through contact tracing, distribution maps, and other tools, epidemiologists can find the initial source of an infection. It takes only one or two people for a disease to spread as contacts multiply.

Epidemiology is a science of time as well as space. Once a few people show symptoms, they could infect 50 percent or more of the people they come in contact with, within three to ten days. This makes swift analysis crucial.

A fast-moving virus can cause an epidemic or pandemic. The difference between the two is in distribution. The disease is distributed unevenly in an epidemic, with some communities having few or no cases. In a pandemic, many more people are sick across more areas. Deaths and hospitalizations are elevated too.

This is why the flu virus—which is actually a number of virus types that can mutate over time–and the COVID viruses are carefully tracked by their strain. Flu is also identified by type. If you have ever heard a strain of influenza referred to as A,B,C, or D, you have heard its type, based on its severity. “A” causes pandemics and is the most dangerous. “B” can cause epidemics. “C” causes mild cold-like symptoms. “D” is an animal variety.

The recent COVID outbreak in 2020-2023 was a pandemic in the United States. Ensheng Dong, a Ph.D. student at Johns Hopkins University, was one of the first people in the world to create a map-based dashboard to show the disease’s spread. Using a Geographic Information System (GIS), Dong worked with physicists, geographers, and others at the university to build a map to track outbreaks. Its red-on-black appearance became iconic.

Outbreaks of many viral infections can be mapped. The CDC (Centers of Disease Control) and other international medical institutions maintain huge geographical databases to follow outbreaks around the world. This research is critical in slowing, treating, and containing viral diffusions and concentrations, allowing the medical professionals to predict where intervention (ie. tests, warnings, and vaccinations) can be helpful in reducing deaths and hospitalizations.

Epidemiology is still a young science. Less than 175 years ago, a doctor named John Snow identified the source of the 1854 cholera outbreak in London: a neighborhood water pump. He did this by mapping all of the cholera cases in the area and interviewing the families. Once he identified the common location they’d used to draw water, he removed the handle from the pump. New cases fell.

This map shows the 2013 spread of polio worldwide:

This map by Rachael Carpenter indicates that the spread of polio began with a concentration in Afghanistan, then jumped to Somalia, Kenya, and Nigeria. The disease spread to Nigeria’s African neighbors Cote d'Ivoire, Mali, Niger, Central African Republic, Uganda, and Liberia.
In 2013, Geography in the News reported on a severe polio outbreak, showing the path of infection. Map by Rachael Carpenter

 

Polio cases began with a concentration in Afghanistan, then jumped to Somalia, Kenya, and Nigeria. The disease spread to Nigeria’s neighbors in Africa, before it was finally halted through the efforts of multiple relief organizations’ vaccine programs, including The World Health Organization (WHO),The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), Rotary International, and the Centers for Disease Control.

So how can a microscopic virus jump thousands of miles from Afghanistan to Nigeria? Clearly, modern technology played a role in moving such great distances over the earth’s surface. What made the countries adjacent to Nigeria so susceptible to the spread of polio? These are geographic questions on the minds of health officials as they battle communicable diseases worldwide everyday.The mobilities of viruses around the world require constant attention.

Note: You can reduce your odds of infection by frequent hand washing, using tissues and avoiding touching your face when you sneeze. Cleaning your work spaces and using a mask, or covering your mouth when you cough, are also good practices.

And that is Geography in the News.

Material in this article comes from “Polio Returns with a Vengeance” (2013), an original article for Geography in the News by Neal Lineback and Mandy Lineback Gritzner.

AAG’s Geography in the News is inspired by the series of the same name founded by Neal Lineback, professor and the chair of Appalachian State University’s Department of Geography and Planning. For nearly 30 years from 1986 to 2013, GITN delivered timely explainer articles to educators and students, relevant to topics in the news. Many of these were published on Maps.com’s educational platforms and in National Geographic’s blogs. AAG is pleased to carry on the series.

Vocabulary
  • Communicable disease
  • Epidemic
  • Fungus/Fungi
  • Iconic
  • Mutate
  • Pandemic
  • Strain
  • Virus
Discussion
  1. What are some of the tools epidemiologists use to track how diseases spread?
  2. Why do we say that epidemiology is a science of time as well as space?
  3. What is the difference between an epidemic and a pandemic?
  4. What are some of the reasons that a virus can “jump” long distances?
Further Reading

“John Snow, Historical Giant in Epidemiology.” UCLA https://epi-snow.ph.ucla.edu/

“Medical Geography and Why We Need It.” University of British Columbia. https://geog.ubc.ca/news/medical-geography-and-why-we-need-it/

Milner, Greg. “Creating the Dashboard for the Pandemic.” Esri ArcUser, Summer 2020. https://www.esri.com/about/newsroom/arcuser/johns-hopkins-covid-19-dashboard

“Notes from the Field: Outbreak of Poliomyelitis — Somalia and Kenya, May 2013,” Centers for Disease Control, Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. At https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6223a7.htm

“What Is Epidemiology?” Epidemiology for the Uninitiated. BMJ Group. https://www.bmj.com/about-bmj/resources-readers/publications/epidemiology-uninitiated

 

 

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Department Profile: School of the Environment at San Francisco State University

Located off the shores of Lake Merced in San Francisco’s southwestern corner, the School of the Environment at San Francisco State University (SFSU) brings together students and faculty committed to scientific exploration, environmental stewardship, and social justice. This unique setting, where urban life meets coastal and mountainous ecosystems, provides an ideal backdrop for studying the connections between people, landscapes, and the planet.

An Interdisciplinary Approach to Environmental Education

San Francisco State University students gather samples for a field methods class in the San Francisco Bay.
San Francisco State University students gather samples for a field methods class in the San Francisco Bay.

The School of the Environment offers a broad and integrated curriculum that reflects the shared mission of its faculty and programs. Students pursuing undergraduate majors gain a strong foundation in physical and human geography, in addition to field methods and geographic information science (GIS) and systems. These core skills equip students to understand environmental processes, helping them map change and analyze human–environment interactions. Graduate students have the option of specializing in geography, geographic information science, geosciences, or resource management and environmental planning.

These offerings are supported by the vast expertise of faculty across disciplines. Wide-ranging scholarly strengths range from physical geography and the use of technical programs to human-environment interactions. This includes food justice and urban agriculture, researching sustainable communities, green consumerism, and the politics of mobility.

A New School Built on Collaboration

In the years following the COVID-19 pandemic, the Dean brought together three units — the former Department of Geography and Environment, the Department of Earth and Climate Sciences, and the Environmental Studies program — to explore merging into a larger, more cohesive academic home. Andrew Oliphant, professor and School of the Environment co-director, shares the former schools’ shared curriculum, cross-listed classes, and overlapping student communities naturally evolved into what is now the School of the Environment, strengthening opportunities for interdisciplinary research, teaching, and collaboration.

With the formation of the new School, faculty intentionally centered equity, representation, and inclusivity in their mission. Their efforts include a range of initiatives: culturally responsive student support, reducing or eliminating course-related costs wherever possible, and expanding pathways into environmental careers for students from historically marginalized communities. As Oliphant notes: “One of our missions is to change the face of the professional world in California that’s managing and stewarding the environment.”

A Presence Across Campus and Beyond

While the School recently reorganized and renamed itself, department chair Andrew Oliphant notes that its reach extends far beyond environmental programs. Students from art, cinema, ethnic studies, biology, physics, and other departments enroll in its courses.

Through this broad academic footprint, students gain training in climate and environmental fundamentals and the necessary language and context for environmental advocacy. The skills taught in courses are applicable across scientific, creative, and civic fields.

A thriving student–alumni network speaks to the school’s deep commitment to mentorship and career support. Graduates contribute to the California workforce and beyond, including local and state governments, federal agencies such as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and private companies and nonprofits such as East Bay Municipal Utility District (EBMUD). The school’s organically built internship network helps open doors for students who may not otherwise have access to such opportunities.

San Francisco State University students gather between two CalTrains for a transportation class field trip.
San Francisco State University students gather between two CalTrains for a transportation class field trip.

 

Preparing Students for a Changing World and Workforce

The school balances professional preparation with a deep commitment to the fundamental sciences. Students can begin to prepare for future steps to careers in environmental management, GIS, or planning; working with nonprofits in scientific research; or doctoral-level academic study.

Oliphant also emphasizes the importance of interdisciplinary training in an era of rapid technological change: “There will be geographers who lose work to AI … but the broad training we give — understanding biophysical processes, social structures, and the philosophies shaping our world — positions our students well in an AI-driven future.”

A prime resource for students includes participating in alternative learning spaces. For example, SFSU’s remote Sierra Nevada Field Campus offers summer field courses where teams of students and faculty spend a week immersed in research. The field campus also provides a location for locally centered research projects. Graduate students frequently use these field experiences to support their thesis work, and faculty encourage student employment on grant-funded research whenever possible.

One project, funded by the state of California, focuses on the restoration of Sierra Nevada Mountain meadows, which have long been degraded by agriculture, mining, and forestry. With numerous faculty who specialize in remote sensing and biogeography, collaboration with community partners such as the Mountain Maidu Consortium, whose Indigenous stewardship of these landscapes spans centuries, is essential. These partnerships represent the school’s holistic approach to environmental research: recognizing that complex spaces — like mountain meadows — cannot be understood through a single disciplinary lens.

When it comes to recounting student success, “it’s about the daughter of immigrant farm workers from the Salinas Valley, now working for the California Department of Food and Agriculture, advising farmers on healthy soil practices.” Oliphant goes on, “Or a recent graduate from the Pitt River Nation who’s working for the USGS, monitoring Northern California lands, part of his tribal community.” This kind of transformative student success is part of the reason SFSU was ranked 8th nationally for social mobility in 2024 by the U.S. News & World Report.

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Department Profile: Geography and Geoinformation Sciences at George Mason University

The Geography and Geoinformation Sciences (GGS) Department at George Mason University is fortunate in its Fairfax, Virginia location, close to many professional opportunities in and around the nation’s capital. Anchored in the center of Northern Virginia’s geospatial intelligence hub, surrounded by federal headquarters like the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), US Geological Survey (USGS), and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), as well as leaders in the private sector like Esri, Dewberry, and BAE Systems, GGS can also connect its students and alumni to local government agencies such as Fairfax County’s GIS and Mapping Services.

The department’s breadth is revealed in its name. “We are not the Department of Geography, but we are the Department of Geography and Geoformation Science,” says Dr. Deiter Pfoser, department chair and director of the Center for Geoscience. “So, there’s a huge distinction there … it sort of alludes to the quantitative sides [of the discipline].” Dr. Nathan Burtch, associate professor, undergraduate coordinator and associate chair, agrees.

George Mason University GGS students gather data with a transit device to create contour maps of a local park in GGS as part of their Field Mapping class.
George Mason University GGS students gather data with a transit device to create contour maps of a local park in GGS as part of their field mapping class.

This emphasis on the quantitative is a major incentive of the program, as the majority of the department’s students are pursuing a Bachelor of Science degree and thinking about careers. Students pursuing a BS in geography can choose from concentrations in Geoinformatics, Geospatial Intelligence, and Urban Science, which are marketable and easily conceptualized by employers.

The department’s research initiatives, which have an annual expenditure of approximately six million dollars, largely trend around topics like artificial intelligence, computational analysis, and informatics. Students researching remote sensing have access to a collection of advanced drone remote-sensing equipment, including DJI drones and interchangeable sensors for environmental and infrastructural studies. Dr. Pfoser points out that the program emphasizes “not only geographical proximity to [many geospatial] agencies, but also work proximity.”

The university and the department’s faculty and leaders involve students in research as early into their academic journeys as possible. The College of Science’s Aspiring Scientists Summer Internship Program (ASSIP) has been active in providing high schoolers and undergraduate students the chance to engage in faculty-mentored research opportunities since 2019. The GGS department has eight prospective mentors for the 2026 session, tackling research interests like spatiotemporal computing, space weather, and food systems transformation. Dr. Pfoser expresses that “the idea is really to bring students closer to research as soon as we can,” to develop students into exemplary undergraduate, graduate, and PhD researchers.

Graduate degree offerings reinforce the department’s quantitative focus, with a master’s degree in Geoinformatics and Geospatial Intelligence. Undergraduate students interested in this degree, or the master’s in Geographic and Cartographic Sciences, can enroll in the Bachelor’s to Accelerated Master’s (BAM) Program and collect graduate credits in their final undergraduate semesters. In addition to offering accelerated, master’s, and doctorate pathways, the department also promotes a culture of lifelong learning by offering graduate certificates in GIS, Geospatial Intelligence, Environmental GIS and Biodiversity, and Remote Sensing and Image Processing. Executive education partnerships with local companies allow working professionals to advance their skills through the guidance of university course content.

An Interdisciplinary Approach to Quantitative Geography

“We’re a little bit more quantitative than the average,” says Dr. Burtch, “But we don’t ignore the cultural and the physical as well.” The GGS department’s Bachelor of Art’s geography program offers concentrations in environmental geography, health geography, geoanthropology, and urban planning. The professors teaching courses in this degree are consistently enthusiastic about their subjects, welcoming students to think critically and exercise real-world problem solving.

The department also values cross-disciplinary exploration. Undergraduate students can choose from a variety of elective courses that traverse neighboring disciplines. Associate professor and BAM advisor Dr. Christine Rosenfeld teaches Spatial Justice, for example, a geographic interrogation of unevenly distributed resources that results in social inequality. Dr. Maction Komwa teaches Geography of Resource Conservation, an analysis of the distribution and preservation of global resources. Dr. Burtch teaches Geography of Sport, purposefully integrating the discipline to reveal surprising explanations about the geography of the sports industry.

The strong sense of student community, accessible advising, and welcoming faculty make the GGS department at GMU an optimal learning environment for students of diverse education and career backgrounds. Standards for teaching excellence are maintained by routine faculty peer review, end-of-semester evaluations, and course modality surveys. The department uses this feedback to support their mindset of “perpetual change” and implement improvements to keep up with the ever-evolving scene of higher education.

Diversity is a big part of George Mason’s identity as an institution, as it is one of the most ethnically and economically diverse schools in Virginia. Dr. Pfoser highlighted the disciplinary diversity of the department by noting that only about half of its faculty are geographers by training. In addition to the interdisciplinary course offerings, the department offers diverse teaching perspectives from career computer scientists, hydrological engineers, environmental geographers, and data scientists. This combination of curriculum, teaching, and student diversity creates classroom environments suited for positive learning experiences.

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On the Map

Harlem of the West: Jazz, People, and Place in the Fillmore

By Mirembe Ddumba

Stand on Fillmore and Geary streets on a Saturday evening, and you can almost hear it. Neon humming against the dusk, a saxophone warming up behind a church door, the ghost of Billie Holiday’s voice floating between the streetlights. In these few streets, jazz wrote itself onto San Francisco’s grid.

The sound arrived by train.

The Sound of Migration

During World War II, African Americans from Louisiana, Texas, and across the South boarded trains bound for San Francisco’s shipyards. Between 1940 and 1950, the city’s Black population grew tenfold, from 4,800 to 43,000, filling apartments left empty when Japanese American families were forced into internment camps.

Musicians arrived with guitars slung over shoulders, horns wrapped in cloth. They transformed twenty blocks into the “Harlem of the West.” By the late 1940s, you could walk Fillmore Street on any night and hear Dizzy Gillespie bleeding through one door, smell barbecue from the next, watch Cadillacs pull up to drop off couples dressed for Jimbo’s Bop City.

Bop City at 1690 Post Street ran after-hours sessions until sunrise. Charlie Parker traded choruses with Dexter Gordon while Billie Holiday sat in a corner booth. Down the street, Ella Fitzgerald sang at the Champagne Supper Club and tried on hats between sets. The Blue Mirror. Club Flamingo. Jack’s Tavern. Two dozen venues within one square mile, each separated by a five-minute walk.

John Coltrane, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Louis Armstrong, and Thelonious Monk rented rooms above the clubs, ate at soul food diners, bought records at local shops, and shaped the neighborhood’s sonic identity night after night. This wasn’t accidental. The grid itself made it possible.

Black-and-white photo showing Fillmore Street, south of Post Street, late 1940s. The neighborhood’s dense grid and constant traffic fueled the energy of the "Harlem of the West." Credit: David Johnson
Fillmore Street, south of Post Street, late 1940s. The neighborhood’s dense grid and constant traffic fueled the energy of the “Harlem of the West.” Credit: David Johnson

 

Geography as Destiny

The Fillmore’s layout made this density possible. Narrow Victorian storefronts, twenty feet wide, meant multiple clubs per block. Short blocks with corner entries created constant foot traffic. The 22-Fillmore streetcar brought audiences from downtown, turning the neighborhood into one continuous jazz experience.

In 1948, city planners declared the Fillmore “blighted.” Under Redevelopment Agency director M. Justin Herman, bulldozers arrived. The Western Addition A-1 and A-2 projects demolished Victorian homes and shuttered clubs across 104 blocks. Geary Street, once lined with music venues, became Geary Boulevard, a four-lane expressway cutting the neighborhood in half.

By 1964, authorities had displaced 4,000 residents from A-1 alone. Jazz musicians scattered to Oakland, the East Bay, and Los Angeles. Residents gave urban renewal a different name: “Negro Removal”.

 

You could go out on Friday night and not come home until Sunday night because there is so much to do.”

—Elizabeth Pepin Silva, filmmaker and author of Harlem of the West

 

The clubs closed. The musicians left. But the music never completely died.

 

Map showing Western Addition redevelopment zones A-1 and A-2, which demolished 104 blocks and displaced thousands of residents. Credit: San Francisco Redevelopment Agency archives
Western Addition redevelopment zones A-1 and A-2, which demolished 104 blocks and displaced thousands of residents. Credit: San Francisco Redevelopment Agency archives

 

Still Playing

Walk Fillmore Street now, and commemorative plaques mark where Bop City stood, where the barbershop was, where musicians bought their reeds. Listen closely, though. The Fillmore Auditorium still books acts, its walls papered with decades of concert posters. Calvary Presbyterian Church hosts Sunday jazz services. Jones Memorial United Methodist Church opens its doors for Friday night sessions.

Every July since 1986, the Fillmore Jazz Festival closes twelve blocks to cars. Over 50,000 people flooded the streets for two days. Five stages. Artisan booths. The smell of Ethiopian food mixing with New Orleans-style barbecue. For one weekend, the neighborhood becomes what it was, pedestrians moving from stage to stage, music echoing off Victorian facades.

On other nights, the music lives in smaller rooms. 1300 on Fillmore books jazz acts in an intimate room with velvet couches. The Boom Boom Room sits on the corner where John Lee Hooker used to own a club. Rasselas Ethiopian Restaurant serves injera and hosts live music Thursday through Sunday. The building that housed Jimbo’s Bop City was literally picked up and moved two blocks west. It’s Marcus Books now, an Afrocentric bookstore that archives what redevelopment tried to erase.

Stand at Fillmore and Geary on Saturday evening. Close your eyes. Past the bus engines and car horns, you can still hear it. A saxophone warming up. The ghost of a neighborhood that jazz built, that policy tried to destroy, and that memory refuses to let die.

Photo showing an overhead view of musicians playing to a packed crowd at the Fillmore Jazz Festival. Credit: Fillmore Jazz Festival
Musicians play to a packed crowd at the Fillmore Jazz Festival, which brings over 50,000 people annually to celebrate the neighborhood’s musical legacy. Credit: Fillmore Jazz Festival

 

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Saul Cohen

On June 9, 2021, Saul Bernard Cohen passed away at the age of 95, surrounded by his loving family. Born in Malden, Massachusetts, he spent much of his life on the East Coast, as he attended the Boston Latin School and later went on to earn his bachelor’s and Ph.D. at Harvard University—graduating right before Harvard terminated the geography program.

He headed the School of Geography at Clark University and became a professor, director, and then later Dean of the Graduate School. During this time, he was lauded for revitalizing the Graduate School of Geography’s (GSOG) academic standards and increasing minority enrollment in the late 1960s/early 1970s. He also established teacher preparation programs for new and experienced teachers with funding obtained from the U.S. Office of Education for the Training of Teachers program, and a National Science Foundation departmental development grant designed to produce “centers of excellence.”

His plans included developing new strengths in the areas of environmental cognition, international development (particularly in Africa), and environmental hazards management. The expansion of the school’s graduate program allowed the faculty to double, and the number of graduate students substantially increased. Traditional environment-focused courses were rejuvenated by new concepts and techniques. As the environmental movement grew, the number of geography undergraduate majors rose to more than 100. The school also doubled its annual output of doctorates in the 1970s. Clark was a linchpin of one of Cohen’s other programmatic ideas: a consortium of doctorate-granting geography departments recruiting faculty or prospective faculty of historically Black colleges and universities to pursue master’s and doctoral degrees.

Following his career at Clark, Cohen served as president of Queens College, part of the City University of New York (CUNY) from 1978 – 1985. Through his persistent advocacy, he was responsible for securing funding for key capital projects, many of which are still standing, including the Benjamin Rosenthal Library, the Copeland School of Music Building, science facilities, and Townsend Harris High School.

After leaving Queens College, Cohen was a professor of geography at Hunter College for 10 years. He served as AAG president from 1989 to 1990, and in 1993, he was elected to the New York State Board of Regents. He served for 17 years, chairing the Elementary, Middle, and Secondary Committee when it established new academic standards for the school.

He is remembered for his research specializing in economic and political geography of the Middle East and editing and authoring 16 books, including his work as an editor of The Oxford World Atlas. Saul was a beloved husband to his wife of 71 years, Miriam Friederman Cohen, and a dedicated father and father-in-law, grandfather, great-grandfather, and friend.

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Bryon Middlekauff

Professor Emeritus of Geography, Dr. Bryon Middlekauff, passed away on September 3, 2025. He was a faculty member at Plymouth State University (previously Plymouth State College), NH from 1988 to 2016. Bryon’s life was marked by a deep passion for teaching geography and mentoring both students and faculty.

Bryon’s bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees—all in in geography—were from the University of Maryland, Appalachian State University, and Michigan State University, respectively, and his dissertation focused on Appalachian paleoclimatology. He returned to this topic in a subsequent published article, and his scholarship also examined fieldwork practice.

Bryon joined the social science department at Plymouth State University after positions at Western Carolina University and Youngstown State University. In 2001 he taught at the University of Wolverhampton in the U.K. while on sabbatical and in 2004 expanded his teaching to encompass the environmental sciences, receiving a new appointment in 2008 as professor of geography and environmental planning.

“One of Bryon’s many strengths was engaging students both in the classroom and beyond,” says former colleague Dr. Patrick May, a longtime colleague. “His lectures were very dynamic, and he got a lot of students really excited about geomorphology, ‘the geography of geology’—understanding the processes that shaped the environment around them.”

Bryon felt strongly about the importance of field studies and led college trips around New England, eastern Canada, and to the American Southwest, as well as travel courses to Paris, the United Kingdom, and Tanzania. He also ran workshops for the New Hampshire Geographic Alliance, leading rigorous day trips throughout the state to help educate educators about the natural environment.

Bryon was instrumental in advancing Plymouth State’s geography program both nationally and regionally. He was heavily involved in the American Association of Geographers (AAG) and attended annual meetings where he presented papers and poster sessions. He was also a member of the New England St. Lawrence Valley Geographical Society (NESTVAL) and served as their Regional Councilor to the AAG for two terms. Bryon received NESTVAL’s Distinguished Service Award in 2013 which included a citation for a Lifetime Contribution to NESTVAL and Geography, one of only three people to receive this distinction. In 1993, Bryon was instrumental in establishing a NESTVAL competition to create a team to send to the first AAG World Geography Bowl, held at the AAG’s annual meeting in Atlanta. Bryon mentored the PSU team members, preparing them for the competition. Under his guidance, Plymouth State’s Geo Bowl team won the New England-St. Lawrence Valley Geographical Society competition several times and students participated in the national competition at the annual AAG conference. “The bowl was a way to excite students,” says May, “and Bryon assured that they took advantage of the full conference experience, including sessions and field trips.”

“He was instrumental in building the PSU Geography Club and remained in touch with many former students,” continues May. “Students will remember him to be very demanding and that they were lucky to have him because he shared so much enthusiasm for his field.”  For his students, Bryon opened a door into the world of becoming a professional geographer. He encouraged many of his students to attend graduate school and accompanied some on visits to the schools.

Dr. Jennifer Collins, now at University South Florida, started her career at Plymouth State College, in the year 2000, where she notes that Bryon had such an impact on both her personally and her career, recognizing that she was a Geographer and suggested she become a member and come to the AAG annual meeting.  Prior to that Jennifer was only an American Meteorological Society member. Jennifer notes that being a member of the AAG has been instrumental to her career and she owes that to Bryon who also helped her network at the AAG conference. “He was a friend, colleague, and mentor, all wrapped up in one.”, she said.

Bryon enjoyed many activities from fly-fishing to skiing. Most of all he enjoyed spending time with his wife, children, and grandchildren. Bryon is survived by his wife and former Plymouth State Director of Advancement Julie DeGalan ’91MBA. Together they co-wrote the book, Great Jobs for Environmental Studies Majors, and were members of Holmes Heritage Society, which honors those who have included Plymouth State in their financial and estate plans. He is also survived by his daughters, Lari (Pat) Hayhoe and Amy (Dan) Jones; grandchildren, Nick (Chelsea), Beau and Olivia Hayhoe, Billy (Olivia) and Tyler Townes, Hayden Jones, and Chelsea Roberts; and great-grandchildren, Charlie, George, Margaret and Penny Hayhoe, Phoebe Townes, and Fiona and Josie Roberts. He is survived by his sister, Kirklyn Kline; nephews, Kevin (Cindy) and Kirk Eikelberger; and grand-nephew, Riley Eikelberger.

Additional information is available in an online obituary.

Written by Pat May, Jennifer Collins, and Julie DeGalan

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